Cross-Cultural Psychogerontology

Population aging is a phenomenon that affects most parts of the world. According to recent data from the World Population Prospects (United Nations 2017), the number of older persons – those aged 60+ – has reached 962 million worldwide and is expected to climb to 2.1 billion in 2050. In spite of these general world trends, life expectancies differ still largely, and aging remains a highly diverse experience across the world. While universal developmental tasks are markers for older age in all societies (e.g., becoming a grandparent), expectations with regard to typical life trajectories and the timing of transitions vary. This “social clock” (Neugarten et al. 1965) or “cultural chrononormativity of aging” (Brinkmann and Musaeus 2018) is also expressed in legal regulations and policies (e.g., availability and timing of retirement schemes). Normative and nonnormative life events and their interpretation as on time or off-time might thus be defined very differently depending on the cultural (and historical) context (see also Baltes et al. 1980; Wrosch and Heckhausen 2005).
This leads to one of the central questions of cross-cultural aging research: Are aging processes universals across cultures and societies in the Western, Eastern, Northern, and Southern parts of the world – or do aging processes differ between cultures and societies?