Open to Seacoast Village members and their guests

*Note the Zoom link for this presentation will be included in the confirmation and reminder emails.

From childhood on, people are exposed to negative stereotypes of older people and witness ageist treatment of older adults. Ageism, even before the pandemic, was widespread, and can leave older people feeling disrespected and stigmatized. In this presentation, Dr. Alison Chasteen will describe how older adults are stereotyped, and how those stereotypes result in ageism, with implications for their well-being. She will present evidence from her lab demonstrating how ageism is often tolerated. She will detail how ageism is experienced by older people as well, and then discuss potential ways to challenge ageist behavior when it occurs. Taken together, these studies will demonstrate the challenges in recognizing and reducing ageism, given its prevalence and often subtle expressions.

About the Presenter

Dr. Alison Chasteen is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. She is the director of the Intergroup Relations Lab at U of T where she and her team investigate stereotyping, prejudice, and stigma, both from the perceiver’s as well as the target’s perspective. A focus of her research is on understanding the effects of age stereotypes and ageism on older people. Dr. Chasteen is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association (Div. 9 and 20), the Gerontological Society of America, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.