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SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN MIDDLE ADULTHOOD
14
ESSENTIALS OF LIFE-SPAN
DEVELOPMENT
JOHN W. SANTROCK
4e

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CHAPTER OUTLINE
• Personality theories and development
• Stability and change
• Close relationships

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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• 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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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• 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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FIGURE 14.1 - LEVINSON’S PERIODS OF
ADULT DEVELOPMENT

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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Transition into middle adulthood – 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
• Midlife crisis
• 40s as a decade of reassessing and recording truth about adolescent and
adult years
• A minority experience midlife crisis
14-6

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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• 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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FIGURE 14.2 - CONTEMPORARY LIFE-EVENTS
FRAMEWORK FOR INTERPRETING ADULT
DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE

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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Drawbacks to life events approach
• Places too much emphasis on change
• May not be major life events that are primary sources of stress
• Daily experiences

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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Stress and personal control in midlife
• Middle-aged adults experience more “overload” stressors
• Involve juggling too many activities at once
• Developmental changes in perceived personal control
• Greater sense of control over finances, work, and marriage
• Less sense of control over sex life and children
• Sense of control associated with delaying onset of disease in middle age

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PERSONALITY THEORIES AND
DEVELOPMENT
• Stress and gender
• Fight or flight
• Become aggressive, socially withdraw, or drink alcohol
• Tend or befriend
• Seek social alliances with others, especially female friends
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STABILITY AND CHANGE
• Longitudinal studies
• Costa and McCrae’s Baltimore Study - Focused on the Big Five factors
of personality:
• Openness to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism
• Concluded considerable stability across adult years for Big Five factors

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FIGURE 14.3 - THE BIG FIVE FACTORS OF
PERSONALITY

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STABILITY AND CHANGE
• Berkeley’s Longitudinal Studies
• Most stable characteristics were intellectual orientation, self-confidence,
and openness to experience
• Characteristics that changed the most:
• Extent to which individuals were nurturant or hostile
• Whether or not they had good self-control
14-14

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STABILITY AND CHANGE
• George Valliant’s Studies
• Longitudinal studies of 3 samples:
• 268 socially advantaged Harvard grads born about 1920
• 456 socially disadvantaged inner-city men born about 1930
• 90 middle-SES, intellectually gifted women born around 1910
• Categorized 75-80 years olds as “healthy-well,” “sad-sick,” or “dead”
• Predictions based on data collected when individuals were 50 years old
14-15

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FIGURE 14.4 - LINKS BETWEEN CHARACTERISTICS AT
AGE 50 AND HEALTH AND HAPPINESS AT AGE 75 TO
80

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STABILITY AND CHANGE
• Conclusions
• Evidence does not support that personality traits are completely fixed in
adulthood
• Changes are typically limited,
• Age is positively related to stability
• Stability peaks in 50s and 60s
• Cumulative personality model: With time and age, people:
• Become more adept at interacting with their environment in ways that
promote stability of personality

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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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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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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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CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• Grandparenting
• Many adults become grandparents for the first time in middle age
• Grandmothers have more frequent contact than grandfathers
• Some grandparents thrust back into “parenting role” due to:
• Divorce, adolescent pregnancy, parental drug use
• Full-time grandparenting linked to health problems, depression, and
stress
• Divorce and remarriage related to special concerns about grandparent
visitation privilieges

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CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• Intergenerational relationships
• Middle-aged adults express responsibility between generations
• Duty to care for parents in late life
• Share experiences, transmit values to younger generations
• “Sandwich generation” – responsibilities for caring for
adolescent/young adult children and aging parents
• Ambivalent relationships between aging parents and their children
• Love, reciprocal help, shared values on positive side
• Isolation, family conflicts and problems, abuse, neglect, caregiver stress on
negative side

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CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
• Gender differences in intergenerational relationships
• Women’s relationships are typically closer than other family bonds
• Married men more involved with wives’ kin than their own
• Mother’s intergenerational ties influential for grandparent-grandchild
relationships
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