Attitudes and treatment towards elderly people can be said to vary drastically across cultures. From Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the America's, Africa and Australia, the attitudes expressed by the community towards older people are very different when compared to one another.

An `attitude' can be defined as `a mental view or disposition' (Wilkes & Krebs, 1987), or if the content is used in has a psychological basis ` the learned, relative stable tendency to respond to people, concepts, and events in an evaluative way' (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2002).

When discussing `older people' there is no way of determining an exact definition that all people will agree on, as it is a socially defined term. However, characteristics of old age include the deterioration of sensory processes. That is, vision, hearing, smell and taste may show signs of decline in strength. Vision may become clouded or even faded, the eye...