Lifespan

11 Key excerpts on "Lifespan"

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  eBook - ePub

  Life-span Development

  Frameworks, Accounts and Strategies

  • Leonie Sugarman(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Annual Review of Psychology included its first review of life-span developmental psychology, defining it as a discipline concerned with the description, explanation, and modification (optimisation) of within-individual change and stability from birth (or possibly from conception) to death and of between-individual differences and similarities in within-individual change (Baltes, Reese, & Lipsitt, 1980). Since the publication of this review the area has been accepted into the mainstream of psychology and its aims have remained largely unchanged.

  Change and continuity

  To live is to change. This truism is implicit in the notion of life-span development. We are each palpably different from the person we were 10 years ago and the person we will be in 10, 20, or 30 years’ time. Life-span developmental psychology is concerned with documenting, explaining, and influencing these changes. In Activity 1.2 you are asked to think about your own life in a different way to the Lifeline exercise – a way that will probably direct attention to how different we all are at different ages.

  However, despite the changes that beset all of us as we grow up and grow older, we do not become totally different people. The life course is characterised by continuity as well as change, and we operate on the assumption that past behaviour and temperament are reliable guides to the future. Thus, we might talk about someone acting “out of character” and in writing a job reference might strive to predict future performance on the basis of past and present achievements. The tension between change and continuity is taken up in more detail elsewhere – through an overview of change, consistency and chaos as concepts for organising life-span data (in Chapter 3), and through discussion of the concepts of dynamic continuity and narrative construction (in Chapter 7).

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  Psychology at the Turn of the Millennium, Volume 2

  Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives

  • Lars Backman, Claes von Hofsten(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  When early studies of child development were extended up to and across stages of adulthood, new ways of thinking about how lives are organized and change emerged. As changing lives often reflect changing times, this greater span of study called for theories that would place lives in context. Life-span psychologists have increasingly focused only on typical trajectories of development and aging, with little interest in the developmental implications of historical variation, whereas life-course ideas in sociology produced a theoretical orientation on age-graded social pathways. This orientation to the life course calls attention to a set of principles; to human development and aging as lifelong processes, the role of human agency and choice-making, timing and the interdependence of lives, and their historical time and place. Each of these principles orients research on human development in context. By extending the field of study across life stages, we see that individuals’ own life histories form a context with behavioral implications. The timing of events and transitions in lives brings life stage and past experience together in a developmental context. Individuals select social environments and thereby construct their own life course. Linked lives specify the behavioral influence of interpersonal contexts. The principle of historical time and place relates life changes and aging to specific historical times and places.

  Life-course concepts are well suited to research on aging that follows children into young adulthood and the later years. They locate the individual along diverse social pathways and link their life course to the changes taking place in society. Children of the Great Depression, for example, entered World War II and benefited from postwar prosperity in their 40s. However, we know little about social-structural effects and historical changes across the entire life course

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  Lives in Time and Place

  The Problems and Promises of Developmental Science

  • R. A. Settersten(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Earlier notions of these concepts were at least in principle based on holistic conceptions of human lives (O’Rand & Krecker, 1990). The dominant theme was borrowed from biology: maturation and growth, followed by decline and regression. Only as a minor subtopic did the idea of lifelong development, whether actual or potential, begin to surface (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998). As the study of human lives has become more elaborate, its treatments have become more differentiated across disciplinary and methodological lines; even disciplinary treatments have become very specialized. While the terms “life course,” “life span,” and “life cycle” are often used interchangeably, most disciplines have a preference for one over the others. For example, the term “life course” is generally used by sociologists, the term “life span” by psychologists, and the term “life cycle” by biologists (and also by sociologists of the “family life cycle”). 2 These terms differ in their intellectual origins and concerns. As we shall see, one of the emphases of the life-course perspective in sociology is what Nydegger (1986a) has called the “role course”: age-related role transitions that are “socially created, socially recognized, and shared” (Hagestad & Neugarten, 1985, p. 35). The life-course perspective also focuses on the collective experiences of groups, and on the social forces that structure lives. In contrast, the life-span orientation in psychology emphasizes “intra-psychic” (or interior) phenomena and changes in these phenomena over the span of an individual’s life. In contrast, the term “life cycle,” strictly defined, refers to “maturational and generational processes driven by mechanisms of reproduction in natural populations” (O’Rand & ICrecker, 1990, p. 242)

