The unfolding of people's adult lives continues across the life span. It is, however, more difficult to generalize about adulthood stages than about life's early years. If you know that James is a 1-year-old and Jamal is a 10-year-old, you could say a great deal about each child. Not so with adults who differ by a similar number of years. The boss may be 30 or 60; the marathon runner may be 20 or 50; the 19-year-old may be a parent who supports a child or a child who receives an allowance. Yet our life courses are in some ways similar. Physically, cognitively, and especially socially, we differ at age 50 from our 25-year-old selves. In the discussion that follows, we recognize these differences and use three terms: early adulthood (roughly twenties and thirties), middle adulthood (to age 65), and late adulthood (the years after 65). Within each of these stages, people will vary widely in physical, psychological, and social development.
Like the declining daylight after the summer solstice, our physical abilities-muscular strength, reaction time, sensory keenness, and cardiac output-all begin an almost imperceptible decline in our mid-twenties. Athletes are often the first to notice. World-class sprinters and swimmers peak by their early twenties. Women-who mature earlier than men-also peak earlier. But most of us-especially those of us whose daily lives do not require top physical performance-hardly perceive the early signs of decline.
Post-40 athletes know all too well that physical decline gradually accelerates. During early and middle adulthood, physical vigor has less to do with age than with a person's health and exercise habits. Many of today's physically fit 50-year-olds run 4 miles with ease, while sedentary 25-year-olds find themselves huffing and puffing up two flights of stairs.
Aging also brings a gradual decline in fertility, especially for women. For a 35-to 39-year-old woman, the chances of getting pregnant after a single act of intercourse are only half those of a woman 19 to 26 (Dunson et al., 2002). Men experience a gradual decline in sperm count, testosterone level, and speed of erection and ejaculation. Women experience menopause, as menstrual cycles end, usually within a few years of age 50. Expectations and attitudes influence the emotional impact of this event. Is it a sign of lost femininity and growing old? Or is it liberation from menstrual periods and fears of pregnancy? For men, too, expectations can influence perceptions. Some experience distress related to a perception of declining virility and physical capacities, but most age without such problems.
With age, sexual activity lessens. Nevertheless, most men and women remain capable of satisfying sexual activity, and most express satisfaction with their sex life. This was true of 70 percent of Canadians surveyed (ages 40 to 64) and 75 percent of Finns (ages 65 to 74) (Kontula & Haavio-Mannila, 2009; Wright, 2006). In another survey, 75 percent of respondents reported being sexually active into their eighties (Schick et al., 2010). And in an American Association of Retired Persons sexuality survey, it was not until age 75 or older that most women and nearly half of men reported little sexual desire (DeLamater & Sill, 2005). Given good health and a willing partner, the flames of desire, though simmered down, live on. As Alex Comfort (1992, p. 240) jested, “The things that stop you having sex with age are exactly the same as those that stop you riding a bicycle (bad health, thinking it looks silly, no bicycle).”
Although physical decline begins in early adulthood, we are not usually acutely aware of it until later life, when the stairs get steeper, the print gets smaller, and other people seem to mumble more. Muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina diminish in late adulthood. As a lifelong basketball player, I find myself increasingly not racing for that loose ball. But even diminished vigor is sufficient for normal activities. Moreover, exercise slows aging. Active older adults tend to be mentally quick older adults. Physical exercise not only enhances muscles, bones, and energy and helps to prevent obesity and heart disease, it also stimulates brain cell development and neural connections, thanks perhaps to increased oxygen and nutrient flow (Erickson et al., 2010; Pereira et al., 2007).
With age, visual sharpness diminishes, and distance perception and adaptation to light-level changes are less acute. The eye's pupil shrinks and its lens becomes less transparent, reducing the amount of light reaching the retina: A 65-year-old retina receives only about one-third as much light as its 20-year-old counterpart (Kline & Schieber, 1985). Thus, to see as well as a 20-year-old when reading or driving, a 65-year-old needs three times as much light – a reason for buying cars with untinted windshields. This also explains why older people sometimes ask people your age, “Don't you need better light for reading?”
The senses of smell and hearing also diminish. In Wales, teens' loitering around a convenience store has been discouraged by a device that emits an aversive high-pitched sound almost no one over 30 can hear (Lyall, 2005).
