Title: CHAPTER 11 SELF AND PERSONALITY
1CHAPTER 11SELF AND PERSONALITY
2Learning Objectives
- How is the personality typically defined, and
what are the five principles of defining
personality? - How do psychoanalytic, trait, and social-learning
theories explain personality development?
3Conceptualizing the Self and Personality
- Personality
- An organized combination of attributes, motives,
values, and behaviors unique to each individual - Often described in terms of relatively enduring
dispositional traits (extraversion or
introversion, independence or dependence)
4Conceptualizing the Self and Personality
- Personality (continued)
- Characteristic adaptations
- Situation-specific and changeable ways in which
people adapt to their roles and environments - Motives, plans, goals, schemas, self-conceptions,
stage-specific concerns, coping mechanisms - Narrative identities
- Unique and integrative life stories that
construct to give ourselves an identity and
meaning to our lives
5Conceptualizing the Self and Personality
- Our self-perceptions
- Self-concept
- Our perceptions positive, negative, realistic,
unrealistic of our attributes and traits as a
person - Self-esteem
- Our overall evaluation of our worth as a person
based upon the positive and negative
self-perceptions that constitute our self-concept - Identity
- Our overall sense of who we are and how we fit
into society
6Conceptualizing the Self and Personality
- Psychoanalytic theory
- Psychoanalytic theorists use in-depth interviews,
dream analysis, etc. to understand personality - Trait theory
- Trait theorists construct personality scales and
use the statistical technique of factor analysis
to identify groupings of personality scale items
that correlate with each other but not with other
grouping of items
7Conceptualizing the Self and Personality
- Currently, there is agreement that personality
can be described in terms of a five-factor model. - Five dimensions of personality known as the Big
Five - Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
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9Conceptualizing the Self and Personality
- Social-learning theorists reject the notion of
universal stages of personality development,
question the existence of enduring personality
traits, and emphasize that people change if their
environments change - From the social-learning perspective, personality
is a set of behavioral tendencies shaped by
interactions with other people in specific social
situations
10Learning Objectives
- How do infants develop a sense of self?
- What behaviors do researchers accept as evidence
of infants self-awareness? - What is temperament?
- How do researchers define and describe
temperament?
11The Infant The Emerging Self
- Infants develop an implicit sense of self through
their perceptions of their bodies and actions - In the first 2 or 3 months, infants discover they
can cause things to happen - After 6 months, infants realize they and other
people are separate beings with different
perspectives, ones that can be shared - Illustrated by joint attention
- About 9 months, infants and their companions
share perceptual experiences by looking at the
same object at the same time - When an infant points at an object and looks
toward her companions to attempt to focus their
attention on the object, she shows awareness that
self and other do not always share the same
perceptions
12The Infant The Emerging Self
- Around 18 months, infants recognize themselves
visually as distinct individuals - Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) demonstrated the
development of self-recognition by putting a dot
of rouge on a babys nose and placing the infant
in front of a mirror - Infants 18 to 24 months of age touched their
noses rather than the mirror, which indicated
they thought they had a strange mark on their
faces evidence of self-recognition -
13The Infant The Emerging Self
- Infants develop a categorical self
- Classify themselves into social categories based
on age, sex, and other characteristics - What is like me and what is not like me
- By age 2, infants master the task of
distinguishing between photos of themselves and
photos of other infants of the same sex
14The Infant The Emerging Self
- What contributes to self-awareness in infancy?
- Cognitive development
- Ability to recognize the self
- Social interaction
- Social relationships that enable secure
attachments - Social feedback positive and negative
15The Infant Temperament
- The study of infant personality has centered on
dimensions of temperament early, genetically
based tendencies to respond in predictable ways
to events - Easiness and difficultness
- Thomas and Chess (1986, 1999) and colleagues
studied nine dimensions of infant behavior,
including - Typical mood
- Regularity or predictability of biological
functions - Tendency to approach or withdraw from new stimuli
- Intensity of emotional reactions
- Adaptability to new experiences and changes in
routine
16The Infant Temperament
- Categories of temperament
- Easy temperament
- Infants are even tempered, typically content or
happy, open and adaptable to new experiences,
have regular feeding and sleeping habits, and are
tolerant of frustrations and discomforts - Difficult temperament
- Infants are active, irritable, and irregular in
their habits, often react negatively (and
vigorously) to changes in routine, are slow to
adapt to new people or situations, cry frequently
and loudly, and often have tantrums - Slow-to-warm-up temperament
- Infants are relatively inactive, somewhat moody,
only moderately regular in their daily schedules,
slow to adapt to new people and situations, but
they typically respond in mildly, rather than
intensely, negative ways.