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  Contextual Influences on Life Span/life Course

  A Special Issue of Research in Human Development

  • Jacquelynne S. Eccles(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Lifespan Psychology: From Developmental Contextualism to Developmental Biocultural Co-constructivism

  Paul Β. Baltes and Jacqui SmithMax Planck Institute for Human Development

  Lifespan psychology has always been associated with a family of scripts about development and aging. An initial set of scripts included proposals about developmental contextualism at the macro-level (e.g., age-graded, history-graded, and non normative influences). Recent theoretical efforts to link evolutionary and ontogenetic perspectives engendered an additional set of interrelated scripts about the nature and consequences of human development. Proposals about the biocultural architecture of the Lifespan highlight its inherent incompleteness and aging-based increase in incompleteness and vulnerability. Age-related differences in the overall allocation of resources (from growth to maintenance and the regulation of loss) as well as the general-purpose mechanisms of selection, optimization, and compensation orchestrate adaptive development and aging within the constraints of the biocultural architecture. We argue that this package of conceptions converges with the notion of developmental biocultural co-constructivism and specifies the zone within which human development can be expressed.

  Without downgrading the role of alternative theoretical endeavors and their powerful impact on the developmental sciences (see Elder, 1998; Lerner, 2002; and Magnusson, 1996, for reviews), Lifespan researchers like to argue that their theoretical orientations have considerably enriched, if not transformed, the field of developmental psychology (e.g., P. B. Baltes, 1987, 1997; P. B. Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998; Staudinger & Lindenberger, 2003). In essence, the Lifespan orientation was designed not only to highlight that development continues beyond childhood and adolescence but also to bring to the foreground additional content phenomena and principles of determination. When researchers view development as being lifelong rather than as restricted to a single age period, topics such as wisdom, intergenerational dynamics, and the influence of changing historical contexts on individual development spring to mind. Consider, for instance, the changes in the directional influence and power of reciprocal socialization when contrasting parents and infants with the counterpart situation in the second half of life, parents and their adult children (Hetherington & Baltes, 1988). Or consider the consequences of the historical increase in average life expectancy, from about 45 years in 1900 to about 80 years in the year 2000. Such dramatic focal changes on social transactions or history-conditioned phenomena are more difficult to identify when the theoretical lens is set for only a single age period, such as childhood.

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  Handbook of the Psychology of Aging

  • (Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Research on Human Development . 2004;1:123–144.

  8. Baltes PB, Staudinger UM, Lindenberger U. Life-span psychology: Theory and application to intellectual functioning. Annual Review of Psychology . 1999;50:471–507.

  9. Baltes PB, Willis SL. Toward psychological theories of aging and development. In: Birren JE, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of the psychology of aging . New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold; 1977:128–154.

  10. Bengtson VL, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of theories of aging . New York, NY: Springer Publishing Co; 1999.

  11. Birren JE, Birren BA. The concepts, models, and history of the psychology of aging. In: Birren JE, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of the psychology of aging . 3rd ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press; 1990:3–34.

  12. Birren JE, Cunningham W. Research on the psychology of aging: Principles, concepts and theory. In: Birren JE, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of the psychology of aging . 2nd ed. New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold; 1985:3–34.

  13. Birren JE, Kenyon GM, Ruth JE, Schroots JF, Swensson T, eds. Aging and biography: Explorations in adult development . New York, NY: Springer Publishing Co; 1995.

  14. Birren JE, Schroots JJF. History, concepts and theory in the psychology of aging. In: Birren JE, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of the psychology of aging . 4th ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press; 1996:3–23.

