Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [259]
Not that today’s life-span developmentalism is pessimistic; indeed, some of its findings have been heartening. A few instances:
Adolescence: Many of the new data about the adolescent stage deal with familiar topics: sexual behavior, social development, the struggle to achieve emancipation from parental control, problems with self-esteem and anxiety. But contrary to long-standing opinion that adolescence is a period of intense turmoil, several research programs have found that for the majority of adolescents it is not. One study reported that, while 11 percent of young adolescents have serious chronic difficulties and 32 percent intermittent and probably situational difficulties, 57 percent experience “basically positive, healthy development during early adolescence.”108 And while drug and alcohol use, smoking, and sexual behavior increase during adolescence and create serious difficulties for some adolescents, one research team said that more often these behaviors are “purposive, self-regulating, and aimed at coping with problems of development.109 A summary of research held that few adolescents experience the turmoil and unpredictable behavior so often ascribed to them.110
Adult “crises”: The focus of adult development research has been on the strenuous transitions that men and women must make, particularly at about forty to forty-five, when they may see their careers topping out, dreams fading, children distancing themselves from the family, and physical youthfulness slipping away. It was Sheehy, the popularizer, who called them “predictable crises”; most researchers talked instead of painful and strenuous “transitional periods.”
One team found that only some men have a midlife crisis, and that most either thrive or muddle through. Others have found that the adult personality is not as rigid and unchanging, and wholly determined by childhood experiences, as had formerly been thought; many adults can adapt sufficiently to make successful transitions to new life circumstances. Paul Mussen and his co-authors said in Psychological Development: A Life-Span Approach, “Perhaps the most important result of the research on personality and aging is a renewed appreciation of the potential for personality change at any point in the life span.” Another research team has said that most people do cope with the inevitable challenges of the passing years, especially if they have a can-do attitude.111
Aging: Developmental change in the elderly has been a recognized field of research for two generations and a major one for at least two decades. Much of it has focused on the psychological changes brought about by declining physical abilities, chronic disease, the slowing down of mental functions, retirement, widowhood, the deaths of friends, and other losses. To such changes, it was widely believed, on the basis of aging studies conducted in Kansas City in the late 1950s, the common and beneficial adaptation was “disengagement”—minimizing stress by abandoning stressful roles and voluntarily withdrawing into a “subculture of aging.” But a reanalysis of the Kansas City data by the psychologist Robert J. Havighurst and his colleagues, and a twenty-five-year longitudinal study of aging at Duke University, showed that not to be the case. Some people choose to disengage and others are forced by ill health to do so, but most aging people maintain their social activities and adapt to the loss of friends and mates by expanding their contacts with younger people, particularly family members. Moreover, they are more content and psychologically healthier than those who disengage.