Chapter 11 Outline

The Introduction.

• The word “adult” derives from the Latin word “adults”  and according to the Latin word it means growing up.
• One of the American Historians named Winthrop Jordan had written “indeed adulthood” and was supposed to be an artifact of the twentieth century in American culture
• Adulthood, is the least studied phase in human development, although it spans the longest period of human life today
• By the 1930s, following the Industrial Revolution, life expectancies had doubled to roughly 60 years of age.
• Adulthood as a distinctive life stage emerged after all other life stages (childhood, adolescence, old age) were “discovered”
• During the middle ages, the Infants turned into adults when they reached “the age of reason 6 or 7 years old and then were married around age 10 since they were expected to die around age 30.
• The Industrial Revolution in the 18^th saw an increase in life span with new social problems with child labor and youth delinquency. The average life expectancy was 60

The Stage Theory

• Stage theories assume that personality changes through age-linked stages that appear universal
• The two people in the stage theory are Levinson and Gould.
• Stage theories assume that personality changes through age-linked stages that appear universal
• Only focused on men
• Life structure: the basic pattern of design of a person’s life at a given time: gives us a way of looking at the individual in society.
• The structure-changing periods usually last 4-5 years

Gould’s theory of transformation in adult life

• This theory was also written by Psychiatrist Roger Gould he supervised residents at the UCLA psychiatric outpatient department Gould became acquainted with the life histories of 125 patients.
• Gould found that patients and non-patients of the same age shared the same general concerns about living
• Gould expressed this transformation as a 5 stage process which corresponds to 5 different age groups. It was originally 7 stages/ age groups but was narrowed down to 5 eventually

The Dialectic Theory

• Human life is a dynamic process of changes produced by multiple and on-going interactions
• The Dialectic Theory does not emphasize a pattern of growth or a universal sequence of development

DIVORCE PRONE PERSONALITY OR DIVORCE-PRONE SOCIETY

  Urban background, Lower socioeconomic status, No church affiliation, Teen-age     marriage

• There are three responses to unemployment: shock and disbelief, active job search with optimism, self-doubt, anxiety and depression, and resignation and apathy