Adulthood: Psychosocial Development

Theories of Adult Personality

Erikson's Stages

  • Erikson envisioned eight stages of development occurring sequentially from birth through old age.
  • Three stages cover the years after adolescence.
  • Erikson later suggested that adults of many ages can be in the fifth stage, identity versus role confusion, or in any of the three adult stages.
Erikson’s Stages of Adulthood
  • Identity versus role confusion
  • Intimacy versus isolation
  • Generativity versus stagnation
  • Integrity versus despair

Maslow's Stages

  • Abraham Maslow (1954) described five stages, which occur in sequence.
  • Movement occurs when people have satisfied their needs at one level and are ready for the next step.
  • In his later years, Maslow reassessed his final level, self-actualization.
  • He suggested another level after that, called self-transcendence, not attained until late in life.

Personality Traits

  • Many contemporary psychologists contend that each person has hundreds of traits.
  • Components of the Big Five (OCEAN) theory:
    • Openness
    • Conscientiousness
    • Extroversion
    • Agreeableness
    • Neuroticism
  • The hypothesis that individual personality traits originate in the brain was tested by scientists who sought to find correlations between brain activity and personality traits.

Age Changes

  • The strength of every trait is affected by maturation.
  • The general age trend is positive.
  • Personality change is more likely early or late in life.

Cultural Influences

  • Cultural context interacts with personality.
  • Evidenced in childbearing trends
  • Link between happiness and a good match of personality traits and social context

Intimacy: Connecting with Others

Romantic Partners: Marriage

  • Worldwide postponement of marriage
  • Societies benefit when most adults marry and stay married.
  • Satisfying marriage improves health, wealth, and happiness.
  • Marital happiness levels are changing by cohort, income, education, and culture.
  • Partnerships over the years are influenced by families and cultures, including children.
  • Cohabitation rates are increasing for all ages.
  • LAT rates are also increasing.
  • Long-term committed partnership is linked to lifelong health and happiness.
  • The empty nest concept may be outdated.

Gay and Lesbian Partners

  • Communication is essential for a happy partnership.
  • Faithfulness and supportiveness lead to emotional well-being, which increases over time.
  • Problems are similar to those found in heterosexual couples.
  • Family acceptance and influence may cause conflict.

Separation, Divorce, and Repartnering

  • All relationships are interconnected and socially constructed.
  • Divorce that ends an abusive, destructive relationship (one-third of U.S. divorces) usually benefits at least one spouse and the children.
  • Divorce reduces income, severs friendships, and weakens family ties.
  • Confiding in children may help the adult but not the children.
  • In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, both marriages and divorce were down.

Friends and Acquaintances

Social Convoy
  • Collectively, the family members, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who move through the years of life with a person
Friends
  • Crucial members of the social convoy
  • Often able to provide practical help and useful advice when serious problems arise
  • Can be created through shared problems

Family Bonds

  • Family links and influence endure over time.
  • Childhood history impacts people across their lifetime.
  • Providing companionship, support, and affection meets intimacy needs for parents and adult children.
  • Rates of boomerang children are increasing.
  • Family closeness can sometimes be destructive.
  • Some adults wisely keep their distance from their blood relatives.
Fictive Kin
  • Someone who is accepted as part of a family to which there is no blood relation
  • Adults need kin, fictive or otherwise.

Generativity: The Work of Adulthood

  • According to Erikson, after the stage of intimacy versus isolation comes generativity versus stagnation, when adults seek to be productive in a caring way.
  • Adults satisfy their need to be generative in many ways, including creativity, caregiving, and employment.

Impact of Parenting on Parents

  • Generativity’s chief manifestation is establishing and guiding the next generation.
  • Every parent is tested and transformed by the dynamic experience of raising children.
  • Just when an adult thinks he or she has mastered the art of parenting, the child advances to the next stage and the adult is required to make major adjustments.

Caring for Biological Children

  • Some caregiving involves meeting another person’s physical needs—feeding, cleaning, and so on—but much of it has to do with fulfilling another person’s psychological needs.
  • Parenting is stressful, especially when a parent’s most urgent need is intimacy.
  • Parenting reorders adult perspective and is an ongoing challenge.
  • Although fathers’ involvement in care has increased, the gender division of this labor remains.
  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, in every nation, female partners were more likely to curtail their employment in order to take care of children.

