AGING AND PERSONALITY: HELPLESSNESS, CONTROL, AND GROWING OLDER
Psychologists believe that when healthy older people just retire to a rocking chair it is because they have a problem. They may be suffering from a condition called "learned helplessness." Learned helplessness comes about when, after losses, failures, or being treated as incompetent, we lose faith in our ability to do anything effectively. This lesson in the futility of action profoundly affects our emotions and the way we behave. We become apathetic, withdrawn, and hopeless about the possibility of ever finding pleasure in life.
Parents can easily produce learned helplessness in children by punishing them often for no reason. This gives them the idea that they are helpless, that anything they do is ineffective or wrong. We can also develop this debilitating problem at any time of life when misfortunes wash over us and it seems we have lost the power to control what happens to us. But because uncontrollable losses do occur more frequently and the options to act can seem less, the danger of developing learned helplessness seems greater after retirement age. The subtle insinuations that age brings incompetence also take their toll.
Judith Rodin of Yale University has studied the corrosive effect of being helpless not just on our psyches, but on our bodies too. With Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, she selected a group of nursing-home patients and gave them a few more responsibilities and choices. Could they care for plants in their rooms? Could they choose the menu for that day? Nursing-home residents are physically dependent. Their lives are externally regulated to an extreme. As the ultimate helplessness-producing environment, the researchers felt a nursing home would be an ideal laboratory for studying the life-enhancing effect of being a more autonomous human being.
Adding just this dollop more of autonomy had a widespread impact. The residents perked up, becoming more alert and feeling happier. The change was long lasting, still there at an eighteen-month follow-up. And the intervention affected not just the quality of life, but its length. Whereas the overall mortality rate in the home was 25 percent, over that period only 15 percent of the residents who were given more autonomy and responsibility died.
At the 1986 meeting of the American Psychological Association, Rodin summarized the growing body of research demonstrating that having control over one's life and being given more decision-making power increases longevity in the elderly. She urged caution too. The studies have been done with nursing-home patients. They may not apply so well to the much greater autonomy of non-institutional life. And having more responsibility is not right for everyone. Some of us are uncomfortable making decisions. We want other people to take over; we are happy to have the anxiety inherent in making choices removed. Or more likely, we want to be able to make our own decisions about A, B, and С but want others to take over X, Y, and Z. Assuming control where we don't want it can boomerang, making us anxious, perhaps even shortening our lives. So exercising choice and being master of our fates is important, but so is selecting the level of control and decision making that fits us.
Here is a classic instance where having full decision-making power could cause added emotional distress: Your doctor brings up the possibility of surgery to correct your son's birth defect. The procedure has the potential to severely exacerbate his condition or to cure it. After carefully spelling out the risks of surgery, your physician leaves the choice totally up to you. Would you feel less anxious if Dr. Jones simply took control, saying, "In my professional opinion, Joe should have this operation"? In this situation many of us might opt for less control. But how can you tell if you are suffering from the opposite problem - not enough say over your life? The best way is to examine the symptoms that learned helplessness produces. We know these symptoms by another name - depression.
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