Young adult identities and their pathways: a developmental and life course model

Developmental and life course studies of young adult identities have focused on 2 dimensions: subjective age and psychosocial maturity. This study examines the developmental synchrony of these 2 processes. In a longitudinal sample of young adults from Add Health (ages 18-22), a person-centered analysis of indicators of these dimensions identified 4 identity profiles. Two depict early and late patterns of identity; the others represent contrasting types of discordance: pseudo-adult, with subjective age more advanced than maturation level, and anticipatory, with subjective age less advanced than maturational level. The profiles vary by gender, socioeconomic status, and race-ethnicity, as well as by adolescent (ages 12-16) pubertal maturation, psychosocial adjustment, and family context. These results provide support for a more holistic, interdisciplinary understanding of adult identity and show that young adult identities in the Add Health sample follow differentiated paths into the adult years, with largely unknown consequences for the subsequent life course.     

People over forty feel 20% younger than their age: Subjective age across the lifespan

Subjective age—the age people think of themselves as being—is measured in a representative Danish sample of 1,470 adults between 20 and 97 years of age through personal, in-home interviews. On the average, adults younger than 25 have older subjective ages, and those older than 25 have younger subjective ages, favoring a lifespan-developmental view over an age-denial view of subjective age. When the discrepancy between subjective and chronological age is calculated as a proportion of chronological age, no increase is seen after age 40; older respondents feel 20% younger than their actual age. Demographic variables (gender, income, and education) account for very little variance in subjective age.     

The fruits of their labors: a longitudinal exploration of parent personality and adjustment in their adult children

This longitudinal study of several aspects of parenting examines how children "turn out" as adults. Ratings of adjustment (educational and occupational attainment as well as social and emotional maturity) in young adult children (aged 25-37) were made on the basis of information from 64 mothers who were participants in a longitudinal study of women's lives. As hypothesized, mothers who were demanding yet responsive, sensitive, and psychologically mature at ages 27 and 43 had children with higher overall adult adjustment scores. Other factors correlated with adjustment included the mother's long-term commitment to being a wife and mother, and the cohesiveness of the home environment. In their 50s, characteristics of parents associated with adult child adjustment were different for men and women (competence in women and forcefulness and individuality in men). Divorce was not a negative factor, and mothers' paid work (after age 27) was positive at a trend level.     

Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups.

The dimensions by which adults of differing ages experience emotion were studied by self-administering questionnaires administered to older adults (n = 828) recruited from Elderhostel programs, middle-aged (ages 30-59) children of Elderhostel attenders (n = 231), and young adult (ages 18-29) subjects recruited from college classes or through Elderhostel participants (n = 207). Elders were higher in emotional control, mood stability, and emotional maturity through moderation and leveling of positive affect and lower in surgency, psychophysiological responsiveness, and sensation seeking. These findings are consistent with the hypothesized increase in self-regulatory capacity with age. These cross-sectional differences cannot, however, be distinguished from cohort-related explanations; they require considerable replication across different types of subjects and further characterization of the dimensions in terms of their functions for self-regulation.     

Religious Doubt and Mental Health Across the Lifespan

The current study examined the connections among religious doubt, mental health, and aging in a nationwide sample of individuals 18 years and older (N = 1629). Findings indicate that that religious doubt emerging from the recognition of suffering and evil in the world has a deleterious impact on mental health. Results also show that as people grow older, religious doubts continue to be associated with psychopathology, but the magnitude of this association becomes weaker across age categories. In other words, the impact of doubt on mental distress declines as one ages. These effects were found across various measures of mental distress, including depression, general anxiety, interpersonal sensitivity, paranoia, hostility, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Findings are explored within the context of psychosocial development and the experiential trajectory of religious maturity.     

