Middle adulthood Flashcards
According to Jung, midlife is the afternoon of life and it serves as an important preparation for late adulthood,
“the evening of life”.
Today, the percentages of people at different ages in the life span are more similar, creating what is called the “___________” of the age distribution (a vertical rectangle).
rectangularization
the developmental period that begins at approximately 40 to 45 years of age and extends to about 60 to 65 years of age
Middle Adulthood
It is the age period in which gains (growth) and losses (decline) as well as biological and sociocultural factors balance each other
Middle Adulthood
A ______ period because it is a time of
balancing growth and decline, linking earlier and later periods of development, and connecting younger and older generations
pivotal
The most visible signs of physical changes in middle adulthood involve _______.
physical appearance
Visible signs in physical appearance are:
wrinkles
hair becomes thin and gray
distraction of nails
age-related loss of muscle mass and strength.
Sacropenia
-the ability to focus and maintain an image on the retina-experiences its sharpest decline between 40 and 59 years of age
Accommodation of the eye
a condition characterized by hypertension, obesity, and insulin resistance.
Metabolic Syndrome
disorders that are characterized by slow onset and long duration. They are rare in early adulthood, increase during middle adulthood, and become common in late adulthood.
Chronic disorder
stress hormones; the link between stress and disease. Elevated _ levels are linked to physical health problems.
Cortisol
Having a sense of ______ in middle age is one of the most important modifiable factors in delaying the onset of diseases in middle adulthood and reducing the frequency of diseases in late adulthood.
Control
main causes of death for individuals in middle adulthood.
Chronic Diseases
the midlife transition during which fertility declines (both men and women).
Climacteric
cessation of a woman’s menstrual periods, usually during the late forties or early fifties.
Menopause
a girl’s first menstruation
Menarche
the transitional period from normal menstrual periods to no menstrual periods at all.
~usually occurs during the forties but can occur in the thirties.
Perimenopause
a condition in which the body does not produce enough testosterone.
Male Hypogonadism
the inability to adequately achieve and maintain an erection to attain satisfactory sexual performance.
Erectile Dysfunction (ED)
accumulated information and verbal skills, which increase in middle adulthood.
Crystallized Intelligence
the ability to reason abstractly, which begins to decline from middle adulthood onward
Fluid Intelligence
If we find differences between 40- and 60-
year-olds on intelligence tests when they are assessed ___________, these differences might be due to cohort effects related to educational differences rather than to age.
cross-sectionally
It involves extensive evaluation of intellectual abilities during adulthood was initiated by K. Warner Schaei.
The Seattle longitudinal study
The main mental abilities tested in this study are:
Verbal comprehension
Verbal memory
Numeric facility
Spatial orientation
Inductive reasoning
Perceptual speed
ability to understand ideas expressed in words.
Verbal Comprehension
ability to encode and recall meaningful language units, such as a list of words.
Verbal Memory
ability to perform simple mathematical computations such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication.
Numeric Facility
ability to visualize and mentally rotate stimuli in two- and three-dimensional space
Spatial Orientation
ability to recognize and understand patterns and relationships in a problem and to use this understanding to solve other instances of the problem.
Inductive Reasoning
ability to quickly and accurately make simple discriminations in visual stimuli.
Perceptual Speed
middle age was a time of peak performance for some aspects of both crystallized intelligence (_____) and fluid intelligence (________).
verbal ability & spatial orientation and inductive reasoning
Perceptual speed begins declining in early adulthood and continues to decline in middle adulthood.
→ A current interest focuses on possible causes for the decline in speed of processing information in adults.
Speed of information processing
Speed of memory processing occur at different levels of analysis, such as:
Cognitive
Neuroanatomical
Neurochemical
maintaining goals, switching between tasks, or preserving internal representations despite distraction
Cognitive
- changes in specific brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex
Neuroanatomical
- changes in neurotransmitter systems such as dopamine.
Neurochemical
- having extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular domain
Expertise
- it refers to the pleasant times after work when individuals are free to pursue activities and interests of their own choosing-hobbies, sports, or reading.
Leisure
- an organized set of beliefs, practices, rituals, and symbols that increases an individual’s connection to a sacred or transcendent other (God, higher power, or ultimate truth).
Religion
- the degree of affiliation with an organized religion, participation in its prescribed rituals and practices, connection with its beliefs, and involvement in a community of believers.
Religiousness
- involves experiencing something beyond oneself in a transcendent manner and living in a way that benefits others and society.
Spirituality
an Austrian psychiatrist whose mother, father, brother, and wife died in the concentration camps and gas chambers in Auschwitz, Poland.
Victor Frankl
Three most distinct human qualities:
(1)spirituality, (2) freedom, and (3) responsibilities.
- it involves drawing on beliefs, values, and goals to change the meaning of a stressful situation, especially in times of chronic stress such as when a loved one dies.
Meaning-Making Coping
Four main needs for meaning that guide how people try to make sense of their lives:
Need for purpose
Need for values
Need for a sense of efficacy
Need for self-worth
present events draw meaning from their connection with future events.
→ Life can be oriented toward a future
anticipated state, such as living happily ever after or being in love.
Need for purpose
Purposes can be divided into:
1) goals and (2) fulfillments.
- this can lend a sense of goodness or positive characterization of life and justify certain courses of action.
