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Focuses on both hereditary and environmental influences and on the continuities and changes that characterize adults.

Adaptation continues from birth to death - involves growth (primarily at younger stages), maintenance, and the regulation of loss (more common in old age)

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Cognitive Changes in Middle and Late Adulthood

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Cognitive Changes in Middle and Late Adulthood

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Middle adulthood: Mixed pattern of improvement and decline occurs.

Fluid processes (speed and inhibitory mechanisms) begin to decline.

Crystallized resources (all forms of declarative and procedural knowledge) can increase throughout middle and old age.

Late Adulthood: Maintenance/gains in crystallized knowledge, but declines in fluid processes mediated by executive functions.

Cognitive functioning in old age is related to overall health.

Dementia is usually due to cardiovascular accidents or disease processes such as Alzheimer's disease.

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Schaie: emphasizes shifting allocation of intellectual skills across adulthood as people confront different kinds of problems relevant to their age and stage of life.
Vaillent: Keeper of meaning (vs. rigidity) - an individual expands generative concerns beyond just making a productive contribution, in order to actually preserve something that is part of the culture.
Levinson: Life-course changes occur in many ways depending on a person's life circumstances, gender, and culture - not in a predictable sequence as Erikson and Vaillant suggested.
Erikson: Three stages in self-development -

Young adulthood: intimacy (vs. isolation)

Middle adulthood: generativity (vs. stagnation) - one's life has purpose by producing and building for the next generation.

Late adulthood: ego identity (vs. despair)

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Last stage in Erikson's self-development. Occurs during late adulthood when an individual processes their life and develop a sense that they lived their life with a purpose and it had order, meaning, and dignity.

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Key Developmental Tasks of Midlife: Family Life Cycle

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Key Developmental Tasks of Midlife: Family Life Cycle

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Begins with mate selection. Once commitment is established, blending of family systems begin. This is then followed by becoming parents then transitioning to the launching period and renegotiating the marital relationship - keeping the love alive.

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The process by which an individual controls their life.

Comes in to play with adapting to life's changes.

Three needs are said to motivate this - autonomy, competence, and relatedness

Heckhausen described two strategies for facing challenges:

Primary-control strategies - attempts to affect the immediate environment and often increase feelings of mastery and self-esteem.

Secondary-control strategies - attempts to change ourselves

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Physical Changes in Middle and Late Adulthood

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Physical Changes in Middle and Late Adulthood

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Middle adulthood:

Shift from adolescing (growing up) to senescing (growing down).

Skin wrinkles and hair loss.

decrease in immune system.

Sensory systems decline.

Changes in reproductive systems.

Late adulthood:

Immune system becomes progressively less effective.

Cardiovascular, respiratory, and organ systems functions less adequate.

Increasing sensory deficits.

Onset of pain, stiffness, and swelling in joints - arthritis.

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Elderly individuals are experiences losses with their physical and mental abilities, as well as the loss of friends and family members.

Baltes suggests three processes for successful development at this stage - pertaining to physical and mental losses:

Selection

Optimization

Compensation

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Middle adulthood: working on keeping the flame alive while trying to maintain friendships and socialize.
Late adulthood:

Network of friends and family members shrink

Negative stereotyping leads to discriminatory and demeaning practices that interfere with positive social interactions.

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Elderly individuals report less anxiety about death than younger people.
Kubler-Ross: Five stages of grief

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

Freud's Theory of the Grief Process

Bereaved individuals need to withdraw from the lost loved one and reinvest that energy into forming new attachments.

Bowlby's Theory of the Grief Process

Used attachment theory concepts to describe stages of grief process:

shock

protest

despair

reorganization