Psychosocial predictors of adult antisocial personality and adult convictions

In the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, 411 South London males have been followed up since age 8. This article investigates the ability of psychosocial risk factors measured at age 8 - 10 to predict antisocial personality measures at ages 18 and 32 and convictions between ages 21 and 40. The most important childhood predictors were a convicted parent, large family size, low intelligence or attainment, and child-rearing factors, including a young mother and a disrupted family. The accuracy of prediction of antisocial personality at age 32 on the basis of childhood risk factors measured more than 20 years before was surprising: nearly half of boys with a convicted parent at age 10 were antisocial at age 32, compared with one in six of the remainder. Over 60% of boys very high risk at age 8 - 10 became antisocial at age 32. While the present research shows how far adult antisocial and criminal behavior can be predicted in childhood, more research is needed to establish the precise causal mechanisms involved.     

Anger and sadness in response to an emotionally neutral film: evidence for age-specific associations with well-being

When the association between emotion and well-being is being considered, positive emotions usually come to mind. However, negative emotions serve important adaptive functions and particular negative emotions may be especially adaptive at different stages of adult development. We examined the associations between self-reported negative emotions in response to an emotionally neutral, thematically ambiguous film and subjective well-being among 76 young (age 20-29), 73 middle-aged (age 40-49), and 73 older (age 60-69) adults. Results indicated that higher self-reported anger in response to the film was associated with higher well-being for middle-aged adults, but not for young and older adults. Higher self-reported sadness in response to the film was associated with higher well-being for older adults, but not for young and middle-aged adults. These findings were stronger for cognitive well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life) than for affective well-being (i.e., ratio of dispositional positive to negative affect) and were specific to these emotions (not found for self-reported disgust or fear) and to the emotionally neutral film (not found for sad or disgusting films). Results are discussed in terms of the functions that anger and sadness are thought to serve and the control opportunities afforded in midlife and late life that render these functions differentially adaptive.     

College-educated women's personality development in adulthood: perceptions and age differences

Adulthood encompasses a large time span and includes a series of psychosocial challenges (E. H. Erikson, 1950). Five aspects of personality (identity certainty, confident power, concern with aging, generativity, and personal distress) were assessed in a cross-sectional study of college-educated women who at the time of data collection were young adults (age: M = 26 years), middle-aged adults (age: M = 46 years), or older adults (age: M = 66 years). Respondents rated each personality domain for how true it was of them at the time, and they then rated the other 2 ages either retrospectively or prospectively. Results are discussed with attention to the ways in which women's adult development may have been shaped by experiences particular to both gender and birth cohort, and to how these women fit with E. H. Erikson's theory of adult development.     

Developmental changes in the perception of adult facial age

The author studied children's (aged 5-16 years) and young adults' (aged 18-22 years) perception and use of facial features to discriminate the age of mature adult faces. In Experiment 1, participants rated the age of unaltered and transformed (eyes, nose, eyes and nose, and whole face blurred) adult faces (aged 20-80 years). In Experiment 2, participants ranked facial age sets (aged 20-50, 20-80, and 50-80 years) that had varying combinations of older and younger facial features: eyes, noses, mouths, and base faces. Participants of all ages attended to similar facial features when making judgments about adult facial age, although young children (aged 5-7 years) were less accurate than were older children (aged 9-11 years), adolescents (aged 13-16 years), and young adults when making facial age judgments. Young children were less sensitive to some facial features when making facial age judgments.     

Regrets and Subjective Well-Being: A Life Course Approach

The aim of the study was to examine age and gender differences in the contents of regrets, and the association between regrets and subjective well-being. The sample consisted of 176 participants ranging in age from 19 to 82 years. The results showed that young adults (19–29 years) named regrets related to relationships and leisure more often than middle-aged (30–54 years) and older adults (55–82 years), whereas regrets related to work and family were more salient among middle-aged and older adults. Furthermore, gender comparison revealed that regrets concerning relationships and family were more frequent among women than among men. Related to subjective well-being, results showed that regrets concerning education and work were negatively associated with life satisfaction, and depressive symptoms associated with self-related regrets.     

Relation of work and retirement to health and well-being in older age.