17The Infant Temperament
- Jerome Kagan identified another aspect of early
temperament behavioral inhibition - The tendency to be shy, restrained, and
distressed in response to unfamiliar people and
situations - Kagan and his colleagues have concluded that
behavioral inhibition is biologically rooted - Individuals with inhibited temperaments display
strong brain responses and high heart rates in
reaction to unfamiliar stimuli
18The Infant Temperament
- Rothbart and colleagues defined infant
temperament in terms of emotional reactions and
the control/regulation of such reactions - Identified three dimensions of temperament
- Surgency/extraversion the tendency to actively
and energetically approach new experiences in an
emotionally positive way (rather than to be
inhibited and withdrawn) - Negative affectivity the tendency to be sad,
fearful, easily frustrated, and irritable (as
opposed to laid back and adaptable) - Effortful control the ability to focus and
shift attention when desired, control ones
behavior and plan a course of action, and
regulate or suppress ones emotions
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20The Infant Temperament
- Thomas and Chess referred to the goodness of fit
between a child and her environment - The extent to which the childs temperament is
compatible with the demands and expectations of
the social world to which she must adapt - Infants temperaments and their parents
parenting behaviors reciprocally influence one
another and interact over time to steer the
direction of later personality development
21Leaning Objectives
- What changes occur in the development of
childrens self-esteem? - What factors influence self-esteem?
- How does personality evolve over childhood, and
what do children understand of their personality?
22The Child Elaborating on the Sense of Self
- Toddlers give evidence of their emerging
self-concepts - By age 2, toddlers may use the personal pronouns
I, me, my, and mine when referring to the self
and you when addressing another person - Toddlers show their emerging categorical selves
when they describe themselves in terms of age and
sex
23The Child Elaborating on the Sense of Self
- The preschool childs self-concept is concrete
and physical - A preschoolers self-description focuses on
physical characteristics, possessions, physical
activities, accomplishments, and preferences - Young children typically do not mention their
psychological traits or inner qualities
24The Child Elaborating on the Sense of Self
- Around age 8, psychological and social qualities
become prominent in self-descriptions - Describe their enduring qualities using
personality trait terms, such as funny or smart - Form social identities, define themselves as part
of social units - Im a Kimberly, a second-grader at Brookside
School, a Brownie Scout. - Become more capable of social comparison using
information about how they compare with other
children to characterize and evaluate themselves - Im the fastest runner in my class
25The Child Self-Esteem
- Susan Harter (1999, 2003, 2006) has found that
self-esteem becomes more differentiated or
multi-dimensional with age - Preschoolers distinguish two aspects of
self-esteem - Their competence (physical and cognitive)
- Their personal and social adequacy (social
acceptance). - By mid-elementary school, children differentiate
among five aspects of self-worth - Scholastic competence
- Social acceptance
- Behavioral conduct
- Athletic competence
- Physical appearance.
26- Caption The multidimensional and hierarchical
nature of self-esteem
27The Child Self-Esteem
- As children age, they integrate their
self-perceptions in the five distinct domains to
form an overall, abstract sense of self-worth - Self-esteem becomes multidimensional and
hierarchical - Global self-worth is at the top of the hierarchy
- The accuracy of childrens self-evaluations
increases over the elementary school years - Children form a sense of what they should be
like an ideal self - With age, the gap between the real self and the
ideal self increases, which contributes to a
decrease in average self-esteem from early to
middle childhood
28The Child Influences on Self-Esteem
- Influences on self-esteem
- Heredity
- Competence
- Social feedback
- Secure attachment to warm, democratic parents
- Self-esteem remains stable over the elementary
school years - High self-esteem is positively correlated with a
variety of measures of good adjustment
29The Child The Developing Personality
- During childhood, temperament interacts with
individual social experiences and evolves into
predictable personality - Researchers are finding links between the
dimensions of temperament and Big Five
personality trait dimensions - Exact relationships are unclear
- Many aspects of personality do not stabilize
until the elementary school years, or
adolescence, or adulthood
30Learning Objectives
- How do adolescents conceptualize their selves,
including self-esteem and personality? - What factors influence the development of
identity during adolescence? - How do adolescents make vocational choices?
