Adulthood

Evie Bentley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415258234
• eBook ISBN: 9781134514748
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Adulthood is an accessible text which deals with the vital area of adult psychological development. It combines detailed accounts of the main theories and evidence on the psychology of adulthood with thorough discussion and commentary, presented in a concise and friendly form. The book's approach encourages engagement with the main theories of this highly relevant topic, as well as including less well-known models of adulthood for discussion.

The book begins with a definition of lifespan psychology, and further chapters include early and middle adulthood; the life events approach; marriage; parenting; divorce; and old age. It includes some modern slants on the classic research, as well as the up-to-date theories, and alternative theories are introduced. Cross-cultural issues and examples have been included in every chapter, and various biases are identified and explained. The final section has sample essays on this topic with extremely helpful examiner's comments, as well as a useful glossary.

Evie Bentley has written an ideal guide to this topic, which requires little or no background knowledge. It provides a useful introduction for both A-level and undergraduate students of psychology or sociology, and will also be of interest to anyone in the health or social care professions and to those with a general interest in developmental psychology.

1 Introduction to lifespan psychology

How this book is organised

The organisation of this book is in six chapters. First, there is this introductory chapter which looks at what psychologists mean by ‘lifespan’ and ‘adulthood’, and also at how this area of psychology has been researched. Chapter 2 deals with early and middle adulthood, and three important theories of human development during this time: the theories of Erikson, Levinson and Gould. Each of these theories views adulthood from a different stance, a different point of view, and these alternative approaches are all very interesting. Chapter 3 takes a fourth approach and looks at some of the main life events of adulthood, namely marriage and partnering, parenthood, and divorce from a psychological angle. Chapter 4 is about late adulthood, with sections on social psychological theories of ageing, the psychological effects of retirement and bereavement, cognitive changes in older adults, and some cross-cultural ageing studies. Chapter 5 has some alternative psychological perspectives on ageing, and Chapter 6 gives a senior examiner’s comments on two student essays, showing where more marks could have been gained and therefore a higher grade obtained. This last chapter is a particularly useful one!

What ‘lifespan’ means

Lifespan psychology or development are relatively new terms. Psychologists used to refer to developmental rather than lifespan psychology, but the former term became equated with childhood development and so a new name was coined to include our psychological development throughout life. This is important, as it would be entirely wrong to imply that our personal, psychological development ceases at some point in the teens. We are dynamic individuals, and can and do continue to develop psychologically throughout life. Our environment and experiences continue to influence and perhaps shape us throughout adulthood.

Why was earlier research focused only on childhood? Well, several famous and influential psychologists thought that little or no further psychological development occurred after adolescence or from an even earlier age. Piaget felt that we developed stage by stage but once puberty had been gone though we remained wherever we were, psychologically speaking, for the rest of our lives. He did suggest an adult-type final stage, but went on to suggest that few of us reached it! You can read more about this in Lisa Oakley’s Cognitive Development (Routledge 2004). Freud came from a different psychological direction, what we now call psychodynamic psychology, but he too felt that our psychological development was closely tied to childhood years, in fact to very early childhood. His fascinating theories are excellently described in Matt Jarvis’ Theoretical Approaches in Psychology (Routledge 2000). Even the Behaviourists such as B.F.Skinner had one of their rare moments of agreements with other psychologists over this matter. Psychological development was not a concept they supported, as they considered any behavioural change to be the result of learning, i.e. responding to stimuli; and conditioning, classical or operant, as the mechanism for that change.

Adolescence as the link from childhood to adulthood

This stage in development is sometimes regarded as a western concept, an example of ethnocentrism and cultural bias. It is true that many other cultures do not have an intermediate stage between childhood and adulthood, meaning that adult life either begins on the day childhood ends or that there is such a gradual transition from childhood to adulthood so that adolescence is an irrelevant concept. But it is also true that in Eurocentric or western culture there is this intermediate stage starting from around the time of puberty, and this stage has been named and studied as adolescence. The psychology of this stage is covered in Social and Personality Development by Tina Abbott (Routledge 2001).

Concept of adulthood

This concept does not seem a difficult one until we try and define what we mean! It can be the time or age when a person has to take on legal responsibility for themselves – currently in the United Kingdom that would be on their eighteenth birthday. It can be when a person is judged mature enough to marry (16 years old in the UK), ride a small motorbike (16 in the UK, 14 in France) or buy alcohol in a public place (18 years old in the UK and 21 years old in the USA). Or it can be considered as reaching a state of maturity (Whitbourne and Weinstock 1979) – another term which is difficult to define! Whitbourne and Weinstock saw this as being happy to act responsibly, accept one’s own social role, think logically, be emotionally aware, and cope reasonably well with life’s smaller frustrations. Ten years later, Turner and Helms (1989) developed this particular theme further, adding that the mature/adult state promotes physical and psychological well-being by the person having sorted out their values, achieved a realistic selfconcept, being stable emotionally and in relationships, and so on. Both these sets of ideas look very idealistic! I wonder how many of the overeighteens in UK culture would agree that these describe their own behaviour. I suspect these criteria would disbar many people, perhaps even the majority, from being classed as adults!

