1. Adulthood

2. Parent and Peer Relationships
Teens get their culture from their peers
Adolescents adopt peer accent/language over parents’
Teens adopt peer habits such as smoking, and seek others with the same habits
Relationship with parents and with peers have a similar style
Parents are still an important influence in religion, career, and political views

3. Emerging Adulthood
In Western Cultures, there seem to be people beyond adolescence who are not yet fully independent adults. This corresponds with a larger age span between menarche and marriage (below):

4. Adulthood Physical Development Cognitive Development
Social Development
Thinking About Stability and Change

5. Adulthood
Defining stages in adulthood is more difficult than doing so for childhood and adolescence
Still, these terms are useful:
Early adulthood (20s and 30s)
Middle adulthood (to age 65)
Late adulthood (65+)

6. Young Adulthood: Physical Development
The peak of physical performance occurs by early to mid-twenties, after which it declines imperceptibly for most of us.
Preview Question 12: How do our bodies from early to late adulthood?

7. Physical Development: Middle Adulthood
Muscular strength, reaction time, sensory abilities and cardiac output begin to decline after the mid-20s.

8. Physical Development: Later Middle Adulthood
Around age 50, women experience menopause (the end of the menstrual cycle) and men experience a gradual decline in fertility and virility.

9. Physical Development: Late Adulthood (65+)
Hearing, vision, and sense of smell diminish, as do muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina.

10. Aging Cognitive Development
Neural processing slows in late adulthood
Slower reaction time
Some aspects of memory also decline
Decline in recall of recently memorized words
No decline in ability to recognize recently learned words

11. Aging and Intelligence
Crystallized intelligence – one’s accumulated knowledge, increases into middle age
Fluid intelligence – the ability to reason speedily and abstractly, decreases slowly up to about age 75, then more rapidly
Mental practice and physical exercise can help sustain cognitive skills

12. Social Development Two basic aspects of our lives dominate adulthood.
Erikson called them intimacy (forming close relationships) and generativity (being productive and supporting future generations).
Freud: The healthy adult is one who can love and work.

13. Adulthood Commitments: Relationships
Evolutionary psychologists believe that commitment has survival value. Parents that stay together are likely to leave a viable future generation.

14. Adulthood Commitments: Work
Happiness stems from working in a job that fits your interests and provides you with a sense of competence and accomplishment.

15. The Social Clock
Like the Biological Clock, this is the culturally-based expectation about when you should leave home, marry, start a career, have children, retire
People today may feel more free to make their own timelines rather than obey the clock

16. Death and Dying Death and Dying: Impact on survivors
Grief is more intense if someone died young, unexpectedly
Style of grieving varies, with no “right” sequence or process
People do rebound from loss (chart)

17. Well-Being Across the Life Span
Happiness does not decrease with age
Older adults show less response to negative events and information
Positive feelings remain, negative feelings fade

18. Growing older can mean getting better.
Stability and Change
Lifelong development includes both stability and change. Basic temperament seems to persist; a smiley grandparent was probably once a smiley baby. Traits such as conscientiousness, confidence, and agreeableness tend to evolve with age and then stabilize as part of one’s personality. The tendency toward stability gives us a sense of identity. The potential for change gives us the hope of personal growth:
Growing older can mean getting better.