For those growing older, there is both bad and good news about health. The bad news: The body's disease-fighting immune system weakens, making older adults more susceptible to life-threatening ailments, such as cancer and pneumonia. The good news: Thanks partly to a lifetime's accumulation of antibodies, people over 65 suffer fewer short-term ailments, such as common flu and cold viruses. One study found they were half as likely as 20-year-olds and one-fifth as likely as preschoolers to suffer upper respiratory flu each year (National Center for Health Statistics, 1990).
Up to the teen years, we process information with greater and greater speed (Fry & Hale, 1996; Kail, 1991). But compared with you, older people take a bit more time to react, to solve perceptual puzzles, even to remember names (Bashore et al., 1997; Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997). The neural processing lag is greatest on complex tasks (Cerella, 1985; Poon, 1987). At video games, most 70-year-olds are no match for a 20-year-old.
Slower neural processing combined with diminished sensory abilities can increase accident risks. As FIGURE 54.1 indicates, fatal accident rates per mile driven increase sharply after age 75. By age 85, they exceed the 16-year-old level. Nevertheless, because older people drive less, they account for fewer than 10 percent of crashes (Coughlin et al., 2004).
Brain regions important to memory begin to atrophy during aging (Schacter, 1996). In early adulthood, a small, gradual net loss of brain cells begins, contributing by age 80 to a brain-weight reduction of 5 percent or so. Earlier, we noted that late-maturing frontal lobes help account for teen impulsivity. Late in life, atrophy of the inhibition-controlling frontal lobes seemingly explains older people's occasional blunt questions and comments ("Have you put on weight?”) (von Hippe!, 2007).
As noted earlier, exercise helps counteract some effects of brain aging. It aids memory by stimulating the development of neural connections and by promoting neurogenesis, the birth of new nerve cells, in the hippocampus. Sedentary older adults randomly assigned to aerobic exercise programs exhibit enhanced memory, sharpened judgment, and reduced risk of neurocognitive disorder (formerly called “dementia") (Colcombe et al., 2004; Liang et al., 2010; Nazimek, 2009).
Exercise also helps maintain the telomeres, which protect the ends of chromosomes (Cherkas et al., 2008; Erickson, 2009; Pereira et al., 2007). With age, telomeres wear down, much as the tip of a shoelace frays. This wear is accentuated by smoking, obesity, or stress. As telomeres shorten, aging cells may die without being replaced with perfect genetic replicas (Epe!, 2009).
The message for seniors is clear: We are more likely to rust from disuse than to wear out from overuse.
Among the most intriguing developmental psychology questions is whether adult cognitive abilities, such as memory, intelligence, and creativity, parallel the gradually accelerating decline of physical abilities.
As we age, we remember some things well. Looking back in later life, people asked to recall the one or two most important events over the last half-century tend to name events from their teens or twenties (Conway et al., 2005; Rubin et al., 1998). Whatever people experience around this time of life – the election of Barack Obama, the events of 9/11, the civil rights movement – becomes pivotal (Pillemer, 1998; Schuman & Scott, 1989). Our teens and twenties are a time of so many memorable “firsts” – first kiss, first job, first day at college or university, first meeting of in-laws.
Early adulthood is indeed a peak time for some types of learning and remembering. In one test of recall, people (1205 of them) watched videotapes as 14 strangers said their names, using a common format: “Hi, I'm Larry” (Crook & West, 1990). Then those strangers reappeared and gave additional details. For example, they said, ''I'm from Philadelphia,” providing more visual and voice cues for remembering the person's name. As FIGURE 54.2 shows, after a second and third replay of the introductions, everyone remembered more names, but younger adults consistently surpassed older adults. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that nearly two-thirds of people over age 40 say their memory is worse than it was 10 years ago (KRC, 2001). In fact, how well older people remember depends on the task. In another experiment (Schonfield & Robertson, 1966), when asked to recognize 24 words they had earlier tried to memorize, people showed only a minimal decline in memory. When asked to recall that information without clues, the decline was greater (FIGURE 54.3) .
