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

Abstract

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. The developmental period of adulthood covers a large time span, from age 18 or 21 to death. A variety of strategies for dividing this long period into shorter age-based periods have been recommended. For example, Erikson’s (1950) theory of psycho-social development includes distinctive stages defined by person-ality developmental tasks; for example, young adulthood (the 20s) is characterized as a time of concern with identity and intimacy issues, whereas middle age (the 40s) is characterized as a time of concern with generativity. Other theorists (e.g., Neugarten, 1968) have emphasized the notion of “executive personality ” in middle age, or a confident sense of command. Older adulthood in Erik-son’s theory is characterized as a time of personality integration in which the key accomplishment is a sense of integrity. Recent theorists have noted that these issues (identity, intimacy, genera-tivity, and integrity) preoccupy adults to varying degrees at all ages, although they may be particularly intense during specific periods and may take different forms at different adult ages (e.g.