  15. Birren JE, Schroots JJF. History of geropsychology. In: Birren JE, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of the psychology of aging . 5th ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press; 2001:3–28.

  16. Birren JE, Schroots JJF. Autobiographic memory and the narrative self over the life span. In: Birren JE, Schaie KW, eds. Handbook of the psychology of aging . 6th ed. San Diego, CA: Elsevier; 2006:477–499.

  17. Bosworth HB, Schaie KW, Willis SL. Cognitive and socio-demographic risk factors for mortality in the Seattle Longitudinal. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences . 1999;54B:P273–P282.

  18. Carstensen LL. Motivation for social contact across the life span: A theory of socio-emotional selectivity. In: Jacobs J, ed. Nebraska symposium on motivation: Developmental perspectives on emotion

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  Adolescence and Adulthood

  Transitions and Transformations

  • Leo Hendry, Marion Kloep(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  Stage Theories of Lifespan Development

  Summary

  In this chapter on stage theories we examine:

  Four influential stage theories looking at human development over the Lifespan;

  Differences and similarities in these theories; and

  Criticisms of these theories.

  Introduction

  In this book, we are exploring and explaining the various psychological and psychosocial transitions from adolescence through adulthood into old age, and the transformations that accompany these changes and developments. The discipline of Developmental Psychology has for a long time been dealing only with the childhood years – and sometimes still does. Yet, there is no question that ‘things do happen’ across the whole of the life course and these events will make people change at any age. Actually, it might be a terrifying thought if there were no developments or changes beyond the teenage years! Fortunately, not all scientists and academics endorse the notion that development only occurs during childhood, or at best into adolescence. Already by the beginning of the last century there were pioneers who posited theories of human development from birth to death. In this chapter we will present a brief description of their views.

  Most of us will remember our childhood embarrassment when some relative we met only from time-to-time greeted us with an exclamation such as ‘Oh, how much you have grown!’ Yet, now we have to bite our tongue whenever we occasionally meet our friends’ children – because, yes, in the interim they have grown! Not only have they grown. Pimply, grumpy teenagers change into confident and friendly young adults, who change into successful career people, who again transform into respectable senior citizens, spoiling their grandchildren as they would never have done with their own children. While observing these changes, we are hardly aware of what is happening to ourselves, until we notice the reactions of others as they perceive us differently from a few years ago.

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  Psychology for Medicine and Healthcare

  • Susan Ayers, Richard de Visser(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  8 Psychosocial Development across the Lifespan

  Chapter Contents

  • 8.1 Childhood
    • 8.1.1 Attachment and development
    • 8.1.2 Breastfeeding and development
    • 8.1.3 Language development
    • 8.1.4 Intellectual development
  • 8.2 Adolescence
    • 8.2.1 Psychological aspects of puberty
    • 8.2.2 Cognition, risk taking, and identity
  • 8.3 Adulthood
  • 8.4 Old age
    • 8.4.1 Health promotion among the elderly
    • 8.4.2 Ageing and psychological wellbeing
    • 8.4.3 Healthcare of older people
  • Tables
    • 8.1 Erikson’s model of Lifespan development
    • 8.2 Attachment styles in the ‘strange situation’
    • 8.3 Comparison of ‘parentese’ and speech between adults
    • 8.4 Children’s explanation of illness
  • Case study
    • 8.1 Successful ageing
  • Figures
    • 8.1 Still face study – infants become distressed if carers do not respond to them
    • 8.2 Mother-baby interaction and motherese
    • 8.3 Piaget’s stage model of intellectual development
  • Research boxes
    • 8.1 Community-based support for breastfeeding
    • 8.2 Child-friendly interventions enhance understanding of illness

  Learning Objectives

  This chapter is designed to enable you to:

  • Describe the major psychosocial developmental changes that occur in childhood.
  • Outline how language and thinking develop through childhood and adolescence.
  • Describe the physical and psychological changes and challenges of adolescence.
  • Discuss stability and change in physical and cognitive capacity during older adulthood.
  • Appreciate how changes across the Lifespan affect practitioner–patient communication.