- How does work affect adolescents identities?
31The Adolescent Self-Conceptions
- Compared to childrens self-descriptions, those
of adolescents - Become less physical and more psychological
- Become less concrete and more abstract
- Have a more differentiated self-concept
- Includes acceptance by a larger peer group, by
close friends, and by romantic partners - Are more integrated and coherent
- Recognizes and integrates inconsistencies
- Are more self-aware and reflective
32The Adolescent Self-Esteem
- Between childhood and early adolescence
self-esteem tends to decrease - Transition to middle or junior high school
- Physical changes of puberty
- Social context and social comparisons
- Big-fish little-pond effect occurs when the
social comparisons are changed - A good student in a class of good students is a
small fish in a big pond - A good student in a class of not-so-great
students is a big fish in a little pond
33The Adolescent Self-Esteem
- Adolescents who experienced a decrease in
self-esteem in early adolescence typically emerge
with higher self-esteem - Contributing factors
- Opportunities to feel competent in areas that are
important to them - Approval and support of parents, peers, and other
important people - As adults, adolescents with low self-esteem tend
to have poorer physical and mental health, poorer
career and financial prospects, and higher levels
of criminal behavior than adolescents with high
self-esteem
34The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Eric Erikson proposed that adolescents experience
the psychosocial conflict of identity versus role
confusion - The search for identity involves important
questions - What kind of career do I want?
- What religious, moral, and political values can I
really call my own? - Who am I as a man or woman and as a sexual being?
- Where do I fit into the world?
- What do I really want out of my life?
- The many separate perceptions that are part of
the self-concept must be integrated into a
coherent sense of self identity
35The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Erikson believed that an adolescent identity
crisis can be explained by - Changing bodies that call for a revised
self-concept and adjustment to being sexual
beings - Cognitive growth that permits systematic thinking
about hypothetical possibilities, including
possible future selves - Social demands to grow up
- According to Erikson, the moratorium period
during high school and the college years permits
adolescents to experiment with different roles to
find themselves
36The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- James Marcia (1966) expanded on Eriksons theory
and developed a procedure to assess adolescent
identity formation - Adolescents are classified into one of four
identity statuses based upon their progress
toward an identity - The key questions are
- Whether an individual has experienced a crisis
(or has seriously grappled with identity issues
and explored alternatives) - Whether an individual has achieved a commitment
(that is, resolved the questions raised)
37- Caption The four identity statuses as they apply
to religious identity
38The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- James Marcias identity statuses
- Diffusion
- No crisis and no commitment
- Foreclosure
- Commitment without a crisis
- Accepted an identity suggested by parents or
other people - Moratorium status
- Experiencing a crisis or actively exploring
identity issues - Questioning their religious upbringing,
experimenting with drugs, changing majors or
relationships - Identity achievement status
- After a period of moratorium, a commitment is made
39- Caption Percentage of subjects in each of James
Marcias four identity statuses as a function of
age
40The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- The process of identity development includes
forming an ethnic identity - A sense of personal identification with an ethnic
group and its values and cultural traditions - The ingredients of a positive ethnic identity
include - Socialization/teaching by parents regarding
cultural traditions - Preparation to live in a culturally diverse
society - Preparation to deal with prejudice in a manner
that does not breed anger and mistrust
41The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Exploring and forging a positive ethnic identity
can - Protect adolescents self-concepts from the
damaging effects of racial or ethnic
discrimination - Foster high overall self-esteem
- Help promote academic achievement and good
adjustment - Reduce depression symptoms.
