Social Psychological Correlates of Occupational Conditions

Schooler, Carmi

Abstract

This project investigates how socio-environmental conditions affect the psychological functioning of the elderly. It tests hypotheses about how, as one grows older, such social-structurally determined environmental conditions such as complexity affect cognitive functioning, autonomous self-directed orientations and ones feelings about oneself and ones circumstances. The data come from a follow-up survey of 707 respondents originally selected in 1964 as part of a nationally representative sample picked for an investigation of how occupational conditions affect psychological functioning. This year we published a paper in a major journal that demonstrated that substantively complex occupational conditions continue to positively effect cognitive functioning later in life-- in fact more so than earlier. Other new findings this year indicated that having substantively complex leisure time activities both affects and is affected by intellectual flexibility. Leisure time activities thus provide one of the mechanisms through which the environment affects the stability of intellectual functioning. - Social-structure, occupations, elderly, environment, cognitive functioning orientations - Human Subjects: Interview, Questionaires, or Surveys Only