  Psychosocial development occurs across the Lifespan. At different ages, we acquire different cognitive and social skills and enact different social roles (see Chapter 9 ). One way of thinking about these changes is by using Erikson’s (1950) division of the Lifespan into eight stages, each characterised by a particular developmental challenge that must be resolved for optimal psychosocial functioning (see Table 8.1

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  Play in Healthcare for Adults

  Using play to promote health and wellbeing across the adult lifespan

  • Alison Tonkin, Julia Whitaker, Alison Tonkin, Julia Whitaker(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Lifespan DEVELOPMENT Julia Whitaker and Alison Tonkin

  The development of play during the course of the Lifespan changes over time and in relation to cultural and societal trends. Contemporary thinking is influenced by historical, generational and international perspectives and these will be explored in relation to the potential contribution of play as a feature of healthcare provision. As Moya (2014) suggests:

  ‘The desire for playful activities is universal, and in the human species it transcends age’. Introduction

  Lifespan development theory centers on human development, exploring the patterns of growth and change that occur as people mature over the course of their lives (Feldman 2011). The concept of Lifespan development is not a new one, with roots firmly established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hoyer 2002). This short introduction to Lifespan development theory presents a selective overview of some of the key themes linking play and Lifespan development. For a more robust and detailed coverage of this topic, there are a number of excellent resources which cover the subject in greater detail, such as the ten volumes of research edited by Baltes covering ‘Lifespan development and behaviour’ (Stassen Berger 2011).

  Nowadays, Lifespan development is considered to be a ‘meta theory’ due to the number of differing themes and approaches that contribute to the study of development (Hoyer 2002) with fields such as anthropology, sociology, genetics, neuroscience and psychology all contributing to our biological understanding of human life (Stassen Berger 2011). The developmental pathway generally follows a predictable pattern for all members of the human species, despite life-altering experiences and events that can affect the health and wellbeing of people as they grow older (Feldman 2011). These experiences may include opposing influences, such as relative wealth or deprivation; experiences of harmonious living or war; and societal issues that impact on the family unit and their associated communities. However, all development is inextricably linked to the process of aging (Hoyer 2002) and the way Lifespan development and aging are portrayed will be dependent on who is defining it and the purpose behind the definition (Heckhausen and Wrosch 2010).

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  Positive Psychology Across the Lifespan

  An Existential Perspective

  • Piers Worth, Piers Worth(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  Change in and over time

  Our journey of development – Lifespan developmental perspectives of change

  Piers Worth

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003132530-2

  The ‘what’ and ‘when’ of change?

  Learning objectives:

  At the end of this chapter, you will

  • Understand and explore five theories of adult development.
  • Recognise and explore the interconnected model of five key developmental theories and how this may be related to and utilised in personal or client work.
  • Reflect upon the unfolding patterns evident in the human Lifespan and consider how this varies from your current understanding of the Lifespan.
  • Understand the strengths and limitations of this research, and how this subject can be further explored.

  This chapter represents an updating, revision and extension of Worth’s (2016 ) chapter titled Positive Development – Our Journey of Growth. Building on Chapter 2 of the original ‘Second Wave Positive Psychology’ book which presented four theories, on human development (Erikson, Levinson, Vaillant and McAdams) separately, this chapter will contain additional content and a perspective on each of these theories, and then be presented as a single model. Seen as a single model, this may support a depth of understanding and insight of our humanity over time. Lifespan developmental psychology is a theoretical perspective based on multi-disciplinary methodologies to portray characteristics of individual development over age and time (Baltes, 1987 ). These studies tend to be large and long-term. Alternative methods for studying Lifespan development are considered at the end of the chapter.