In our capacity to learn and remember, as in other areas of development, we differ. Younger adults vaty in their abilities to learn and remember, but 70-year-olds vary much more. “Differences between the most and least able 70-year-olds become much greater than between the most and least able 50-year-olds,” reports Oxford researcher Patrick Rabbitt (2006). Some 70-year-olds perform below nearly all 20-year-olds; other 70-year-olds match or outdo the average 20-year-old.
No matter how quick or slow we are, remembering seems also to depend on the type of information we are trying to retrieve. If the information is meaningless – nonsense syllables or unimportant events – then the older we are, the more errors we are likely to make. If the information is meaningful, older people's rich web of existing knowledge will help them to hold it. But they may take longer than younger adults to produce the words and things they know: Quick-thinking game show winners are usually young or middle-aged adults (Burke & Shafto, 2004) . Older people's capacity to learn and remember skills declines less than their verbal recall (Graf, 1990; Labouvie-Vief & Schell, 1982; Perlmutter, 1983).
Module 62 explores another dimension of cognitive development: intelligence. As we will see, cross-sectional studies (comparing people of different ages) and longitudinal studies (restudying the same people over time) have identified mental abilities that do and do not change as people age. Age is less a predictor of memory and intelligence than is proximity to death. Tell me whether someone is 8 months or 8 years from death and, regardless of age, you've given me a clue to that person's mental ability. Especially in the last three or four years of life, cognitive decline typically accelerates (Wilson et al., 2007). Researchers call this near-death drop terminal decline (Backman & MacDonald, 2006).
Many differences between younger and older adults are created by significant life events. A new job means new relationships, new expectations, and new demands. Marriage brings the joy of intimacy and the stress of merging two lives. The three years surrounding the birth of a child bring increased life satisfaction for most parents (Dyrdal & Lucas, 2011). The death of a loved one creates an irreplaceable loss. Do these adult life events shape a sequence of life changes?
As people enter their forties, they undergo a transition to middle adulthood, a time when they realize that life will soon be mostly behind instead of ahead of them. Some psychologists have argued that for many the midlife transition is a crisis, a time of great struggle, regret, or even feeling struck down by life. The popular image of the midlife crisis is an earlyforties man who forsakes his family for a younger girlfriend and a hot sports car. But the fact – reported by large samples of people – is that unhappiness, job dissatisfaction, marital dissatisfaction, divorce, anxiety, and suicide do not surge during the early forties (Hunter & Sundel, 1989; Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998). Divorce, for example, is most common among those in their twenties, suicide among those in their seventies and eighties. One study of emotional instability in nearly 10,000 men and women found “not the slightest evidence” that distress peaks anywhere in the midlife age range (McCrae & Costa, 1990).
For the 1 in 4 adults who report experiencing a life crisis, the trigger is not age but a major event, such as illness, divorce, or job loss (Lachman, 2004). Some middle-aged adults describe themselves as a “sandwich generation,” simultaneously supporting their aging parents and their emerging adult children or grandchildren (Riley & Bowen, 2005).
Life events trigger transitions to new life stages at varying ages. The social clock – the definition of “the right time” to leave home, get a job, marry, have children, or retire – varies from era to era and culture to culture. The social clock still ticks, but people feel freer about being out of sync with it.
Even chance events can have lasting significance, by deflecting us down one road rather than another (Bandura, 1982). Albert Bandura (2005) recalls the ironic true story of a book editor who came to one of Bandura's lectures on the “Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths” – and ended up marrying the woman who happened to sit next to him. The sequence that led to my authoring this book (which was not my idea) began with my being seated near, and getting to know, a distinguished colleague at an international conference. Chance events can change our lives.
Two basic aspects of our lives dominate adulthood. Erik Erikson called them intimacy (forming close relationships) and generativity (being productive and supporting future generations) . Researchers have chosen various terms – affiliation and achievement, attachment and productivihj, connectedness and competence. Sigmund Freud (1935) put it most simply: The healthy adult, he said, is one who can love and work.
We typically flirt, fall in love, and commit – one person at a time. “Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal,” observed anthropologist Helen Fisher (1993) . From an evolutionary perspective, relatively monogamous pairing makes sense: Parents who cooperated to nurture their children to maturity were more likely to have their genes passed along to posterity than were parents who didn't.