→ Values enable people to decide whether certain acts are right or wrong
Need for Values
- this involves the belief that one can make a difference. A life that had purposes and values but no efficacy would be tragic.
→ The person might know what is desirable but could not do anything with that knowledge.
Need for a Sense of Efficacy
- most individuals want to be “good, worthy persons”. It can an be pursued individually.
Need for Self-Worth
Two prominent theories that define stages of adult development are
Erik Erikson’s life-span view and Daniel Levinson’s seasons of a man’s life.
Erikson proposed that middle-aged adults face an issue of _______, which is the seventh stage in his life-span theory.
generativity versus stagnation
- it encompasses adults’ desire to leave legacies of themselves to the next generation. Through these legacies adults achieve a kind of immortality.
Generativity
- (also known as “self-absorption”) occurs when people believe they have done nothing for the next generation.
Stagnation
Middle-aged adults can develop four generativity in a number of ways.
Biological generativity
Parental generativity
Work generativity
Cultural generativity
When adults have offspring →
biological
generativity
When adults nurture and guide children →
parental generativity
When adults develop skills that are passed down to others →
work generativity
When adults create, renovate, or conserve
some aspect of culture that ultimately survives →
cultural generativity
an important dimension of middle age.
Generativity
A higher level of generativity in midlife was linked to ______ in late adulthood.
greater wisdom
According to Levinson, the transition to middle adulthood lasts about five years (ages 40 to 45) and requires the adult male to come to grips with four major conflicts that have existed in his life since
adolescence:
[1] Being young versus being old
[2] Being destructive versus being constructive
[3] Being masculine versus being feminine
[4] Being attached to others versus being separated from them
- adolescence is a time for detecting parental flaws and discovering the truth about childhood, while adulthood is a decade of reassessing and recording the truth about the adolescent and adulthood years.
George Vaillant (1977)
_______ sees midlife as a crisis. ______ maintains that only a minority of adults experience a midlife crisis.
Levinson & Vaillant
Stage theories focus on the universals of adult personality development as they try to pin down stages that all individuals go through in their adult lives.
Individual variations
is triggered by life events such as a job loss, financial problems, or illness.
Crisis
Age-related stages represent one major way to examine adult personality development. A second major way to conceptualize adult personality development is to focus on life events.
Life events approach
- how life events influence the individual’s development depends not only on the life event itself but also on mediating factors (such as physical health and family supports), the individual’s adaptation to the life event (such as appraisal of the threat and coping strategies), the life-stage context, and the sociohistorical context.
Contemporary Life Events Approach
→ Life-events approach places too much
emphasis on change. It does not adequately recognize the stability that, at least to some degree, characterizes adult development.
Drawbacks of life-events approach:
- the view that when men experience stress, they are more likely to engage in a _____ pattern, as reflected in being aggressive, withdrawing from social contact, or drinking alcohol.
Fight-or-Flight
- Taylor’s view that when women experience stress, they are likely to engage in a ______ pattern, seeking social alliances with others, especially female friends.
Tend-and-Befriend
Some developmentalists conclude that changing historical times and different social expectations influence how different cohorts-groups of individuals born in the same year or time period-move through the life span
Historical context (cohort effect)
- argues that our values, attitudes, expectations, and behaviors are influenced by the period in which we live
Bernice Neugarten
- it holds that the social environment of a particular age group can alter its social clock-the timetable on which individuals are expected to accomplish life’s tasks, such as getting married, having children, or establishing themselves in a career.
→ _______\ provide guides for our lives
Social Clock
- the big five factors are linked to longevity (OCEAN)
The Big Five Factors of Personality
OCEAN
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
individuals high on _____ to experience are more likely to have better health and well-being.
Openness to Experience
- individuals high in ______ often do well in a variety of life
domains
Conscientiousness
- individuals high in ________ are
more likely than others to live longer
Extraversion
- people who are high in _______ are more likely to live longer.
Agreeableness
- people high in _______ are more
likely to die at a younger age.
Neuroticism
involves having a positive outlook on the future and minimizing problems. ______ is
often referred to as a style of thinking.
Optimism
- one of the researchers in the Berkeley Longitudinal Studies, stresses that too much attention has been given to discontinuities for all members of the human species, as exemplified in the adult stage theories.
→ He points out that some people experience recurrent crises and undergo substantial changes over the life course, whereas others have more stable, continuous lives entailing very little change.
John Clausen (1993)
In the ________, some women moved toward becoming “pillars of society” in their early forties to early fifties.
→ Menopause, caring for aging parents, and an empty nest were not associated with an increase in responsibility and self-control.
Mills College Study
_____ studies showed that individuals at 50 years of age were more likely to be alive and happy at 75 to 80 years of age.
George Vaillant
is strong in early adulthood, while affectionate love increases in middle adulthood
Romantic love
- a decrease in marital satisfaction that occurs after children leave home, because parents derive considerable satisfaction from their children.
Empty Nest Syndrome
- the grandparent performed what was considered to be a proper and prescribed role.
Formal Style
- the grandparent was informal and playful.
Fun-Seeking Style
- the grandparent was benevolent but interaction was infrequent.
Distant-Figure Style
Middle-aged adults are the “____________” generation, caring for both grown children and aging parents simultaneously.
sandwich
