Adult Personality Development Flashcards
How does personality change as a person ages?
Some aspects stay the same and other aspects change; for example, in mid-life there is a shift from outer-world to inner-world orientation and change of time perspective from “time since birth” to “time until death”
What are some examples of traits that remain relatively stable throughout adulthood?
Happiness, assertiveness, and hostility
What are some changes that people often experience as they get older?
Women experience increased self-efficacy and assertiveness and decrease in dependence; Men experience increase in nurturance and interpersonal orientation
Discuss mid-life changes
Jung’s proposal that, for many people, midlife involves shift from extraversion to introversion
Levinson’s “Seasons of a Man’s Life”
4 “seasons” or “stages” including infancy through adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood
Neugarten’s Kansas City Study
Investigated personality characteristics of adults aged 40-70 y.o.
Erikson identified 3 adult stages of personality development. What are they?
Intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and ego integrity versus despair
Levinson’s stages are further broken down into substages. Give an example of substages.
Early adulthood divided into “entering the adult world,” the “age 30 transition”, and “settling down”
What is one task of age 30 transition?
Define “the dream” (which is a vision of an ideal life)
Transition from early to middle adulthood occurs when (between what ages)? What kinds of conflicts arise during this transition/subsequent stage?
Between 40-45 y.o. and involves several conflicts including being young versus being old, being attached versus separated, etc., as well as “deflation of the dream” as person realizes his/her goals are not worthwhile and/or will not be fulfilled
What is a difference between Levinson’s original study and subsequent study?
Original one was with males only and subsequent was both males and females; he confirmed (?) that females are very similar to males in terms of developmental stages and tasks
What percentage of males in Levinson’s original study experienced midlife crises? What have other researchers found with respect to midlife crises?
80%; others have found that midlife is time of reevaluation and only period of crisis in minority of adults; midlife not necessarily associated with increases in emotional disturbance as might be expected if truly time of crisis
What did Neugarten’s research confirm?
Adulthood is a time of both consistency and change; adaptive characteristics (like styles of coping) are relatively stable and other characteristics change
What are some of the characteristics that change?
Around age 50, people usually experience transition from outer-world to inner-world orientation and from active to passive mastery
With respect to active and passive mastery, what did different aged adults indicate?
40 y.o. participants more likely than 60 y.o.s to say they had control over their environment; 60 y.o.s more likely to say that they felt threatened by environment