Patterns of labor-force participation were studied with a broad array of indicators of physical and psychological well-being. The sheer amount of work--whether people work and, if so, how many hours they work--shows little relationship to health and well-being. Drawing on scattered existing research and theory, it is hypothesized and found that persons whose patterns of labor-force participation (or nonparticipation) reflect their personal preference report higher levels of physical and psychological well-being than do those whose level of labor-force involvement is constrained by other factors. The results do not differ by gender, age (65 years and older vs. 55-64 years), or occupation (professional vs. clerical or sales vs. blue-collar workers). Data are from 1,339 respondents 55 years of age or older in the Americans' Changing Lives Survey, a large national, cross-sectional survey of Americans 25 years of age and older with an oversample of those 60 years of age and older, and are analyzed by ordinary least squares multiple regression.     

Age Group Differences in Postural Adjustments Associated With a Stepping Task

In this study, differences among age groups in the postural adjustments associated with a stepping task were identified. Twenty subjects from each of 3 age groups, children (8-12 years), young adults (25-35 years), and older adults (65ndash73 years), performed the task in 2 movement contexts: place and step. In place, the subject simply lifted the foot and placed it on the step. In step, the subject lifted the foot, placed it on the step, and stepped up onto the step. Latencies of postural and focal muscle activation were determined by using surface electromyography and pressure switches. Center of pressure (CP) data were obtained by using a force platform. Subjects in all 3 age groups consistently demonstrated postural adjustments before movement initiation. Children displayed longer postural latencies than young adults as well as disproportionately large values for CP path length. Older adults showed prolonged postural-focal latencies and decreased CP excursions compared with the 2 younger age groups. These results suggest that maturation of coordination between posture and movement may not be fully complete in 8- to l2-year-olds and that increased restraint characterizes the performance of postural adjustments in healthy persons over 65 years of age.     

Age differences in personality traits from 10 to 65: Big Five domains and facets in a large cross-sectional sample

Hypotheses about mean-level age differences in the Big Five personality domains, as well as 10 more specific facet traits within those domains, were tested in a very large cross-sectional sample (N = 1,267,218) of children, adolescents, and adults (ages 10-65) assessed over the World Wide Web. The results supported several conclusions. First, late childhood and adolescence were key periods. Across these years, age trends for some traits (a) were especially pronounced, (b) were in a direction different from the corresponding adult trends, or (c) first indicated the presence of gender differences. Second, there were some negative trends in psychosocial maturity from late childhood into adolescence, whereas adult trends were overwhelmingly in the direction of greater maturity and adjustment. Third, the related but distinguishable facet traits within each broad Big Five domain often showed distinct age trends, highlighting the importance of facet-level research for understanding life span age differences in personality.     

Sustained-attention capacity in young and older adults

The sustained-attention capacity of young (21-29 years) and older (65-78 years) adults was examined using a high-event rate digit-discrimination vigilance task presented at three levels of stimulus degradation. Increased stimulus degradation led to a reduction in the hit rate and to a greater decline in hit rate over blocks (increased vigilance decrement). Sensitivity (d') declined over blocks only at the highest level of stimulus degradation. Older adults had a lower hit rate and showed greater vigilance decrement than young adults, particularly when stimuli were highly degraded. However, both age groups showed the same pattern of stability in sensitivity when stimulus degradation was moderate, and sensitivity decrement over time when stimulus degradation was high. The results suggest that the process of sustained allocation of capacity--as reflected in temporal changes in sensitivity--operates similarly in young and older adults.     

A lifespan database of adult facial stimuli.

Faces constitute a unique and widely used category of stimuli. In spite of their importance, there are few collections of faces for use in research, none of which adequately represent the different ages of faces across the lifespan. This lack of a range of ages has limited the majority of researchers to using predominantly young faces as stimuli even when their hypotheses concern both young and old participants. We describe a database of 575 individual faces ranging from ages 18 to 93. Our database was developed to be more representative of age groups across the lifespan, with a special emphasis on recruiting older adults. The resulting database has faces of 218 adults age 18-29, 76 adults age 30-49, 123 adults age 50-69, and 158 adults age 70 and older. These faces may be acquired for research purposes from http://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/facedb/. This will allow researchers interested in using facial stimuli access to a wider age range of adult faces than has previously been available.     

