Cohort Differences and Similarities in Women's Attitudes About Self and Aging

This panel focuses on four complementing and international views of women’s aging, with a special emphasis on cohort comparisons and using three different studies of women, with contrasting methodological frameworks. In so doing, we present evidence related to trends in social percepetions of aging, attitudes about aging and identity, and ideas about control and objectification. Dr. Newton presents data on older Canadian women showing the connection between physical aging and identity maintenance, using both qualitative and quantitative data and using the lifecourse perspective. Dr. Ryan, using data from the Health and Retirement Study to compare cohorts of women from the 2008 and 2018 HRS waves, reports cohort differences in negative self-perceptions of aging, and that both cohort and negative self-perfections are associated with life satisfaction, using the life course developmental framework. Ms. Tran compares younger and older cohorts of women on a measure of self-objectification, finding that the older cohort reported lower objectification, consistent with a selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) model. Finally, Dr. Sherman, using the same data set as Ms. Tran, shows that control beliefs are associated with objectification, regardless of cohort, consistent with objectification theory predictions of consistency over time regarding the impact of objectification experiences. Dr. Jamila Bookwala will provide discussion of this group of papers.

Age, Attitudes to Aging, and Identity in Older Canadian Women

The life course perspective emphasizes social structure, personal agency, and their interdependencies (Settersten et al., 2020), serving as the theoretical framework for this study. Given stereotypical societal views of gender and aging (e.g., Sontag, 1979), physical aging is often the focus when examining women’s aging attitudes and concomitant changes in a sense of personal identity. Additionally, studies of midlife women have found relationships between age and identity (e.g., Stewart et al., 2001). Using quantitative and qualitative data, the present study examines associations between age, personal identity, and attitudes to physical, psychological and social aging in older Canadian women (N = 190, Mage = 70.38). Results show that while attitudes to physical aging contribute to identity maintenance, attitudes to social and psychological aging are also important for older women’s identity maintenance. Interactions between age and attitudes to aging associated with personal identity are discussed with reference to the life course perspective.

Oxidative phosphorylation safeguards pluripotency via UDP-N-acetylglucosamine

The roles of mitochondrial respiration in pluripotency remain largely unknown. We show here that mouse ESC mitochondria possess superior respiration capacity compared to somatic cell mitochondria, and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) generates the majority of cellular ATP in ESCs. Inhibition of OXPHOS results in extensive pluripotency and metabolic gene expression reprogram, leading to disruption of self-renewal and pluripotency. Metabolomics profiling identifies UDP-N-acetylglucosamine (UDP-GlcNAc) as one of the most significantly decreased metabolites in response to OXPHOS inhibition. The loss of ESC identity induced by OXPHOS inhibition can be ameliorated by directly adding GlcNAc both in vitro and in vivo. This work demonstrates that mitochondrial respiration, but not glycolysis, produces the majority of ATP in ESCs, and uncovers a novel mechanism whereby mitochondrial respiration is coupled with the hexosamine biosynthesis pathway to generate UDP-GlcNAc for ESC identity maintenance.

Emerging diasporas: Exploring mobilization outside the homeland

An enormous number of people are leaving their homelands around the world today. This has happened several times in the past, but migration has spiked in recent years. These population movements can have significant effects on both the host country (where emigrants or refugees settle), as well as politics back in the homeland. After they leave their homelands, why do some groups mobilize, and in what ways? In this article, we examine a number of factors that may impact when emigrated groups mobilize after they move. We develop a new dataset on potential diasporas in the United States to evaluate a series of hypotheses; including those about motivations for mobilization such as identity maintenance, the objective plight of co-ethnics in the homeland, and group capacity to mobilize. We find some merit in the identity preservation argument and a strong effect of geographic concentration of the diaspora segment. Surprisingly, diaspora mobilization does not appear to be strongly related to conflict in the homeland among these groups.

Metadehumanization Erodes Democratic Norms During the 2020 Presidential Election

The present research identifies social psychological factors threatening American democracy. Namely, we identify metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, as a robust predictor of Americans’ support for anti-democratic norms. Both immediately before and after the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for using anti-democratic means to hurt the opposing party. Along with extending past work demonstrating metadehumanization’s corrosive effect on democratic integrity, the present research also contributes novel insights into our understanding of this process. We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, we found that the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.

The Husband: Navigating the Relational Challenge Of Her Institutionalization Or His Widowerhood

Marital status is central to one’s identity. Using interview data from US husband caregivers and British widowers, we explore how men’s relational identity as husband is maintained despite challenges as, and after, marriage ends. These data, analyzed using the constant comparative method associated with constructionist grounded theory, corroborate that the work of being married is key to identity maintenance for husbands and that the married relationship and its associated responsibilities affirm a sense of self as a man. Marriage shelters men, providing a secure place for that self-perception as a man. But a wife’s institutionalization in long-term care or widowerhood threatens the ontological security offered through marriage and prompts identity work. We extend the literature in finding that (former) husbands attempt to retain their long-term relational identity and thus remain sheltered by marriage. They reconstruct masculinity-affirming identities through activities that help them harbor their self-presentation as a (former) husband.

Altar Encounters

This chapter examines Latinx religious identities through the lens of change and continuity. For evangelicals, the experience of religious conversion becomes a marker of evangelical identity. Some Catholics, too, have experiences of religious renewal which closely approximate religious conversion. For evangelicals, conversion experiences are closely linked to rupturing with the past. For Catholics, religious renewal is a way to solidify ties to the past, both religious and ethnic. Essentially, Catholics have a stronger sense of continuity with the past and evangelicals tend to emphasize discontinuity with the past. Ultimately, the author addresses the dilemma of how experiences of religious renewal and religious change relate to ethnic identity maintenance. Understandings of the past matter for ethnic identity because they structure the collective memories that people have at their disposal to bolster a sense of shared history. Conversion experiences also shape how people understand themselves in relation to ethnic spaces.

Replicator–mutator dynamics of linguistic convergence and divergence

People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity maintenance as an evolutionary game in which individuals play the field and the dynamics are supplied by a multi-population extension of the replicator–mutator equation. Using linearization, the stabilities of all dynamic equilibria of the game in its fully symmetric two-population special case are found. The model is then applied to an empirical test case from adolescent sociolinguistic behaviour. It is found that the empirically attested population state corresponds to one of a number of stable equilibria of the game under an independently plausible value of a parameter controlling the rate of linguistic mutations. An asymmetric three-population extension of the game, explored with numerical solution methods, furthermore predicts to which specific equilibrium the system converges.