Middle Age and Aging: A Reader in Social Psychology » (New Edition)

Bernice L. Neugarten is professor of education and sociology at Northwestern University and professor emeritus of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. She is a past president of the Gerontological Society.

The process of aging is receiving an increasing amount of attention from behavioral scientists. Middle Age and Aging is an attempt to organize and select from the proliferation of material available in this field. The selections in this volume emphasize some of the major topics that lie closest to the problem of what social and psychological adaptations are required as individuals move through the second half of their lives. Major attention is paid to the importance of age-status and age-sex roles; psychological changes in the life-cycle; social-psychological theories of aging; attitudes toward health; changing family roles; work, retirement, and leisure; certain other dimensions of the immediate social environment such as friendships, neighboring patterns, and living arrangements; differences in cultural settings; and perspectives of time and death.

Part I. Age Status and Age-Sex Roles
Part II. The Psychology of the Life Cycle
Part III. Social-Psychological Theories of Aging
Part IV. The Social Psychology of Health
Part V. Family Relationships
Part VI. Work, Leisure, and Retirement
Part VII. The Immediate Social Environment
Part VIII. Aging in Other Societies
Part IX. Time, Dying, and Death
Appendixes. Research Strategies
List of Contributors
References