42The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- The main developmental trend evident in
vocational choice is increasing realism with age - Between the ages of 11 and 18, adolescents become
more realistic and begin to make preliminary
vocational choices that consider their interests,
capacities, and values - By late adolescence or emerging adulthood,
considerations include the realities of the job
market, the physical and intellectual
requirements for different occupations, the
availability of job openings in a field, the
years of education required, and the work
conditions
43The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Some adolescents are challenged to form a
positive vocational identity - Adolescents from lower income families,
especially minority group members living in
poverty and facing limited opportunities,
discrimination, and stress, may lower their
career aspirations and aim toward jobs they are
likely to get rather than the jobs that interest
them most - The vocational choices of females have been and
continue to be constrained by traditional gender
norms
44The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Young women who have adopted traditional
gender-role attitudes for marriage and family in
early adulthood may set their educational and
vocational sights low, figuring that they cannot
have it all - Many young women do not seriously consider
traditionally male-dominated jobs, doubt their
ability to land such jobs, and aim toward
feminine-stereotyped, and often lower-status and
lower-paying, occupations - Many teens female and male do not explore a
range of possible occupations before making a
choice
45The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Progress toward identity formation in adolescent
is influenced by five factors - Cognitive growth
- The ability to contemplate possible future
identities, to think in complex and abstract
ways, and to seek information - Personality
- Low neuroticism and high levels of openness to
experience and conscientiousness - Relationships with parents
- Those who are in the moratorium and identity
achievement statuses have solid relationships
with parents who encourage autonomy
46The Adolescent Forging a Sense of Identity
- Opportunities to explore
- Exposure to diverse ideas and independent
thinking, such as occurs during a college
education - The broader cultural context
- In industrialized Western societies, adolescents
are expected to forge an identity after exploring
their options - In traditional societies, identity foreclosure
may be the most adaptive path to adulthood
47Learning Objectives
- How does personality change during adulthood?
- Why do people change or remain the same?
- How does culture influence personality
48The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Self-esteem tends rise gradually through the
adult years until the mid-60s and then for some
adults to drop in the 70s and 80s - How do most elderly people manage to maintain
positive self-images for so long, even as they
experience some of the disabilities and losses
that come with aging? By - Reducing the gap between the ideal self and the
real self - Changing standards of self-evaluation
- Making social comparisons to other old people
- Avoiding self-stereotyping
49The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Reducing the gap between the ideal self and the
real self - According to Ryffs (1991) research, older adults
scaled down their visions of what they could
ideally be and what they likely will be, possibly
because they recognized that aging brings with it
a loss of capacities - They also judged more positively what they had
been - As a result, their ideal, future, present, and
past selves converged
50The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Adjusting goals and standards of self-evaluation
- Peoples goals and standards change with age so
that what seem like losses or failures to a
younger person may not be perceived as such by
the older adult - As our goals and standards change over the
lifespan, we apply different measuring sticks in
evaluating ourselves and do not mind failing to
achieve goals that are no longer important
51The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Comparing the self to other older adults
- Older adults are able to maintain self-esteem by
making social comparisons primarily to other
older adults - With people who have the same kinds of chronic
diseases and impairments they have, or even worse
52The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Not internalizing ageist stereotypes
- Negative stereotypes we learn and that are
reinforced over the years may be applied to the
self once we being to think of ourselves as old - Research shows that negative stereotypes of aging
can affect gait (in walking) and memory
performance - Research suggests that ageist stereotypes are
harmful to behavior, health, and self-esteem,
especially among people who have come to identify
themselves as old and apply ageist stereotypes
to themselves
53The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Self-conceptions also reflect broad cultural
influences - In an individualistic culture, individuals define
themselves primarily as individuals and put their
own goals ahead of their social groups goals - North American and Western European societies
- In a collectivist culture, people define
themselves in terms of group memberships and give
group goals higher priority than personal goals - Latin America, Africa, and East Asia societies
54The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Self-conceptions in an individualistic society
such as the United States mean - Being your own person independent and different
from others - Describing ones unique personal qualities and
the personality traits believed to be apparent in
most situations and relationships - Maintaining high self-esteem
55The Adult Self-Conceptions
