Lesson 16: Middle Adulthood (Psychosocial Devt)

• Psychosocial development in middle adulthood

  Objective: looking at trajectories or pathways

  Subjective: how people construct their identity and the structure of their lives
• Middle adulthood


  Relatively stable period of development in which little change occurred
• The Big Five personality traits

  • Conscientiousness - tends to be highest: being deliberate, organized, and discipline
  • Agreeableness - tends to increase: being straightforward, altruistic, and modest, but decrease in activity
  • Neuroticism - tends to decrease for those who remarry in the middle age
• Erikson's seventh stage: generativity versus stagnation

  Generativity - involves finding meaning through contributing to society and leaving a legacy for future generations. The virtue of this period is care: "a widening commitment to take care of the persons, the products, and the ideas one has learned to care for"
• Adults who slide into stagnation may find themselves disconnected from their communities because of their failure to find a way to contribute
• Women report higher levels of generativity than men do, and this is particularly true in early adulthood
• For men, having a child early in adulthood is associated with greater generativity
• Generativity can extend to the world of work, to politics, to religion, to hobbies, to art, to music, and to other spheres, or as Erikson called it, "maintenance of the world"
• Individuation (according to Carl G. Jung)


  Emergence of the true self through balancing or integrating conflicting parts of the personality

  Concentrate on obligations to family and society: develop aspects of personality that will help them reach external goals (Women: emphasize expressiveness and nurturance while Men: primarily oriented toward achievements)

  Preoccupation shifts to inner, spiritual selves
• Social clock


  Describing the ages at which people are expected to reach certain milestones
• Factors affecting people's subjective sense of aging and their entry into middle age

  • Ethnic minority group members
  • People who have lower levels of education or socioeconomic status
  • Young parents
  • Divorced people
  • People whose parents have died
• Women report that middle age starts and ends later than men do, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the social devaluation conferred upon "old" women
• As people age, they tend to report feeling younger than what they actually are, and what they consider to be "middle-aged" versus "old" shifts upward
• Early parenting is associated with declines in well-being and an increased risk of depression when compared to on-time parenting
• Because of the intense time-graded social norms regarding motherhood, women are likely to feel increasing pressure to have children with age, and this affects adjustment to midlife
• Despite the multiple challenges and variable events of midlife, many middle-aged adults show remarkable resilience
• Midlife Crisis


  Changes in personality and lifestyle such as these during the early to middle forties; in some normative-crisis models, stressful life periods precipitated by the review and reevaluation of one's past
• On average, both men and women's well-being gradually drops until they reach midlife and smoothly increases until at least the age of 70, although this shift occurs sooner for those people who are temperamentally higher in well-being
• Turning Point


  Psychological transition that involve significant change or transformation in the perceived meaning, purpose, or direction of a person's life
• In the MIDUS survey and in studies of resilience, many respondents reported positive growth from successful resolution of life challenges
• Midlife Review


  Introspective examination that often occurs in the middle age, leading to reappraisal and revision of values and priorities
• Midlife review involves recognizing the finiteness of life and can be a time of taking stock, discovering new insights about the self, and spurring midcourse corrections in the design and trajectory of one's life
• Developmental Deadlines


  Time constraints on the ability to have a child, make up with an estranged friend or family member
• Ego Resiliency


  The ability to adapt flexible and resourcefully to potential sources of stress
• Identity Schemas


  Accumulated perceptions of the self shaped by incoming information from intimate relationships, work-related situations, and community and other experiences
• Assimilation


  Interpreting new information encountered in the environment via existing cognitive structures (fitting in new information)
• Accommodation


  Changing cognitive structures to more closely align with what is encountered
• Identity Assimilation


  Involves holding onto a consistent sense of self in the face of new experiences that do not fit the current understanding
• Identity Accommodation


  Involves adjusting the identity schema to fit new experiences
• Identity Balance


  Maintain a stable sense of self while adjusting their self-schemas to incorporate new information (e.g., effects of aging → respond flexibly)
• In Assimilation, people are inflexible and do not learn from experience, unrealistically seek to maintain a youthful self-image and ignore what is going on in their body, and the process of denial may make it harder for them to confront the reality of aging when it can no longer be ignored
• In Accommodation, people are weak and highly vulnerable to criticism, their identity is easily undermined, and they may overreact to early signs of aging (e.g., first gray hair) and become pessimistic, which may hasten physical and cognitive declines
• Successful achievement of identity is associated with generativity, and both together are then associated with positive outcomes
• Generativity tends to be associated with prosocial behavior, volunteering for community service or for a political cause, and high levels are linked to positive outcome: sense of having contribute meaningfully to society
• Narrative Identity


  Individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized evolving story of the self that provides them with a sense of unity and purpose in life
• Highly generative adults tend to construct generativity scripts. These scripts often feature a theme of redemption, or deliverance from suffering, and are associated with psychological well-being
• According to the MIDUS findings, women reported slightly more negative emotionality (such as anger, fear, and anxiety) at all ages than men. Positive emotionality (such as cheerfulness) increases, on average, among men but falls among women in middle age and then rises sharply for both sexes, but especially men, in late adulthood
• Subjective well-being


  How happy a person feels
• One reason for this life satisfaction is that positive emotions associated with pleasant memories tend to persist, while the negative feelings associated with unpleasant memories fade
• Social support (e.g., friends and spouses) and religiosity are important contributors to life satisfaction