Early Adult

1
Early Adult

• Social and Emotional Development

2
Stage vs. Nonstage Views

• Stage - advancing age is source of change
• Non-stage - life events drive change
• View of text

3
Erikson Intimacy gt Isolation
4
Erikson on Intimacy

• Intimacy close heterosexual relationship within
  which procreation can be accomplished
• Problems
• Presumes heterosexual relationship
• Excludes intimacy in friendships
• Excludes intimacy in childless marriages
• Intimacy (and therefore marriage) is important
  step in adult development

5
Erikson on Isolation

• Failure to develop capacity for sharing with or
  caring about others
• Relationships superficial, competitive
• Loneliness, self-absorption
• Problems
• Definition does not distinguish isolation from
  its causes
• One can experience isolation in context of
  relationships

6
Critique of Eriksons Theory

• Research reveals intimacy is of central concern
  in early adulthood
• Themes of generativity emerge concurrently with
  intimacy
• Presumes women and men follow same course

7
Levinsons Seasons of Life (1)

• Retrospective study
• 40 middle age men
• Hourly workers
• Business executives
• Biologists
• Novelists
• Additional study on small sample of women
• Intensive interviews and testing

8
Levinsons Seasons of Life (2)

• Examines psychological shifts in adulthood
• Life structures alternative with transitions
• Structure underlying life pattern or design
• often relate to work and family
• Transitions - time for re-appraisal

9
Levinson (3) Other Key Concepts

• Dream - image guides decisions
• Mentor
• BOOM - Becoming ones own man
• Timing
• What about women?

10
Vallients Study

• Follow-up of Grant Study
• Empirical study of Eriksons stages
• Expands Eriksons views
• Original Grant Study
• Sample - 268 normal young men from Harvard

11
Vallients Adaptation to Life

• Longitudinal follow-up on original sample
• Trace change and development throughout life
• Lives are shaped by quality of relationships
  (rather than trauma)
• Predictor - adaptive adolescents turn out to be
  more adaptive adults

12
Vallient Expands Erikson

• Intimacy gt Isolation
• Career consolidation (30s)
• Generativity gt Stagnation
• Keeping the meaning gt Rigidity (50s)
• Integrity gt Despair

13
Critique of Levinson and Vallient

• Cohort limitations
• results may not generalize to people today
• Narrow sample
• white, male, college educated
• Retrospective studies
• How accurate is recollection?
• Presume males and females more alike than
  different

14
Adult Female Development

• Identity appears to continue to emerge in context
  of intimate relationships
• Multiple variations in timing rather than
  following the pattern of the family life cycle
• Tensions evident between family commitments and
  careers
• Reappraisal more likely at about age 30 (rather
  than stocktaking at 40)

15
Gilligan on Female Development

• Adolescent females struggle to resist loss of
  psychological strengths and positive
  self-concepts of childhood
• Adulthood is time for recovering confidence,
  assertiveness, and self-confidence

16
Neugarterns Nonstage Theory

• Life events mark time
• Age misleads life experiences are key

17
Concepts Related to Nonstage View (1)

• Social clock
• Influenced by cultural context
• Current blurring of proper time
• On time -- Off time
• Age-graded expectations
• Cause us to accelerate or to put on the breaks

18
Concepts Related to Nonstage View (2)

• Normative events
• expected
• on-time
• anticipated
• Non-normative
• unexpected
• off-time

19
Schlossberg on Life Change

• Give me a room full of 40 year olds and you tell
  me nothing. What matters is what transitions
  they have experiences. There are as many
  patterns as people.
• People react to both events and their timing
• Back to Unit 4