Further difficulties are to do with the completely normal individual differences between people. Puberty itself is a moveable feast, and it is normal for this to start any time between the ages of 10 and 15 – or maybe in an even wider age range. If the biological clocks controlling this side of development vary so much, then it is not unlikely that psychological development also varies considerably and normally in its timing.

Another focus of individual differences is on the two sexes. It is true that most of the classic research, done in the twentieth century, focused on male psychological development. This is of course no surprise to anyone with knowledge of psychology. But we now acknowledge that we cannot just assume that because something has been researched in males we can apply the findings to females. There are similarities between the two sexes but there are also very important gender differences, and a great plus of current lifespan development research is that many researchers are clearly aware of this.

When psychologists research lifespan development they are today making several assumptions, as Sugarman (1986) has pointed out. We are individuals, with individual thoughts and individual choices – what he calls active agents in our own development – but we are also members of social groups such as our families, friends, school/college/ work colleagues, neighbourhood. We have an impact on them and they on us, it’s a reciprocal influence, and it’s a dynamic one as well since relationships of any sort are rarely static. We are also, as human beings, highly complex creatures with highly complex brains and behaviours. No simple line of research and no simple set of explanations are ever going to be able to explain our development through life, even in distant years when lifespan development is no longer a new discipline.

Methods of research

This area of psychological development in adulthood has real research difficulties. Adulthood lasts such a long time, six decades and increasing, so that problems with good research build up fast. Longitudinal studies are by their very nature time-consuming and therefore very expensive. Also, people don’t always stay put, and the original sample in such a study may be seriously depleted as some participants move away, lose interest in cooperating with the researchers, or die young. Another set of problems is to do with context as outlined above. A person’s adult development will be closely linked with their cultural, social, political and financial context so that many different groups need to be studied if we are seeking a general picture of human adult development. A third group of difficulties comes with the type of research methods being used. Researchers have their own ideas, otherwise they could not be doing the research. But if they are interviewing and observing people, the problems of validity, reliability and bias are bound to be there too. Ann Searle’s book Introducing Research and Data in Psychology (Routledge 1999) has good sections on such research issues. And it is very hard indeed, some would say impossible (Popper 1969), for any human to be truly objective, especially when following their own ideas as in research, so we all need to be cautious in interpreting research findings.

So how old is ‘old’, and how adult are you? Probably we all know of younger people who seem set in their ways, old before their time; conversely we also probably know older adults who are busy in their minds if not physically and who have a lively interest in things. Kastenbaum (1979) suggested that we have several ‘ages’ (see Table 1.1 below) with which we coexist, and this certainly has face validity as so many people report acting or feeling older or younger than their years, depending on what they are doing and so on. One 2001 issue of the UK magazine for retired people, Saga, put a photo of the ageing rock musician Mick Jagger on its cover, which resulted in much amusement – and also a statement from Mr Jagger’s team that they were ‘horrified’ at the photograph’s use. This supports the view that adulthood and perhaps older adulthood is a concept interpreted differently by different groups of people.

Table 1.1 Kastenbaum’s types of age

Progress exercise

Try and think of people who you have read about, seen on TV or know, and map their ‘ages’ according to the table on the previous page. Try and think of one whose ‘age’ will vary. And do your own ‘ages’ agree, or do you have some variation too?

How useful do you think Kastenbaum’s idea is?

Summary

• Lifespan psychology covers the psychological development throughout life;
• This idea of continual development is not held by some psychologists or approaches such as Piaget, Freud and the Behaviourists;
• Adolescence may be a culture-dependent stage in psychological development, specific to western-based cultures;
• Adulthood is difficult to define as many ideas, such as Whitbourne and Weinstock’s or Turner and Helms’, are idealistic rather than realistic and do not allow for individual differences in development;
• Researching psychological development is full of difficulties such as researcher bias and all the problems of researching by asking questions, e.g. validity and reliability;
• Kastenbaum suggested a set of age categories based not just on the number of years lived but on Biological, Subjective, Functional and Social Age as well. This allows for the individual and group differences we see around us.

Further reading

http://epunix.biols.sussex.ac.uk/Home/Julian_Staddon/age.html has useful links to sites on ageing.

Bee, H. and Boyd, D. (2002) Lifespan Development, 3rd edn, Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, is the latest edition of a classic text.

2 Early and middle adulthood

Introduction

Several classic theories have viewed our psychological development as a series of stages. These stages may be seen as crises, challenges, conflicts, seasons, transitions or transformations. Although this sounds somewhat uninviting, daunting even, people manage to get through adulthood and most of us even enjoy ourselves much of the time!