- Self-conceptions in a collectivist society such
as Japan mean - Being interdependent with others, embedded in
society - Believing that the self is different as the
social context or situation is different - Being more modest and self-critical, noting
inadequacies
56The Adult Continuity and Discontinuity in
Personality
- McCrae and Costas (2003, 2008) studies of
personality change and continuity revealed
consistency in rankings within a group - The person who tends to be extraverted as a young
adult is likely to be extraverted as an elderly
adult, and the introvert is likely to remain
introverted over the years - The adult who shows high or low levels of
neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, or
openness to new experiences is likely to retain
that ranking compared with that of peers years
later
57The Adult Continuity and Discontinuity in
Personality
- Studies of personality change over time find both
continuity and discontinuity in personality
during adulthood - There is a good deal of cross-age consistency in
personality - Example the person who tends to be extraverted
as a young adult is likely to be extraverted as
an elderly adult, and the introvert is likely to
remain introverted over the years - Cohort effects demonstrate that the historical
context in which people grow up affects their
personality development
58The Adult Continuity and Discontinuity in
Personality
- Personality growth from adolescence to middle
adulthood is highlighted by less excitement
seeking and openness to experience but more
maturity (emotional stability, conscientiousness,
and agreeableness) - There is little personality change from middle
adulthood to later adulthood except for decreased
activity level and openness to experience and
increased agreeableness
59The Adult Continuity and Discontinuity in
Personality
- What makes a personality stable over the
lifespan? - Heredity
- Genes contribute to individual differences in all
five of the Big Five personality factors - Lasting effects of childhood experiences
- Stable environments
- Gene-environment correlations
- Our genetic endowment may influence the kinds of
experiences we have, and those experiences, in
turn, may strengthen our genetically based
predispositions
60The Adult Continuity and Discontinuity in
Personality
- What causes changes in personality over the
lifespan? - Biological factors
- Diseases that cause nervous system deterioration
can cause moodiness, irritability, and
irresponsibility - Changes in the environment
- Poor fit between person and environment
61Learning Objectives
- What is the focus of each of Eriksons
psychosocial stages? - What factors can influence how each crisis is
resolved?
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63The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- According to Erikson, both maturational forces
and social demands push humans through eight
psychosocial crises - Later conflicts may be difficult to resolve if
early conflicts were not resolved successfully - Optimal development results in the gain of a
virtue or psychosocial strength
64The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- The path to adulthood
- Trust vs. mistrust
- Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
- Initiative vs. guilt
- Industry vs. inferiority
- Identity vs. role confusion
- Intimacy vs. isolation
- Generativity vs. stagnation
- Integrity vs. despair
65The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- Trust vs. mistrust
- Infants learn to trust others if their caregivers
are responsive to their needs - Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
- Toddlers acquire a sense of themselves as
individuals - Initiative vs. guilt
- Preschoolers develop a sense of purpose and take
pride in accomplishments
66The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- Industry vs. inferiority
- Elementary school children focus on mastering
important skills and on evaluating their
competencies - Identity vs. role confusion
- The adolescent integrates separate aspects of the
self-concept into a coherent sense of self.
67The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- Intimacy vs. isolation
- Commitment to a shared identity with another
person - Generativity vs. stagnation
- The capacity to produce something that outlives
you and to care about the welfare of future
generations
68The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- Integrity vs. despair
- Finding a sense of meaning in life that will
enable facing the inevitability of death - A sense of integrity is related to a high sense
of psychological well-being and low levels of
depression or despair
69The Adult Eriksonian Psychosocial Growth
- Butler (1963) proposed that older adults engage
in a process called life review - A reflection on unresolved conflicts of the past
in order to come to terms with themselves, find
new meaning and coherence in life, and prepare
for death - Researchers find that elders who engage in life
review display a stronger sense of integrity and
better overall adjustment and well-being than
those who do not reminisce much and those who
mainly stew about unresolved regrets
70The Adult Midlife Crisis?
- Daniel Levinson (1986, 1996) proposed a stage
theory of adulthood - Based on interviews with 40 men
- Suggested that adults build a life structure, or
pattern of living, that is altered during
transition periods approximately every 7 years - The transition period from age 40 to age 45 is a
time of midlife crisis - A person questions his life structure and
questions where he has been and where he is going - Researchers find little support for Levinsons
claim that most adults experience a genuine
crisis in their early 40s
71Learning Objectives
- How do career paths change during adulthood?
- How do adults cope with age-related changes that
affect their working selves? - How are older adults influenced by retirement?
- How can we characterize successful aging?