Adult bonds of love are most satisfying and enduring when marked by a similarity of interests and values, a sharing of emotional and material support, and intimate self-disclosure (see Module 79). Couples who seal their love with commitment – via (in one Vermont study) marriage for heterosexual couples and civil unions for homosexual couples more often endure (Balsam et al., 2008). Marriage bonds are especially likely to last when couples marry after age 20 and are well educated. Compared with their counterparts of 50 years ago, people in Western countries are better educated and marrying later. Yet, ironically, they are nearly twice as likely to divorce. (Both Canada and the United States now have about one divorce for every two marriages, and in Europe, divorce is only slightly less common.) The divorce rate partly reflects women's lessened economic dependence and men's and women's rising expectations. We now hope not only for an enduring bond, but also for a mate who is a wage earner, caregiver, intimate friend, and warm and responsive lover.
Might test-driving life together in a “trial marriage” minimize divorce risk? In one Gallup survey of American twenty-somethings, 62 percent thought it would (Whitehead & Popenoe, 2001). In reality, in Europe, Canada, and the United States, those who cohabit before marriage have had higher rates of divorce and marital dysfunction than those who did not cohabit (Jose et al., 2010). The risk appears greatest for those cohabiting prior to engagement (Goodwin et al., 2010; Rhoades et al., 2009).
American children born to cohabiting parents are about five times more likely to experience their parents' separation than are children born to married parents (Osborne et al., 2007). Two factors contribute. First, cohabiters tend to be initially less committed to the ideal of enduring marriage. Second, they become even less marriage supporting while cohabiting.
Nonetheless, the institution of marriage endures. Worldwide, reports the United Nations, 9 in 10 heterosexual adults marry. And marriage is a predictor of happiness, sexual satisfaction, income, and physical and mental health (Scott et al., 2010). National Opinion Research Center surveys of nearly 50,000 Americans since 1972 reveal that 40 percent of married adults, though only 23 percent of unmarried adults, have reported being “very happy.” Lesbian couples, too, report greater well-being than those who are alone (Peplau & Fingerhut, 2007; Wayment & Peplau, 1995). Moreover, neighborhoods with high marriage rates typically have low rates of social pathologies such as crime, delinquency, and emotional disorders among children (Myers & Scanzoni, 2005).
Marriages that last are not always devoid of conflict. Some couples fight but also shower each other with affection. Other couples never raise their voices yet also seldom praise each other or nuzzle. Both styles can last. After observing the interactions of 2000 couples, John Gottman (1994) reported one indicator of marital success: at least a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions. Stable marriages provide five times more instances of smiling, touching, complimenting, and laughing than of sarcasm, criticism, and insults. So, if you want to predict which newlyweds will stay together, don't pay attention to how passionately they are in love. The couples who make it are more often those who refrain from putting down their partners. To prevent a cancerous negativity, successful couples learn to fight fair (to state feelings without insulting) and to steer conflict away from chaos with comments like “I know it's not your fault” or “I'll just be quiet for a moment and listen.”
Often, love bears children. For most people, this most enduring of life changes is a happy event. “I feel an overwhelming love for my children unlike anything I feel for anyone else,” said 93 percent of American mothers in a national survey (Erickson & Aird, 2005). Many fathers feel the same. A few weeks after the birth of my first child I was suddenly struck by a realization: “So this is how my parents felt about me?”
When children begin to absorb time, money, and emotional energy, satisfaction with the marriage itself may decline (Doss et al., 2009). This is especially likely among employed women who, more than they expected, carry the traditional burden of doing the chores at home. Putting effort into creating an equitable relationship can thus pay double dividends: a more satisfying marriage, which breeds better parent-child relations (Erel & Burman, 1995).
Although love bears children, children eventually leave home. This departure is a significant and sometimes difficult event. For most people, however, an empty nest is a happy place (Adelmann et al., 1989; Gorchoff et al., 2008). Many parents experience a “postlaunch honeymoon,” especially if they maintain close relationships with their children (White & Edwards, 1990). As Daniel Gilbert (2006) has said, “The only known symptom of empty nest syndrome' is increased smiling.”
For many adults, the answer to “Who are you?” depends a great deal on the answer to “What do you do?” For women and men, choosing a career path is difficult, especially during bad economic times. Even in the best of times, few students in their first two years of college or university can predict their later careers.
