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Source for later: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297194279_AGING_WELL_SURPRISING_GUIDEPOSTS_TO_A_HAPPIER_LIFE

Triumphs of Experience

George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, has published a summation of the key insights the study has yielded in the book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.

Maturation

The warmth of childhood relationship with mothers matters long into adulthood:

• Men who had "warm" childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
• Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
• Late in their professional lives, the men's boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
• The warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on "life satisfaction" at 75.

Marriage

Political-mindedness correlates with intimacy: aging liberals have more sex.

• The most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68.
• The most-liberal men had active sex lives into their 80s.

Old Age

• The warmth of childhood relationship with fathers correlated with:
  • Lower rates of adult anxiety.
  • Greater enjoyment of vacations.
  • Increased "life satisfaction" at age 75.

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.

• Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives.
• Strongly correlates with neurosis and depression, which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it.
• Together with associated cigarette smoking, was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death.

Surprising Findings

• Financial success depends on warmth of relationships and, above a certain level, not on intelligence.
  • Those who scored highest on measurements of "warm relationships" earned an average of $141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60).
  • No significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150.

Adaptation to Life

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Aging Well

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George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, has published a summation of the key insights the study has yielded in the book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study:

• Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.
  • Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives.
  • Strongly correlates with neurosis and depression, which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it.
  • Together with associated cigarette smoking, was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death.
• Financial success depends on warmth of relationships and, above a certain level, not on intelligence.
  • Those who scored highest on measurements of "warm relationships" earned an average of $141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60).
  • No significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150.
• Political-mindedness correlates with intimacy: aging liberals have more sex.
  • The most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68.
  • The most-liberal men had active sex lives into their 80s.
• The warmth of childhood relationship with mothers matters long into adulthood:
  • Men who had "warm" childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
  • Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
  • Late in their professional lives, the men's boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
  • The warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on "life satisfaction" at 75.
• The warmth of childhood relationship with fathers correlated with:
  • Lower rates of adult anxiety.
  • Greater enjoyment of vacations.
  • Increased "life satisfaction" at age 75.

The Grant Study is a 75-year longitudinal study from the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School. It followed 268 Harvard-educated men, the majority of whom were members of the undergraduate classes of 1942, 1943 and 1944. It has run in tandem with a study called "The Glueck Study," which included a second cohort of 456 disadvantaged, non-delinquent inner-city youths who grew up in Boston neighborhoods between 1940 and 1945. The subjects were all male and of American nationality. The men continue to be studied to this day. The men were evaluated at least every two years by questionnaires, through information from their physicians, and by personal interviews. Information was gathered about their mental and physical health, career enjoyment, retirement experience and marital quality. The goal of the study was to identify predictors of healthy aging.

Attentional Blink

The attentional blink happens when a second target is not perceived when presented in succession of a first target within 200-500 ms. Target 1 is presented, and while the viewer is momentarily focused on target 1, target 2 is presented with the first target 200-500 ms later. Frequently, the second target goes unperceived. This can be tested by .... and

Encoding (memory)

Encoding (organizational): classifying of information that relates to similar memories and associations.

Faculty Psychology

Faculty psychology views the mind as a collection of separate modules or faculties assigned to various mental tasks. It claims that we are born with separate, innate human functions. Thomas Reid mentions more than 43 different faculties, or functions, of the mind that all work together as a whole. Some examples of faculties include judgement, compassion, memory, attention, perception, and consciousness. The view is also explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic Theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas.

It is also present, though more implicitly, in Franz Joseph Gall's formulation of phrenology, the now-disreputable practice of measuring personality and sensory traits by estimating brain mass of organs on one's head to determine ways to improve faults. However, faculty psychology has been revived in Jerry Fodor's concept of modularity of mind, the supposition that different modules autonomously manage sensory input and other mental functions.

Faculty Psychology resembles localization of function, the claim that specific cognitive functions are performed in specific areas of the brain. For example, the Broca's Area is in charge of language production and syntax, while the Wernicke's Area is in charge of language comprehension and semantics. Nowadays, it is known that while the brain's functions are separate, they also work together in a localized function.

