Mills Quarterly summer 2012
Summer 2012 Mills College alumnae magazine
Their comparative work has revealed other differ- ences. Older adults in both the United States and China clearly demonstrated the positivity effect in the types of memories they recalled, but their shared positivity didn’t extend to their attitudes about aging. When asked to give five words or phrases to describe the changes that take place as we age, American adults used negative terms. Chinese older adults used more positive words like “wisdom” and “helping others.” Not only was their outlook on aging significantly rosier, they also recalled less negative information. “This shows that cultural differences do make a differ- ence in cognitive processing of information,” Chung says. Interestingly, her work also found that Chinese- American immigrant elders have a negative view of aging, reflecting western culture, even if they live exclu- sively with other Chinese-American immigrants. The attitudes of a person’s current geographical loca- tion, Chung says, is a much bigger factor in determining a person’s attitude about growing old than researchers expected. “You would expect that immigrants who have just come here from China would bring their attitudes with them,” she says, “yet they were surprisingly similar to older adults born in the United States.” Chung became interested in memory while studying cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, where her thesis advisor was Professor Lynn Hasher. Hasher developed the Inhibition Deficit Theory, which proposes that as we age we aren’t as good at regulating which information enters our working memory, making us more distractable. Chung’s interest in aging and mem- ory was also spurred by her own grandfather’s struggle with memory loss. “My grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dis- ease and spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home in Hong Kong,” Chung says. “I wanted to learn more about cognitive aging so that I could understand the reasons for his sufferings. Due to some of his experi- ences, I was also determined to someday examine the cross-cultural effects of aging.” She completed her graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and post-doctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now teaches courses in the fundamentals of psychology, statis- tics, and cognitive psychology at Mills. She is also a frequent speaker at College and alumnae events and has presented her research at conferences of the American Psychological Association, the International Neuropsychological Society, and others. For all of the nuanced ways that older people struggle to keep their brain capacity strong and robust, there are also some real physiological benefits to a few more candles on the birthday cake, Chung adds. As the brain ages, it shrinks—but not uniformly. The hippocampus, a part of the brain that is involved in forming and storing memory, doesn’t shrink much. Neither does the amyg- dala, which processes emotion. “Older adults can remember bigger vocabularies than younger people. Our semantic memory increases as we grow older,” Chung says. “Our memory function does change, but those changes may not be as big as people used to think.” ◆ Summer 2012 21 “My grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. I wanted to learn more about cognitive aging so that I could understand the reasons for his sufferings. I was also determined to examine the cross-cultural effects of aging.”
