Socioemotional Development in
Middle Adulthood
Chapter 16
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Chapter Outline
• Personality theories and adult development• Stability and change• Close relationships
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Personality Theories and Development
• Stages of adulthood– Erikson’s generativity versus stagnation• Generativity - Adults’ desire to leave legacies of
themselves to the next generation• Stagnation: Develops when individuals sense that they
have done nothing for the next generation• Generativity can be developed in a number of ways
– Biological generativity– Parental generativity– Work generativity– Cultural generativity
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Figure 16.2 - Levinson’s Periods of Adult Development
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Personality Theories and Development
• Stages of adulthood– Levinson’s seasons of a man’s life• Teens – transition from dependence to independence• 20s are a novice phase of adult development• 30s are a time for focusing on family and career
development• By the 40s, man has a stable career and now must look
forward to the kind of life he will lead as a middle-aged adult
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Personality Theories and Development
• Stages of adulthood – Levinson’s seasons of a man’s life • Transition to middle adulthood lasts - Conflicts
– Being young vs. being old– Being destructive vs. being constructive– Being masculine vs. being feminine– Being attached to others vs. being separated from them
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Personality Theories and Development
• Stages of adulthood – How pervasive are midlife crises? • The 40s are a decade of reassessing and recording the
truth about the adolescent and adult years• Only a minority of adults experience a midlife crisis
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Figure 16.3 - Emotional Instability and Age
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Figure 16.4 - Age and Well-Being
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Personality Theories and Development
• Stages of adulthood – Individual variations• Middle-aged adults interpret, shape, alter, and give
meaning to their lives• In 1/3 of cases where individuals report experiencing a
midlife crisis: – Triggered by life events such as job loss, financial problems, or
illness
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Personality Theories and Development
• The life-events approach– Contemporary life-events approach: How life
events influence the individual’s development depends on:• Life event itself• Mediating factors• Individual’s adaptation to the life event• Life-stage context• Sociohistorical context
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Figure 16.5 - A Contemporary Life-Events Framework for Interpreting Adult Developmental Change
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Personality Theories and Development
• The life-events approach– Drawbacks• Life-events approach places too much emphasis on
change, not adequately recognizing stability• It may not be life’s major events that are the primary
sources of stress – Daily experiences
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Figure 16.6 - The Ten Most Frequent Daily Hassles and Uplifts of Middle-Aged Adults over a Nine-Month Period
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Personality Theories and Development
• Stress and personal control – Stress, personal control, and age• Middle-aged adults experience more “overload”
stressors that involve juggling too many activities at once• Some aspects of personal control increase with age
while others decrease
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Personality Theories and Development
– Stress and gender• Fight-or-flight: When men experience stress:
– Become aggressive, socially withdraw, or drink alcohol
• Tend-and-befriend: When women experience stress: – Seek social alliances with others, especially female friends
• Contexts of midlife development – Historical contexts (Cohort effects)• Changing historical times and different social
expectations influence:
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Personality Theories and Development
– How different cohorts move through the life span
• Social clock: Timetable according to which individuals are expected to accomplish life’s tasks
– Gender contexts• Stage theories have a male bias• The demands of balancing career and family are usually
not experienced as intensely by men
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Personality Theories and Development
• Contexts of midlife development – Cultural contexts• The concept of middle age is unclear or absent in many
cultures• Middle age like for women - Depends on the modernity
of the culture and the culture’s view of gender roles– Middle-aged women in nonindustrialized societies experience
certain advantages
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Stability and Change
• Longitudinal studies– Costa and McCrae’s Baltimore Study
– Focused on the big five factors of personality
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Figure 16.8 - The Big Five Factors of Personality
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Stability and Change
• Longitudinal studies– Berkeley longitudinal studies• Intellectual orientation, self-confidence, and openness
to new experience were the more stable traits• Characteristics that changed the most
– Extent to which individuals were nurturant or hostile – Whether or not they had good self-control
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Stability and Change
• Longitudinal studies– Helson’s Mills College Study• Three main groups of women
– Family-oriented– Career-oriented– Neither path
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Stability and Change
• Longitudinal studies– George Vaillant’s studies• Conducted:
– Sample of 268 socially advantaged Harvard graduates born about 1920
– Sample of 456 socially disadvantaged inner-city men born about 1930
– Sample of 90 middle-SES, intellectually gifted women born about 1910
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Figure 16.9 - Links Between Characteristics at Age 50 and Health and Happiness at Age 75 to 80
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Stability and Change
• Conclusions– Personality traits continue to change during the
adult years, even into late adulthood– Cumulative personality model - With time and
age, people:• Become more adept at interacting with their
environment in ways that:– Promote the stability of personality
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Close Relationships
• Love and marriage at midlife– Security, loyalty, and mutual emotional interest
are more important in middle adulthood– Most married individuals are satisfied with their
marriages during midlife– Divorce in middle adulthood may be more positive
in some ways, more negative in others
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Close Relationships
• The empty nest and its refilling– Empty nest syndrome: Decrease in marital
satisfaction after children leave the home• Parents derive considerable satisfaction from their
children
– Refilling of empty nest is a common occurrence• Loss of privacy
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Close Relationships
• Sibling relationships and friendships – Sibling relationships may be extremely close,
apathetic, or highly rivalrous– Friendships that have endured over the adult
years tend to be deeper
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Close Relationships
• Grandparenting – Grandparent roles and styles• Three prominent meanings
– Source of biological reward and continuity– Source of emotional self-fulfillment– Remote role
– Three grandparenting styles• Formal • Fun-seeking • Distant-figure
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Close Relationships
• Grandparenting – The changing profile of grandparents• Most common reasons are divorce, adolescent
pregnancies, and parental drug use• Full-time grandparenting has been linked to health
problems, depression, and stress
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Close Relationships
• Intergenerational relationships – Middle-aged adults express responsibility between
generations– Midlife adults play important roles in the lives of
the young and the old– Relationships between aging parents and their
children:• Characterized by ambivalence
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Close Relationships
• Intergenerational relationships– Differences in gender• Mothers and daughters have closer relationships during
their adult years • Married men are more involved with their wives’
families than with their own• Grandparent-grandchild relationships
– Mothers’ intergenerational ties were more influential
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