  Erik Erikson – the life cycle

  Erikson’s (1958 /1980, 1963) theory of the life cycle is arguably the most comprehensive of the Lifespan theories in covering childhood through to old age. His theory was the first major whole-life developmental perspective offered in modern times and was a milestone in the history of psychology for that reason. Some may consider this dated, yet more recent work, for example, the Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development (Vaillant, 1977 , 2002 , 2012

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  The Adult Development of C.G. Jung (RLE: Jung)

  • John-Raphael Staude(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  However, there was little attention to adulthood and later life. Psychologists assumed that personality was controlled by inheritance, therefore research focused on the description of the unfolding of inborn patterns. To the extent that the later periods of life were studied at all, this research was done under the rubrics of gerontology and geriatrics. The model employed was one of pathology not one of normal adult development. Until quite recently most persons calling themselves developmental psychologists were primarily interested in children and not really interested in life-span developmental psychology. The serious study of normal adult development in American psychology was inaugurated by G. Stanley Hall early in the twentieth century. His book, Adolescence, published in 1904, became a standard text on the subject for many years. In this work he viewed the strains of the pre-adult years both in terms of physiological changes and in terms of adaptation to changing norms and expectations of the adult social world. Towards the end of his long career, Hall began to investigate the aging process. Finally in 1922 he published his book Senescence: The Last Half of Life, in which he presented an interpretation of the life course in terms of a theory of life stages. Only in the 1920s and 1930s did psychologists begin to take seriously the influence of culture and the environment in shaping behavior. Some of these psychologists, the behaviorists, saw the personality as a tabula rasa on which the social environment could stamp almost any pattern of behavior. Others saw the personality as a pattern of behavior that emerged from the interaction of the human organism with its social environment. In this view the organism was considered to possess an active force that made demands on the social environment and was at the same time, at least to some extent, shaped by adaptation to its environment

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  Handbook of Psychology, Developmental Psychology

  • Irving B. Weiner, Richard M. Lerner, M. Ann Easterbrooks, Jayanthi Mistry(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  In the initial chapter in this section, Siegler, Bosworth, Davey, and Elias note that most of the ongoing research in developmental health psychology has been incremental, with the emphasis on qualitative changes most prominent at the start of adulthood. Fears about demographic transitions have increased as Baby Boomers (born between 1946 to 1964) began to turn 65 in 2011. Accordingly, the authors review new findings on centenarians, risk and prevention of cognitive decline, and management of multiple chronic disorders in the elderly. They note that major changes in the understanding of the bases of health among aged groups that may occur in the next 10 years will not necessarily come from psychology, but from other disciplines. If, for instance, there are advances in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, such work will change later life and the health psychology of aging. In the absence of such advances, however, the authors believe that society will be faced with many dependent older persons with needs for long-term care.

  In their chapter on cognitive development in adulthood Dixon, McFall, Whitehead, and Dolcos discuss five aspects of cognitive development in adulthood and aging. Specifically, the chapter includes attention to (a) foundational issues in the study of cognitive change over many years of adulthood; (b) two enduring cognitive topics in the field, namely, intelligence and memory; (c) the long-standing but under-studied roles that biological and health conditions play in cognitive aging; (d) the recent and novel topic of emotional and affective influences on cognition throughout adulthood; and (e) the historically intriguing question of whether and how sustained cognitive health can be detected or promoted in normal aging.

  In the next chapter in this section, Bertrand, Kranz Graham, and Lachman note that personality development in adulthood and old age has been the focus of considerable research over the last several decades, amassing a body of literature that is richly diverse in theoretical and methodological approaches. The authors define and examine the nature of personality in adulthood and old age from diverse perspectives and consider issues of stability, continuity, and change. They focus on the impact of individual differences in personality on health and well-being in multiple domains (e.g., cognitive functioning) throughout the life span and discuss the impact of variations in personality due to such factors as gender, culture, and the antecedents of personality change. In addition, they review theoretical approaches and present current major perspectives in the field, including traits, life-span developmental, contextual, self, and phenomenological approaches. Some of the major findings regarding subjective personality change and personality as a predictor of later life outcomes are discussed. They also examine specific aspects of the self-construct, such as identity, self-efficacy and control, well-being, and emotion regulation. Finally, the authors summarize the current state of the adult personality literature, especially the focus on identifying mechanisms.

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