I Age in Ways that I Find Meaningful

Recording

Abstract

Old age has traditionally been perceived as a time of declines and losses. Yet, empirical findings from the recent 20 years have shown that many of the age-related declines in social and cognitive performance can be offset by making the performance self-relevant and/or emotionally rewarding.

In this talk, I am going to present findings from studies on social relationships, attention, memory, emotion and problem solving, across adult samples (aged 18 to 90+ years), from Hong Kong, USA, Canada and Germany, to show that aging is not just about declines. Once older individuals find an activity or performance meaningful, they are more motivated to engage in it, attend more to it, remember it better and may eventually perform better in it. The strategies that enable older people to do so, and cross-cultural differences in these strategies, will be highlighted. Experiences in collaborating with other disciplines, such as engineering, architecture, sociology and social work, to explore ways to scale up these strategies will be shared. Practical implications of these strategies for personal aging at the individual and interpersonal levels, and population aging at the society level, will also be discussed. 

Bio

Helene H. Fung is a Professor and the Chairperson of the Dept of Psychology, the Executive Director of the Centre for Positive Social Science and a Deputy Director of the Institute of Ageing, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. She obtained her BS from University of Washington, Seattle, and MA and PhD from Stanford University.

Professor Fung examines socioemotional ageing across cultures. Among her awards include the 2017-18 Anne E. Ofstedal Fellowship on Higher Education Leadership, offered by United Board, the 2010 Margret and Paul Baltes award in Behavioural and Social Gerontology from the Gerontological Society of America, the 2008 Retirement Research Foundation Mentor Award from Division 20 and the 2016 Henry David International Mentoring Award from Division 52, American Psychological Association. She is included on a list of the top 2% of working scientists world-wide (2020-2023), and is ranked 33rd in Top Scientists in Psychology in China by Research.com. 

She is a senior associate editor for the Australian Journal of Psychology, and an associate editor for Cognition and Emotion. She has been an associate editor for Acta Psychologica Sinica. She was elected a fellow of the Association for the Psychological Science, a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 20 & 52), and a fellow and Member-at-large of the Behavioural and Social Science Division of the Gerontological Society of America.