Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
83/584 page 55
![A Theory of Adaptation and the Risk of Trauma 55 However, by the time an individual reaches advanced age new adaptations may be difficult, to say the least. In a study of elderly persons' entering a home for the aged, Lieberman [16] found that the typically high first-year mortality rates apparently are related to the impact of institutionalization on the aged but are not related to average age on admission or to the number of chronically ill persons admitted (p. 515). In general, elderly persons prefer to maintain or reinstate those С conditions that are familiar and in which they are comfortable—that is, for which appropriate В schemata exists—so that they do not have to make major new adaptations. Since behavioral plasticity facilitates adaptation, it is regrettable that all individuals lose some of their adaptive potential as they grow older. But individuals within any cultural group differ with respect to how rapidly they age in this sense. In addition to possible genetic or other physical determinants (e.g., illness or tissue damage), individuals differ in behavioral plasticity in part because of the experences they have undergone. For example, children who experience favorable home conditions retain a greater degree of adaptability than children who have suffered early traumatic emotional experiences, or been reared under a high degree of stress, or under minimally stimulating environmental conditions, or been deprived of maternal care. Correspondingly, the members of some sociocultural groups retain a greater degree of behavioral plasticity than others. For example, individuals reared in urban settings tend to be much more adaptable to new situations, especially those involving complex social interactions with strangers, than do their counterparts reared in families who live essentially in geographic and social isolation [17, 18]. Since the isolates learn to relate primarily to members of their family until they go to a small boarding school at age 7, they not only develop exceptionally close ties with the members of their own family, but they also lack the urban child's range of casual experiences with a wide variety of other persons. In other words, individuals born and reared on an isolated farm, as compared with those born in an urban setting, lack the opportunity to develop the psychic mechanisms {B schemata) that would enable them to relate easily to others. 16 Social isolates have remarked that after they have lived, say, 35 years on an isolated farm, they are not able to live comfortably in towns or cities where they would have to relate constantly to other persons.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0084.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
