DEVELOPMENTAL TASKS IN ADULTHOOD

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DEVELOPMENTAL TASKS IN ADULTHOOD

• Create the life you want to live.
• Become the person you want to be.
• Vocational Decisions v
• Family Life Cycle
• Personality

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FAMILY LIFE CYCLE

• 1. Establishing marriage.
• 2. New parenthood.
• 3. Child-rearing family.
• 4. Empty nest.
• 5. Grandparenthood.

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FAMILY LIFE CYCLE

• Changing family forms.
• More women working full time.
• More divorce single parenting.
• More reconstituted families.
• Ethnic and cultural variations.
• Values, timing, and forms.
• Extended family involvement.

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CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS IN ADULTHOOD

• Marital relationships.
• Normative developments.
• Stable happiness or unhappiness.
• Ends with widowhood.
• Siblings longest relationships.
• Friendships important across the life-span

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CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS IN ADULTHOOD

• Parent-child relationships
• More mutual
• Modified extended family
• Caring for aging parents
• Middle-generation Squeeze caring for aging
  parents and adolescent children.
• Caregiver burden women.

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WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

• Temperament
• Psychometric theory

Psy 311 Adulthood
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ADULT PERSONALITYPsychometric Theory The Big
Five

• 1. Neuroticism emotional
  stability vs. instability
• 2. Extroversion sociability vs. introversion
• 3. Openness to experience curiosity interest
  in variety vs. preference for sameness

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ADULT PERSONALITY Psychometric Theory The Big
Five

• 4. Agreeableness compliance
  cooperativeness vs. suspiciousness
• 5. Conscientiousness discipline
  organization vs. lack of seriousness

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How Does Personality Change Across Adulthood?
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PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENTFrom Adolescence to
Middle Age

• LESS
• Neurotic
• Extraverted
• Open to new experiences
• MORE
• Agreeable
• Conscientious

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PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENTFrom Middle to Old Age

• Relatively stable
• Maybe less active
• Maybe more introverted and introspective

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PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENTIn Old Age

• STEREOTYPES OF AGING
• MORE
• anxious
• rigid, stubborn
• bossy, complaining

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Why So Little Development From Middle to Old Age?

• 1. Methodological reasons
• measures of traits
• self-report
• repeated assessment

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• 2. Really stable
• Genetic influences
• Long lasting effects of childhood experiences
• Identity achieved
• 3. Active stability
• Gene-environment correlations
• people seek out experiences that fit with their
  personality
• experiences maintain personality

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Why So Little Development From Middle to Old Age?

• 4. Changes are not AGE graded
• Biological changes
• Stressful life events
• Poor fit with environment
• POTENTIAL for change

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AGING of PERSONALITY

• 1. Stability of personality self-concept with a
  stable life
• 2. Changes as a result of changing life events
  crises spouse loss, job change, relocation,
  health, money changes
• 3. Only normative change more introverted or
  introspective

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THE AGING OF INTELLIGENCE
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AGE GRADE

• Socially defined age group in a society
• Assigned different
• social status
• roles
• privileges
• responsibilities

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AGE NORM

• Societys expectations about what people should
  and should not be doing at different points in
  the life span
• Unwritten rules about
• Behavior, activities
• Appearance
• Attitudes, vocabulary

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LIFE-SPAN VIEW ofAdulthood and Aging

• CONTEXTUAL
• What you come with matters
• Biology
• Psychology
• Your generation matters
• Opportunities
• Stereotypes
• What you do matters

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THE AGING OF INTELLIGENCE
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1. Cross-Sectional StudiesSteady declines
starting at age 20

• FALSE

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2. Longitudinal StudiesSteady Increases Until
Age 70

• FALSE

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1. Cross-Sectional StudiesSteady declines
starting at age 20

• A. Cohort effects
• Health, Education
• Recent Practice
• B. Testing effects
• Pacing
• Motivation (over-arousal)
• Caution
• Unfamiliar tasks demands

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2. Longitudinal StudiesSteady Increases Until
Age 70

• A. Mortality
• lower IQ scores
• drop out sooner

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3. Sequential Studies

• A. Big effect of generation
• B. Developmental changes
• Modest gains in 30s, 40s, 50s
• Scores level off in 60s 70s
• Declines in 70s 80s

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Different Facets of Intelligence

• Crystallized ability to use knowledge acquired
  in school through experience

• Fluid ability to use ones mind actively to
  solve novel problems

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3. Sequential Studies (cont.)

• C. Different abilities change at different rates
• Crystallized intelligence stable or improves
• Fluid intelligence declines more rapidly
• Speed declines

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3. Sequential Studies (cont.)

• D. Different people show different patterns of
  change
• Start off higher do better
• Use practice do better
• Terminal drop decrease in intellectual abilities
  right before death

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AGING MEMORYDECLINES WITH AGE ?
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Information Processing

• 1. EXPERTISE
• Knowledge base rich, well-organized
• Use to learn, remember, solve problems
• 2. EVERYDAY PROBLEM-SOLVING
• Middle-aged better than young adults
• Elderly smaller deficits

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Declines in Memory

• 1. Short-term vs. long-term
• Memory not as sticky
• More work to get information in
• Problems with encoding
• 2. Recognition vs. recall
• Nonsense words (names)
• Problems with retrieval

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Declines in Memory (cont.)

• 3. Timed tasks (speed)
• Older people get slower
• 4. Unfamiliar (meaningless) tasks
• 5. Unexercised skills
• 6. Explicit memory tasks

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What Causes Declines in Memory?

• NOT
• Knowledge base
• Meta-memory
• MAYBE
• Memory strategies
• Basic processing capacities
• Sensory changes

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What Causes Declines in Memory?

• CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
• Cohort differences in education
• Health and life-style differences
• Motivational factors
• Kinds of tasks

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Memory Overview

• 1. Research is cross-sectional
• 2. Declines in late 60s and 70s
• (most severe among the old-old)
• 3. Not all people
• 4. Not all memory tasks

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MAINTAINING MEMORY

• 1. OVERCOME STEREOTYPES
• Selective attention
• Overgeneralization of real deficits
• 2. USE IT OR LOSE IT
• Mental activity
• Physical activity

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Pathological Declines in Cognition

• 1. Symptoms
• Impaired memory
• Judgment, orientation, mood swings
• Daily functioning
• 2. Acute vs. chronic brain dysfunction
• Chronic e.g., Alzheimers

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Pathological Declines in Cognition (cont.)

• 3. Treatment
• Stress, medical conditions
• Food, medications
• Physical and mental activity
• Social contact
• 4. Terminal drop

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LAST NAME, first name

• 1. When are the low points for marital
  satisfaction?
• 2. Name 3 factors that predict how stressful
  adjusting to the birth of a new baby will be.
• 3. How does personality change from middle to
  old age?
• 4. Name two things that cause personality to
  change.

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LAST NAME, first name

• 1. Name 3 things that sequential studies tell us
  about how intelligence changes across adulthood.
• 2. Name 3 things related to intelligence that
  decline with age.
• 3. Name 2 things we can do to maximize our
  cognitive functioning as we age.

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END