Caring for Nonbiological Children

Adoption
  • Adoptive parents have several advantages: They are legally connected to their children for life, the biological parents are usually absent, and they desperately wanted the child.
  • Strong bonds can develop, especially when the children are adopted as infants.
  • During adolescence, these bonds may stretch and loosen as some adoptive children become intensely rebellious.
  • Reactive attachment disorder (DSM-5)
  • Racial socialization
Stepparents
  • The average age of new stepchildren is 9 years.
  • Disruption may occur with changes in living arrangements.
  • Effects are cumulative: Young stepchildren often get hurt, sick, lost, or disruptive; and teenage stepchildren may get pregnant, drunk, or arrested.
Foster Parents
  • It is estimated that more than 400,000 children are officially in U.S. foster care; most for less than one year.
  • The average age is 7 years, and many are attached to their biological family.
  • The most difficult form of parenting, which includes expenditure of psychosocial and financial resources
  • Most foster children have experienced maltreatment, witnessed violence, and are suspicious of any adult.
Grandparents
  • Grandparenting presents a new opportunity for generativity.
  • Begins on average at age 50
  • Related to family needs
    • Provide total care (5 percent)
    • Can also provide two-generation care in skipped-generation families
    • May sometimes provide kinship care (about one-third of foster children)

Caregiving

  • Caregiving is a lifelong process.
  • Caregiving includes responding to the emotions of people who need a confidant, a cheerleader, a counselor, or a close friend.
Kinkeeper
  • Caregiver who takes responsibility for maintaining communication
  • Gathers family for holidays
  • Conveys important family news
  • Fosters generativity in other family members

Squeezed

Sandwich Generation
  • The generation of middle-aged people who are supposedly “squeezed” by the needs of the younger and older members of their families
  • In reality, some adults do feel pressured by these obligations, but most are not burdened by them, either because they enjoy fulfilling them or because they choose to take on only some of them or none of them.

Employment

  • Employment is the other major avenue for generativity.
  • Adults have many psychosocial needs that employment can fulfill.
  • Unemployment is associated with higher rates of child abuse, alcohol use disorder, depression, and many other social problems.

Generativity and Work

  • Work meets generativity needs by allowing people to do many things:
    • Develop and use their personal skills
    • Express their creative energy
    • Aid and advise coworkers, as a mentor or friend
    • Support the education and health of their families
    • Contribute to the community by providing goods or services
Extrinsic Rewards of Work
  • The tangible benefits, usually in the form of compensation (e.g., salary, health insurance, pension), that one receives for doing a job
Intrinsic Rewards of Work
  • The intangible gratifications (e.g., job satisfaction, self-esteem, pride) that come from within oneself as a result of doing a job

Wages and Benefits

  • Absolute income matters less for job satisfaction than comparison to comparable professions or jobs.
  • Unemployment is destructive of physical and mental health (reduced self-esteem).
  • NEET emerging adults may create a lifelong impact on a generation.
  • Many Americans are concerned about the income gap between rich and poor.
  • Only half of all U.S. workers have traditional, steady jobs.
  • The other half usually do not have medical or pension benefits, which seems okay at age 25 but disastrous by age 60.
  • Millions of adults want jobs but are unable to find them.

Changing Locations

  • Changes in location are more common today and may create a variety of consequences.
    • Losing work friendships and social support
    • Losing intimacy across all family members
  • For senior workers:
    • Loss of accrued benefits
    • Decreased opportunity to find a job when new skills are required
    • Age discrimination
    • Reduction of intimacy and generativity
  • For immigrants:
    • Loss of workforce information support from like peers
    • Movement to uncomfortable climate, food, and language

Changing Schedules

  • Increasing numbers of employers need employees with nonstandard or varying schedules.
  • One-third of all workers have nonstandard schedules.
  • Retail services are increasingly available 24/7.
  • Part-time work and overtime work pose unique challenges.
  • Impact on workers and family:
    • Disruption of biological rhythms and family schedules
Flextime
  • An arrangement in which work schedules are flexible so that employees can balance personal and occupational responsibilities
  • Part-time work and self-employment
  • Nonstandard work schedules often correlate with personal, relational, and child-rearing difficulties.
  • Components of an ideal balance include adequate income, chosen schedules, and social support.

Finding the Balance

  • Adults choose their mates, their locations, their lifestyles, and their vocations to express their personality.
  • Extroverts surround themselves with many social activities.
  • Introverts choose a quieter, but no less rewarding, life.
  • Every adult benefits from friends and family, caregiving responsibilities, and satisfying work.