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SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN MIDDLE ADULTHOOD
14
ESSENTIALS OF LIFE-SPAN
DEVELOPMENT
JOHN W. SANTROCK
3e

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14-2
CHAPTER OUTLINE
• Personality theories and adult development
• Stability and change
• Close relationships

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14-3
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Adult stage theories
• The life-events approach
• Stress and personal control in midlife
• Contexts of midlife development

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14-4
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Adult stage theories
• Erikson’s stage of 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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14-5
FIGURE 14.1 - LEVINSON’S PERIODS OF
ADULT DEVELOPMENT

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14-6
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Adult stage theories
• 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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14-7
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Transition to middle adulthood lasts - Conflicts
• Being young versus being old
• Being destructive versus being constructive
• Being masculine versus being feminine
• Being attached to others versus being separated from them

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14-8
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• 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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14-9
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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14-10
FIGURE 14.2 - A CONTEMPORARY LIFE-EVENTS
FRAMEWORK FOR INTERPRETING ADULT
DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE

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14-11
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• The life-events approach
• Drawbacks
• Life-events approach places too much emphasis on change
• It may not be life’s major events that are the primary sources of
stress
• Daily experiences

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14-12
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Stress and personal control in midlife
• Middle-aged adults experience more “overload” stressors
that involve juggling too many activities at once
• Developmental changes in perceived personal control
• Some aspects of personal control increase with age while others
decrease

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14-13
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)
• Social clock: Timetable according to which individuals are
expected to accomplish life’s tasks

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14-14
PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
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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14-15
STABILITY AND CHANGE
• Longitudinal studies
• Conclusions

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14-16
STABILITY AND CHANGE
• Longitudinal studies
• Costa and McCrae’s Baltimore Study - Focused on the big
five factors of personality

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14-17
FIGURE 14.3 - THE BIG FIVE FACTORS OF
PERSONALITY

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14-18
STABILITY AND CHANGE
• 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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14-19
STABILITY AND CHANGE
• 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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14-20
FIGURE 14.4 - LINKS BETWEEN CHARACTERISTICS AT
AGE 50 AND HEALTH AND HAPPINESS AT AGE 75 TO
80

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14-21
STABILITY AND CHANGE
• Conclusions
• Personality traits continue to change during the adult years,
vinto 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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14-22
CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• Love and marriage at midlife
• The empty nest and its refilling
• Sibling relationships and friendships
• Grandparenting
• Intergenerational relationships

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14-23
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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14-24
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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14-25
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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14-26
CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• Grandparenting
• Grandparent roles and styles
• Three prominent meanings
• Source of biological reward and continuity
• Source of emotional self-fulfillment
• Remote role
• 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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14-27
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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14-28
CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• Gender differences characterize intergenerational
relationships
• 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 more influential than
fathers’