This chapter will look at the three most well-known theories of early and middle adulthood, and at relevant research studies plus critical discussion and commentary.

Erikson’s conflicts theory

This theory is often known as the ‘eight ages of man’. Erikson was originally a follower of Freud, i.e. he came from a psychodynamic background, but he did not agree with Freud’s theory that the psychological development of the personality is complete when we become adult. Freud suggested that such development takes place mainly in childhood, and in early childhood at that, and suggested that this development was largely driven psychosexually. He proposed four main stages of psychosexual development – oral, anal, phallic and genital – combined with a tripartite development of the personality: the id, ego and super-ego. You can read much more about these interesting ideas in Tina Abbott’s book in this series, Social and Personality Development. This theory of Freud’s assumes that psychological development rarely if ever continues into adulthood. Erikson disagreed, and proposed that development is life-long and is not so much powered by sexual forces as by social ones, which is why this theory is sometimes called Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. He produced a plan of eight psychosocial stages (see Table 2.1) which he believed we work through during our lifetime. Moving on from one stage to the next was, he suggested, dependent on the individual resolving a personal, developmental crisis. Each crisis is based on a personal conflict such as a young adult’s dilemma over resolving his/her desire for a close relationship with the fear of losing his/her own identity, which needs to be worked through and resolved before the individual person can proceed further, psychologically speaking.

Erikson’s complete stages theory is outlined here so you can see how the adult stages follow on from earlier ones. This is to help your understanding of his approach, but do be aware that you only need to know the adulthood stages for this topic.

Adolescence and adult identity

Erikson suggested that the adolescent years would, if completed successfully from the psychological point of view, end with having developed the ability to see oneself as having a strong personal identity, in other words feeling confident about who and what one is. The person would have sorted out the adolescent confusions, and would be able to see themselves as having a consistent and integrated identity. This illustrates the crisis of adolescence, the resolution of which is the step into the identity of early adulthood.

Table 2.1 Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development

Early adulthood: intimacy versus isolation

The first crisis of early adulthood which needs solving is the conflict between intimacy and isolation. What this is all about is friendship and other close relationships – deep and lasting friendships where we trust others and reveal to them our true thoughts and feelings. Some of these friendships may develop from those of our teenage or childhood years, some may be new. One or more of these friendships may develop still more and become romantic relationships, and/or erotic ones too. Erikson believed that as real intimacy involves sacrificing something of our own self we must have a strong or firm identity in order to be able to do this.

Of course, this stage can only happen if the previous conflicts of adolescence have been resolved and the person’s sense of identity established. People need to have learned to give as well as take; to hold on to some things and to let go of others; to take initiative, to go for something or to play at it; to compete and to cooperate.

What is well known from painful, personal experience is that even surface friendships or relationships may bring us conflicts and negative emotions. We must all have had the unhappy experience of telling someone we thought of as a friend something personal, maybe something over which we felt vulnerable. And they go and spill the beans around – and we are hurt. This can happen at any stage of life, but in early adulthood Erikson suggests we explore our own ability to commit ourselves to others, to estimate and risk this disappointment and hurt, while coming to terms with having to make compromises of various sorts.

In early adulthood people become more realistic about themselves, their own abilities, their charms! Most realise that the chances of becoming a rock or film star are receding fast (if indeed those chances ever existed), and that taking over the world or becoming a millionaire are just pipe-dreams. People also cease to think that they may meet and become romantically involved with their icons – they acknowledge the harsh light of the adult day. They also become much more realistic, and adapt to knowing that they cannot have things always their way. As you know, if we want to be friends with others, if we want to be loved, we have to consider the wants, needs and feelings of others, and compromise. The estate agents’ mantra may be ‘location, location, location’ but for the young adult the chant should really be ‘compromise, compromise, compromise’ if relationships of most kinds are to progress and be rewarding. What this tendency also tells us is that the desire for an intimate relationship must be a basic one, a need as well as a want, for us to risk so much in its pursuit.

Intimacy versus isolation summarised

• Erikson proposed that early adulthood, the twenties and thirties, involves a crisis between intimacy and isolation, and intimacy is only possible after the identity crisis has been resolved in adolescence;
• This crisis must be resolved in order for the person to move on;
• This intimacy crisis is resolved by understanding ourselves in a realistic way, so we can build close friendships and experience intimate relationships;
• This enables the person to develop and mature psychologically;
• If this crisis is not resolved then the person will experience only superficial not meaningful relationships and this means that s/he becomes socially isolated;
• T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to lifespan psychology
• 2 Early and middle adulthood
• 3 Family and relationships in adulthood
• 4 Late Adulthood
• 5 Alternative theories
• 6 Student essays with examiner’s comments
• Glossary
• References