In the end, happiness is about having work that fits your interests and provides you with a sense of competence and accomplishment. It is having a close, supportive companion who cheers your accomplishments (Gable et al., 2006). And for some, it includes having children who love you and whom you love and feel proud of.
To live is to grow older. This moment marks the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you will henceforth be. That means we all can look back with satisfaction or regret, and forward with hope or dread. When asked what they would have done differently if they could relive their lives, people's most common answer has been “Taken my education more seriously and worked harder at it” (Kinnier & Metha, 1989; Roese & Summerville, 2005). Other regrets – “I should have told my father I loved him,” “I regret that I never went to Europe” – have also focused less on mistakes made than on the things one failed to do (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995).
From the teens to midlife, people typically experience a strengthening sense of identity, confidence, and self-esteem (Huang, 2010; Robins & Trzesniewski, 2005). In later life, challenges arise: Income shrinks. Work is often taken away. The body deteriorates. Recall fades. Energy wanes. Family members and friends die or move away. The great enemy, death, looms ever closer. And for those in the terminal decline phase, life satisfaction does decline as death approaches (Gerstorf et al., 2008).
Small wonder that most presume that happiness declines in later life (Lacey et al., 2006). But worldwide, as Gallup researchers discovered, most find that the over-65 years are not notably unhappy (FIGURE 54.4). If anything, positive feelings, supported by enhanced emotional control, grow after midlife, and negative feelings subside (Stone et al., 2010; Urry & Gross, 2010) . Older adults increasingly use words that convey positive emotions (Pennebaker & Stone, 2003), and they attend less and less to negative information. Compared with younger adults, for example, they are slower to perceive negative faces and more attentive to positive news (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005; Scheibe & Carstensen, 2010). Older adults also have fewer problems in their social relationships (Fingerman & Charles, 2010), and they experience less intense anger, stress, and worry (Stone et al., 2010) .
The aging brain may help nurture these positive feelings. Brain scans of older adults show that the amygdala, a neural processing center for emotions, responds less actively to negative events (but not to positive events), and it interacts less with the hippocampus, a brain memory-processing center (Mather et al., 2004; St. Jacques et al., 2009; Williams et al., 2006). Brain-wave reactions to negative images also diminish with age (Kisley et al., 2007).
Moreover, at all ages, the bad feelings we associate with negative events fade faster than do the good feelings we associate with positive events (Walker et al., 2003). This contributes to most older people's sense that life, on balance, has been mostly good. Given that growing older is an outcome of living (an outcome most prefer to early dying), the positivity of later life is comforting. Thanks to biological, psychological, and social-cultural influences, more and more people flourish into later life (FIGURE 54.5).
Warning: If you begin reading the next paragraph, you will die.
But of course, if you hadn't read this, you would still die in due time. Death is our inevitable end. Most of us will also suffer and cope with the deaths of relatives and friends. Usually, the most difficult separation is from a spouse – a loss suffered by five times more women than men. When, as usually happens, death comes at an expected late-ife time, grieving may be relatively short-lived.
Grief is especially severe when a loved one's death comes suddenly and before its expected time on the social clock. The sudden illness or accident claiming a 45-year-old life partner or a child may trigger a year or more of memory-laden mourning that eventually subsides to a mild depression (Lehman et al., 1987).
For some, however, the loss is unbearable. One Danish long-term study of more than 1 million people found that about 17,000 of them had suffered the death of a child under 18. In the five years following that death, 3 percent of them had a first psychiatric hospitalization. This rate was 67 percent higher than the rate recorded for parents who had not lost a child (Li et al., 2005) .
Even so, reactions to a loved one's death range more widely than most suppose. Some cultures encourage public weeping and wailing; others hide grief. Within any culture, individuals differ. Given similar losses, some people grieve hard and long, others less so (Ott et al., 2007). Contrary to popular misconceptions, however,
We can be grateful for the waning of death-denying attitudes. Facing death with dignity and openness helps people complete the life cycle with a sense of life's meaningfulness and unity – the sense that their existence has been good and that life and death are parts of an ongoing cycle. Although death may be unwelcome, life itself can be affirmed even at death. This is especially so for people who review their lives not with despair but with what Erik Erikson called a sense of integrity – a feeling that one's life has been meaningful and worthwhile.