72The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- According to Phillips research (1982), from age
21 to age 36, young adults progressed from
wide-open exploration of different career
possibilities to tentative or trial commitments
to a stabilization of their choices - Adults often reach the peaks of their careers in
their 40s - Job performance is consistently correlated with
the Big Five dimensions of conscientiousness,
extraversion, and emotional stability
73The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Personenvironment fit is critical to work
performance - People tend to perform poorly and become open to
changing jobs when there is poor fit between
their personality and aptitudes and the demands
of their job or workplace
74The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Why do U.S. women earn about 80 cents for every
dollar men earn? - Traditional gender-role norms have prompted many
women to subordinate career goals to family goals - Earnings are affected by interruptions for
childbearing, reduced hours, relocations, or
deferred promotions - Workplace discrimination against women
- Traditionally female jobs pay less than male
jobs, even when the intellectual demands of the
work are equal - Women who enter jobs with the same management
degrees and salaries as men, and receive equal
performance ratings, still do not rise as far in
the organization or earn as much as their male
peers - Women earn about 20 less than men, even
controlling for the tendency of women to work
less, step out of the workforce more, and enter
lower-paying occupations
75The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- According to studies on aging workers
- The job performance of workers in their 50s and
60s is largely similar overall to that of younger
workers - Age was largely unrelated to quality of task
performance and creativity on the job - Older workers outperformed younger workers in
areas such as good citizenship and safety and had
fewer problems with counterproductive behavior,
aggression, substance use on the job, tardiness,
and absenteeism - Older workers did not perform as well in training
programs, possibly because many of them involved
computer technology
76The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Aging workers may be able to maintain job
performance because they use selective
optimization with compensation to cope with aging - Selection focus on a limited set of goals and
the skills most needed to achieve them - Optimization practice those skills to keep them
sharp - Compensation develop ways around the need for
other skills
77The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- In the U.S., roughly half of adults are out of
the labor force by age 62-64, two thirds are out
by age 65-69, and about 90 are out by age 70 or
older - Since the 1960s, the average age of retirement
has dropped from over 67 to 62 - Appears to be increasing as retiring baby boomers
find that they need to continue working for
financial reasons and as the age of eligibility
for full Social Security benefits increases
78The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Some workers retire all at once
- For others, retirement is a process that plays
out over a number of years - May retire gradually, cutting back work hours,
taking part-time bridge jobs, cycling in and
out of retirement several times - Retiring workers face two challenges
- Adjusting to the loss of their work role
- Developing a satisfying, meaningful lifestyle in
retirement
79The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Atchley (1976) proposed that adults transition
from worker to retiree in phases - Preretirement phase gather information, talk
about retirement, plan for the future - Honeymoon phase enjoy the newfound freedom
- Disenchantment phase feel aimless, possibly
unhappy as the novelty wears off - Reorientation phase begin to put together a
realistic and satisfying lifestyle
80The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Favorable adjustment to retirement is associated
with - Voluntary rather than involuntary retirement
- Good physical and mental health
- Financial resources to live comfortably
- Marriage or strong social support
81The Adult Vocational Development and Adjustment
- Women face challenges in their adjustment to
retirement - May feel pressured to retire if their husbands
retire or develop health problems - Have moved in and out of the workforce more and
have not earned as much as men and therefore
often find themselves with no pension and an
inadequate income in retirement - Are likely to outlive their husbands and end up
living alone
82The Adult Personality and Successful Aging
- Theories of successful aging offer insight to
successful retirement and happy, fulfilling old
age - Activity theory suggests that aging adults will
find their lives satisfying to the extent that
they can maintain their previous lifestyles and
activity levels, either by continuing old
activities or by finding substitutes (for
example, by replacing work with hobbies,
volunteer work, or other stimulating pursuits) - According to this view, psychological needs do
not really change as people enter old age most
aging individuals continue to want an active
lifestyle
83The Adult Personality and Successful Aging
- Disengagement theory suggests that successful
aging involves a withdrawal of the aging
individual from society that is satisfying to
both parties the individual and society - Because the aging individual has needs that are
different from those she once had, she seeks to
leave old roles behind and to reduce activity - Meanwhile, society both encourages and benefits
from the older persons disengagement, which
makes room for the younger generation