The effect of emotion-focused orientation at retrieval on emotional memory in young and older adults

This study examines how emotion-focused orientation at retrieval affects memory for emotional versus neutral images in young and older adults. A total of 44 older adults (ages 61-84 years, M=70.00, SD=5.54) and 43 young adults (ages 17-33 years, M=20.58, SD=3.72) were tested on their free recall and forced-choice recognition of images. At retrieval the emotion-focused orientation was manipulated by instructing participants to focus on emotion-related information (i.e., emotional content of images and the emotional reactions evoked by the images). In the control conditions participants were either instructed to focus on visual information or not provided any specific orientation instruction. In free recall but not forced-choice recognition, the emotion-focused orientation increased young adults' positivity bias and thus wiped out their superior negativity bias. However, the emotion-focused orientation did not affect older adults' emotional memory. The data suggest that young adults activate and prioritise emotional goals in response to external demand during intentional information processing whereas older adults seem to spontaneously tune themselves to emotional goals.     

(Im)maturity of judgment in adolescence: why adolescents may be less culpable than adults

A crucial step in the establishment of effective policies and regulations concerning legal decisions involving juveniles is the development of a complete understanding of the many factors-psychosocial as well as cognitive-that affect the evolution of judgment over the course of adolescence and into adulthood. This study examines the influence of three psychosocial factors (responsibility, perspective, and temperance) on maturity of judgment in a sample of over 1,000 participants ranging in age from 12 to 48 years. Participants completed assessments of their psychosocial maturity in the aforementioned domains and responded to a series of hypothetical decision-making dilemmas about potentially antisocial or risky behavior. Socially responsible decision making is significantly more common among young adults than among adolescents, but does not increase appreciably after age 19. Individuals exhibiting higher levels of responsibility, perspective, and temperance displayed more mature decision-making than those with lower scores on these psychosocial factors, regardless of age. Adolescents, on average, scored significantly worse than adults, but individual differences in judgment within each adolescent age group were considerable. These findings call into question recent arguments, derived from studies of logical reasoning, that adolescents and adults are equally competent and that laws and social policies should treat them as such.     

Growing up Faster, Feeling Older: Hardship in Childhood and Adolescence

We examine whether hardship while growing up shapes subjective age identity, as well as three types of experiences through which it may occur. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that hardship in several domains during childhood and adolescence is associated with feeling relatively older and self-identifying as an adult in the late teens and twenties. Specifically, young people who as adolescents felt unsafe in their schools or neighborhoods, witnessed or were victims of violence, had fewer economic resources in the household, and lived in certain family structures, reported older subjective ages (by one or both measures). We find no evidence that hardship's association with subjective age is mediated by work responsibilities in adolescence or by anticipating a very curtailed life span, but entering adult roles earlier mediates or partially mediates many of these relationships.     

Adult age differences in attention to semantic context

In three experiments age differences in attention to semantic context were examined. The performance of younger adults (ages 18-29 years) and older adults (ages 60-79 years) on a semantic priming task indicated that both age groups could use information regarding the probability that a prime and target would be related to flexibly anticipate the target category given the prime word (Experiment 1). The timing by which target expectancies were reflected in reaction time performance was delayed for older adults as compared to younger adults, but only when the target was expected to be semantically unrelated to the prime word (Experiment 2). When the target and prime were expected to be semantically related, the time course of priming effects was similar for younger and older adults (Experiment 3). Together the findings indicate that older adults are able to use semantic context and the probability of stimulus relatedness to anticipate target information. Although aging may be associated with a delay in the timing by which controlled expectancies are expressed, these findings argue against an age-related decline in the ability to represent contextual information.