Theories of Adult Psychosocial Development

Early Adulthood (18-40 Years)

Erikson

Intimacy vs. Isolation

Levinson

Life Structure

Valliant

Intimacy, Career Consolidation

Erikson

Stage 6: Emerging Adulthood

Intimacy vs. Isolation

-Love relationships most important

-Not developmentally complete until capable of intimacy.

-Not yet developed sense of identity will fear committed relationship and may retreat to isolation.

Positive Outcome

-Can form close relationships/share with others if they have achieved sense of identity.

Negative Outcome

-Fear commitment, feel isolated and unable to depend on anybody in the world.

Levinson

Early Adulthood

-Era of greatest energy and abundance, contradiction and stress.

-Involves serious decisions about work, marriage, children and lifestyle before many have experience to choose wisely.

-Dream - image of self that guides decision-making (women split dreams)

-Mentor - facilitates realization of dream.

-Age 30 Transition - focus on whichever aspect not yet achieved (partner/career).

-Many women not settled until Middle Adulthood.

Vaillant

Early Adulthood

-Men only (students at highly competitive liberal arts college)

-Quality of relationships with important people shaped life course

-Brief period of intimacy (20s), career consolidation (30s), turn from individual achievement to generativity (40s).

-50s/60s "Keepers of Meaning"

-Women undergo similar series of changes.

-Have left adolescence, but are some distance from taking on adult responsibilities.

-Complimentary traits, but more similar, the more satisfied.

-Women look for: intelligence, ambition, financial status, moral character.

-Men look for: physical attractiveness, domestic skills.

-Evolutionary theory--ability to reproduce.

Perry

Epistemic Cognition

Reflections on how we arrived at facts, beliefs, and ideas. When mature, rational thinkers reach conclusions that differ from those of others, the consider the justifiability of their conclusions.

• Relativistic Thinking vs. Dualistic Thinking
• Commitment within Relativistic Thinking (synthesizing contradictions).

skills that depend on accumulated knowledge and experience, god judgement, and mastery of social conventions (abilities acquired because they are valued by the individual's culture).

Increases steadily through Middle Adulthood.

depends more heavily on basic information-processing skills--ability to detect relationships among visual stimuli, speed of analyzing information, and capacity of working memory.

Begins to decline in twenties.