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VICTIMIZATION OF THE ELDERLY

rceptual accuracy of either. Adaptation to life changes as one ages, thus, is a highly individual process. The individualistic characteristic of the adaptation process hinders generalization.

Cognitive phenomena employed by individuals in adapting to life changes are grouped into three categories (Wong & Watt, pp. 272-279). The first category is comprised of an individual's stream of consciousness thought and visual images that occur as responses to life events. Such automatic thoughts related to events may be biased by systematic distortions. The second category is comprised of an individual's expectancies about the probabilities of the responses by others to one's own behaviors. Such expectancies influence one's behaviors, and also are susceptible to systematic distortion. The third category of cognitive phenomena includes one's unrealistic and irrational beliefs about the nature of one's relationships both to others and to one's environment. Such irrational beliefs may result in dysfunctional behavioral responses (DeGenova, 1993, pp. 191-201).

Systematic distortion related to one's automatic thoughts occurs through a variety of thought behaviors (Adelmann, 1994, pp. S277-S285). The most frequent of these thought behaviors are over generalization--an assumption that the behavior of oneself and others will be invariant, arbitrary inference--jumping to conclusions, selective abstraction--where one ignores a part of the available information, and all-or-nothing thinking--where one accepts only the extremes of a continuum as an explanation for the behavior of another. Biased attributions in one's automatic thoughts are significant because they can elicit a sense of hopelessness and helplessness regarding improvement of problems being experienced (Gannon, Vaux, Rhodes, & Luchetta, 1992, pp. 288-301).

Expectancies involve estimates of the probabilities that one will behave in certain ways in certain situations (Adelmann, ...

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VICTIMIZATION OF THE ELDERLY. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:46, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1687357.html