It is debatable to what extent the continuous mention of faculties throughout the history of psychology should be taken to indicate a continuity of the term's meaning. In medieval writings, psychological faculties were often intimately related to metaphysically-loaded conceptions of forces, particularly to Aristotle's notion of an efficient cause. (Note to work a little on Aristotle later) This is the view of faculties which is explicit in the works of Thomas Aquinas:

Titchner studied mental faculties, or structuralism.

Modularity of mind

Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have been proposed by different authors. According to Fodor, the author of Modularity of Mind, a system can be considered 'modular' if its functions are made of multiple dimensions or units to some degree. One example of modularity in the mind is 'binding.' When one perceives an object, they take in not only the features of an object, but the integrated features that create a whole. Instead of just seeing 'red,' 'round,' 'plastic,' and 'moving,' the subject may experience a rolling, red ball. Binding may suggest that the mind is modular because it takes multiple processes to perceive one thing.

Historically, questions regarding the functional architecture of the mind have been divided into two different theories of the nature of the faculties. The first can be characterized as a horizontal view because it refers to mental processes as if they are interactions between faculties such as memory, imagination, judgement, and perception, which are not domain specific (e.g., a judgement remains a judgement whether it refers to a perceptual experience or to the conceptualization/comprehension process).The second can be characterized as a vertical view because it claims that the mental faculties are differentiated on the basis of domain specificity, are genetically determined, are associated with distinct neurological structures, and are computationally autonomous.

The vertical vision goes back to the 19th century movement called phrenology and its founder Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed that the individual mental faculties could be associated precisely, in a one-to-one correspondence, with specific physical areas of the brain For example, someone's level of intelligence could be literally "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. Phrenology's practice was debunked scientifically by Pierre Flourens in the 19th century. He destroyed parts of pigeons' and dogs' brains, called lesions, and studied their resulting dysfunction. He was able to conclude that while the brain localizes in some functions, it also works as a unit and is not as localized as earlier phrenologists thought. During the 20th century, Titchener studied the modules of the mind through introspection. He tried to determine the original, raw perspective experiences of his subjects. For example, if he wanted his subjects to perceive an apple, they would need to talk about spatial characteristics of the apple and the different hues that they saw without mentioning the apple.

Behaviorists tried to replace the mind with reflexes, which are, according to Fodor, encapsulated (cognitively impenetrable or unaffected by other cognitive domains) and non-inferential (straight pathways with no information added). Low level processes are unlike reflexes in that they are can be inferential. This {can be} demonstrated by the poverty of the stimulus argument. {The poverty of the stimulus supports the argument that children do not only learn language from their environment, but are innately programmed with low- level processes that help them seek and learn language.} The proximate stimulus, that which is initially received by the brain (such as the 2D image received by the retina), cannot account for the resulting output (for example, our 3D perception of the world), thus necessitating some form of computation.

In contrast, cognitivists saw lower level processes as continuous with higher level processes, being inferential and cognitively penetrable (influenced by other cognitive domains, such as beliefs). The latter has been shown to be untrue in some cases, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion, which can persist despite a person's awareness of their existence. This is taken to indicate that other domains, including one's beliefs, cannot influence such processes.

Pylyshyn (1999) has argued that while these properties tend to occur with modules, one—information encapsulation—stands out as being the real signature of a module; that is, the encapsulation of the processes inside the module from both cognitive influence and from cognitive access. One example is that conscious awareness of the Müller-Lyer illusion being an illusion does not correct visual processing.

The definition of module has caused confusion and dispute. J. A. Fodor initially defined modules as "functionally specialized cognitive systems" that have nine features but not necessarily all at the same time. In his views, modules can be found in peripheral processing such as low-level visual processing but not in central processing. Later he narrowed the two essential features to domain-specificity and information encapsulation. Frankenhuis and Ploeger write that domain-specificity means that "a given cognitive mechanism accepts, or is specialized to operate on, only a specific class of information". Information encapsulation means that information processing in the module cannot be affected by information in the rest of the brain. {One example is that the effects of an optical illusion, from low-level processes, persist even when the perceiver is consciously aware, due to high level processes.}

Evolutionary psychologists instead usually define modules as functionally specialized cognitive systems that are domain-specific and may also contain innate knowledge about the class of information processed. Modules can be found also for central processing. This theory is sometimes referred to as massive modularity.