Themes and issues in Adult Development and Aging

Biopsychosocial perspective

• biological
  • genetic factors
  • physiological state and functioning
• psychological/personality
  • personal history
  • situational factors
  • current state (cognitive, emotional, behavioral)
• sociological/cultural
  • culture
  • SES socioeconomic status (level of education, income, occupation, [wealth])
  • historical influences & events

Whitbourne’s 4 principles:

• changes are continuous over the life span
• only the survivors grow old
• individuality matters
• aging is different from disease

“EVERY MAN is in certain respects;
a. like all other men,
b. like some other men,
c. like no other man.

“He is like all other men because some of the determinants of his personality are universal to the species. That is to say, there are common features in the biological endowments of all men, in the physical environment they inhabit, and in the societies and cultures in which they develop. 

In certain features of personality, most men are “like some other men.” The similarity may be to other members of the same socio-cultural unit. The statistical prediction can safely be made that a hundred Americans, for example, will display certain defined characteristics more frequently than will a hundred Englishmen comparably distributed as to age, sex, social class, and vocation.

Finally, there is the inescapable fact that a man is in many respects like no other man. Each individual’s modes of perceiving, feeling, needing, and behaving have characteristic patterns which are not precisely duplicated by those of any other individual. This is traceable, in part, to the unique combination of biological materials which the person has received from his parents. More exactly, the ultimate uniqueness of each personality is the product of countless and successive interactions between the maturing constitution and different environing situations from birth onward.”

Henry A. Murray and Clyde Kluckhohn, from Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (1953).

The meaning of age

• activity: “Decades of Life”
• “adulthood”, like “childhood” and similar ideas, is a social construction — life simply “is”; human beings have found it useful to apply our symbolic capabilities (principally language) to divide this continuous flow into chunks (ideas, concepts) that can then be played with for various purposes (some helpful, some not so helpful)
  • Do you think of yourself as an “adult”?; what does this mean to you?; when/how did you become an adult?
• considerations of what we mean by “adult” can be based on a number of considerations:
  • based on age (old man/woman)
  • based on events (coming of age ceremonies)
  • based on role(s) (employed, wage earner, parent)
  • based on biology (of childbearing age; postmenopausal, senile; myelination of the frontal lobes)

Influences of age

• Normative age-graded
  • cultural norms and expectations; graduate high school; majority; first job
  • “developmental milestones”, puberty, menopause
• Normative history-graded
  • affect all of us who lived through them
  • discrete: “Where were you when you learned of 9-11”, “the Challenger disaster”, “the Kennedy assignation”?
    • e.g., the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9-11-01 may have fundamentally changed attitudes towards safety and security among U.S. citizens
  • epoch: “Great Depression”, “Baby Boomers”, “Viet Nam [conflict]”, “mortgage crisis”, “gen X” [people born roughly between 1965 and 1975], “millennials” [sometimes called “generation Y” or Echo Boomers, born between 1979 and 1994]
• Nonnormative
  • idiosyncratic
    • growing up in Clatskanie, Oregon
  • random events
    • a shooting during my dissertation research

Life-span perspective: places adult life in the broader context of human development

• human development can be viewed as falling into two phases:
  • early phase (childhood, adolescence)
  • rapid age-related increases in size & ability
  • later phase (young adulthood, middle age, old age)
  • slowing changes in size, continuing changes in physical characteristics & abilities
  • aging is a lifelong process and development does not cease until death
• Paul Baltes (1987, Baltes et al., 2006) identified four features of a life-span perspective:
  • 1. multidirectionality: development involves both growth & decline (vocabulary tends to increase, reaction time decrease)
  • 2. plasticity: capacity is not absolutely predetermined or set (many skills can increase with practice, even in later life–but there are limits)
  • 3. historical context: each of us develops within a particular set of circumstances (time, place, culture) that affect our developmental path
  • 4. multiple causation: development is influenced by a wide variety of factors (don’t expect to many simple answers)
• Baltes and his colleagues (2006) view lifespan development as an interaction between growth, maintenance, and loss regulation; four factors are seen as critical:
  • 1. age-related reductions in the amount and quality of biologically based resources
  • 2. age-related increase in the amount and quality of culture needed to generate continuously higher growth, with the resulting effect being usually a net slowing in growth with age
  • 3. age-related decline in the efficiency with which people make use of cultural resources
  • 4. a lack (in many societies) of cultural, “old-age friendly” support structures

Factors influencing human growth and development

Where you were born — culture

“shared basic value orientations, norms, beliefs, and customary habits and ways of living” (Cavanaugh & Blanchard-Fields, 2011, p. 15), “provides the basic worldview of a society in that it gives it the basic explanations about the meaning and goals of everyday life”

(ibid, p. 15)

• !Kung tribe, southwest Africa
• Piraha, Amazon river, South America
• Anthropology has been the discipline most focused on understanding the how best to think about culture and it’s pervasive influence on our lives

When you were born — history graded normative influences

• cohort: people born around the same time
  • may be alike in ways that set them apart from people born at other times

Who your parents are

• race
  • as a biological concept: genetically based subgroups within a species
    • difficulties with concept
    • issues of measurement
  • as an aspect of identity:
    • self-identity
    • culturally assigned identity
    • in group/out group, who counts as “human”
• ethnicity
  • defining stories, attitudes, assumptions
  • language
• socioeconomic status (caste, class, SES)
  • the concept/variable
    • education
    • occupation
    • income
    • (wealth)
  • measurement issues
    • there is no single measure/conceptualization of SES
    • Hollingshead Scale (early measure, frequently used in sociological research)
      Kuppuswami Scale (Indian measure frequently used in medical research on urban populations)
  • relationships
    • health, wealth, and happiness
    • SES parents/SES children
• religion (holidays, symbols, references, feeling in/feeling out)
• approach to child rearing

What happens to you — idiosyncratic (nonnormative) influences

• accidents and the consequences of accidents
• choices and the consequences of choices

Recurrent questions/issues in developmental science

• Nature/Nurture
  • degree to which genetic or hereditary influences (nature) or experiential or environmental influences (nurture) determine the kind of person we are
    • unfolding/emergence vs learning
    • How the theory explains individual differences –theorists who emphasize stability of characteristics may will often focus on hereditary influences, whereas theorists who are interested in change may focus on plasticity
  • typical position: “both” but then how do we understand the interaction between these influences
    • How does the “answer” change over different domains or aspects of behavior:
      • language ability, temperament, reactivity to stress vs. specific knowledge, well being, life satisfaction
    • Does the balance between nature and nurture change over the lifespan?
• Stability-Change
  • degree to which people remain the same or change over time
  • how does change “change” over the life span — Do adults change?
  • what characteristics are being considered, how are these measured, what counts as “change”?
  • Can change be influenced? (increased, slowed, halted)
• Continuity-Discontinuity
  • Are developmental transitions a smooth, gradual progression (continuity) or a series of abrupt, qualitative shifts (discontinuity)
  • additive models vs. stage theories
• Universal vs. Context-Specific Development
  • One path of development or several?
  • Can one model/theory of adult development serve to adequately represent all the variety in the world’s populations?