1. Kathleen Stassen Berger
Part VII Chapter Twenty-Two
Adulthood: Psychosocial Development
Ages and Stages
Intimacy
Generativity
Prepared by Madeleine Lacefield Tattoon, M.A. 1
2. Adulthood: Psychosocial Development
• emotional reactions to events in
adulthood are fluid
• marriage, parenthood, divorce, and the
empty nest, each sometimes joyous
and sometimes not, are ages and
stages of adult development
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4. Ages and Stages
• The Social Clock
– refers to the idea that the stages of life,
and the behaviors “appropriate” to them,
are set by social standards rather than
by biological maturation—for instance,
”middle age” begins when the culture
believes it does, rather than at a
particular age in all cultures
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5. Ages and Stages
• Culture, Cohort, and SES
– culture
• the patterns of behavior that are passed from one
generation to the next, groups have their own culture—
values, customs, clothes, dwellings, cuisine,
assumptions--people are influenced by more than one
culture
– cohort
• people born within a few years of one another--these
people are affected by the same: values, events,
technologies, culture
– socioeconomic status (SES)
• “social class”--more than money, occupation, education,
place of residence--includes advantages and
disadvantages
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6. Ages and Stages
• The “Midlife Crisis”
– a period of unusual anxiety, radical
reexamination, and sudden
transformation that is widely associated
with middle age but which actually has
more to do with developmental history
than with chronological age
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7. Ages and Stages
• Personality Throughout Adulthood
– personality is a major source of
continuity providing coherence and
identity, allowing people to know
themselves and be known
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8. Ages and Stages
• The Big Five
– the five basic clusters of personality traits that
remain quite stable throughout adulthood—
openness, conscientiousness, extroversion,
agreeableness and neuroticism
– ecological niche
• the particular lifestyle and social context adults
settle into that are compatible with their individual
personality needs and interests
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9. Ages and Stages
• Culture and Personality
– personality variations are more evident
between one person and another in the
same nation than between one nation
and another
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10. Ages and Stages
• Gender Convergence
– a tendency for men and women to
become more similar as they move
through middle age
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11. Intimacy
• intimacy needs are lifelong
• adults meet their social needs for social
connection with relatives, friends,
coworkers, and romantic partners
– social convoy
– collectively, the family members, friends,
acquaintances, and even strangers who move
through life with an individual
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12. Intimacy
• Friends
– typically the most supportive members
of the social convoy, because they are
chosen
– research study found that friendships
tend to improve with age
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13. Intimacy
• Protection Against Stress
– allostatic load
• the total, combined burden, of stress and
disease that an individual must cope with
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14. Intimacy
• Gender Differences
– linked lives
• the notion that family members tend to
share all aspects of each other’s lives,
from triumph to tragedy
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15. Intimacy
• Family Bonds
– household
• a group of people who live together in
one dwelling and share its common
spaces, such as kitchen and living room
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16. Intimacy
• A Developmental View
– familism
• the idea that family members should
support one another because family
unity is more important than individual
freedom and success or failure
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17. Intimacy
• Adult Siblings
– fictive kin
• a term used to describe someone who
becomes accepted as part of a family to
whom he or she has no blood
relationship
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18. Intimacy
• Marriage
– a public commitment to one long-term
sexual partner
– adults seek committed sexual
partnerships to help meet their needs for
intimacy, to raise children, share
resources, and provide care
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19. Intimacy
• Marriage and Happiness
– from a developmental perspective,
marriage is useful
– adults thrive if another person is
committed to caring for them; married
people are a littler happier, healthier and
richer than unmarried people
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20. Intimacy
• Long-Term Marriage
– long-term quality of a marriage
relationship is affected by family
relationships in childhood
– empty nest
• a time in the lives of parents when their
grown children leave the family home to
pursue their own lives
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21. Intimacy
• Homosexual Partners
– everything that applies to heterosexual
partners applies to homosexual partners
who make a commitment to each other
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22. Intimacy
• Divorce
– marriages never ends in a vacuum—they are
influenced by the social and political context
• Divorce Rates
– the power of the social context is evident in
variations in divorce rates
• Over the Years, Divorce and Remarriage
– divorce is most likely to occur within the first
five years
– for long-term marriages, divorce is less likely
but more devastating when it happens
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23. Generativity
• after intimacy comes generativity,
– generativity versus stagnation
• when adults seek to be productive in a
caring way, usually through work or
parenthood (Erikson)
– generativity comes with maturity–age is
not a necessary marker
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24. Generativity
• Caregiving
– Erikson wrote, a mature adult “needs to be
needed”
– some caregiving is physical
– but much is psychological
– kinkeeper
– the person who takes primary responsibility for
celebrating family achievements, gathering the family
together, and keeping in touch with family members
who do not live nearby
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25. Generativity
• Caring for Children
– bearing and raising children is labor
intensive
– the insistence on dramatizing the
dependence of children on adults often
blinds us to the dependence of the older
generation on the young one
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26. Generativity
• Many paths to parenthood
– a parental alliance assumes two cooperating
parents
– children can develop well in any family
– 1/3 of North American adults become
stepparents, adoptive parents, or foster
parents at some point in their lives
– the social construction about “real” parents is
misleading
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27. Generativity
– Caregiving for Aging Parents
• sandwich generation
– a term for the generation of middle-aged
people who are supposedly “squeezed” by
the needs of the younger and older
generations—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
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28. Generativity
• Employment
– Many benefits
• extrinsic rewards of work
– the tangible rewards, usually in the form of
compensation, that one receives for a job (e.g., salary,
benefits, pension)
• intrinsic rewards of work
– the intangible benefits one receives from a job (e.g.
job satisfaction, self-esteem, pride) that come from
within oneself
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29. Generativity
• Human Needs
– it is crucial to learn how new work
conditions support development—in the
functions of family caregiving, personal
creativity, satisfaction, and esteem and
mentoring of other workers
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30. Generativity
• Diversity
– benefit of modern economy is increased
diversity
• more employed women and minority
groups
• higher employment rates have helped
with those once shut out
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