These include: Losing parents and experiencing associated grief. Launching children into their own lives. Adjusting to home life without children (often referred to as the empty nest).
The most common health problems experienced during middle age are arthritis, asthma, bronchitis, coronary heart disease, diabetes, genitourinary disorders, hypertension (high blood pressure), mental disorders, and strokes (cerebrovascular accidents).
Middle adulthood, or middle age, is the time of life between ages 40 and 65. During this time, people experience many physical changes that signal that the person is aging, including gray hair and hair loss, wrinkles and age spots, vision and hearing loss, and weight gain, commonly called the middle age spread.
According to Erikson, midlife adults face the crisis of generativity vs. stagnation. This involves looking at one's life while asking the question, “Am I doing anything worthwhile?
A midlife crisis is a shift in identity that sometimes affects middle-aged adults between the ages of 40 and 60. 1 At this halfway point in life, people tend to reevaluate their lives and confront their own mortality. For some, this becomes a significant issue that affects their relationships and careers.
Midlife is viewed as a time of increased stability especially if compared with early adulthood or adolescence. A person's tendency toward extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness, the Big Five personality traits, is more consistent (McCrae & Costa, 2003).
Emotionally, the middle-aged brain is calmer, less neurotic, more capable of managing emotions, and better able to negotiate social situations (Phillips, 2011). Older adults tend to focus more on positive information and less on negative information than do younger adults.
The adult brain seems to be capable of rewiring itself well into middle age, incorporating decades of experiences and behaviors. Research suggests, for example, the middle-aged mind is calmer, less neurotic and better able to sort through social situations. Some middle-agers even have improved cognitive abilities.
During midlife, individuals juggle many competing demands, including roles as workers, spouses, parents, and adult children. They may experience precursors to health problems (e.g., high cholesterol) or some of the same conditions as their parents (e.g., diabetes).
According to Levinson, the change to middle adulthood requires that the adult male come to grips with what 4 major conflicts? 1) being young vs old, 2) being destructive vs constructive, 3) being masculine vs feminine & 4) being attached vs separated. Go through complete/total reassessment of their life.
While many may suspect that people's personalities are fixed in childhood, new research suggests that most people's personalities evolve throughout their lives.
Yankner says the middle-aged brain has learned from experience, as well as from social connections, which also helps to strengthen cognitive function. The brain at midlife also appears capable of rewiring itself and generating new neurons in response to physical activity and new experiences.
Mental health problems are common among seniors and may include isolation, affective and anxiety disorders, dementia, and psychosis, among others. Many seniors also suffer from sleep and behavioral disorders, cognitive deterioration or confusion states as a result of physical disorders or surgical interventions.
According to Kohlberg, middle age adults are in the final stage of moral development called postconventional morality. Middle-aged adults become more interested in establishing and living by their personal values.
Those who suffer from poor health, poor relationships, and feel that they have no control over their fate are more likely to experience feelings of stagnation. If you are feeling this way, there are things that you can do to feel more productive and involved.
Dramatic changes in appearance, behavior or self-care. Excessive indecisiveness. Feelings of anger, boredom, emptiness, irritability, loss of purpose, nostalgia, resentment, sadness or being unfulfilled. Financial irrationality and excessive spending.
Some start as late as age 50. There is no universal consensus on what the exact definition of middle age is, but usual characteristics include the beginning of rapid decline of fertility, graying of hair, and lessening of opportunities.
It is in early and middle adulthood that muscle strength, reaction time, cardiac output, and sensory abilities begin to decline. One of the key signs of aging in women is the decline in fertility, culminating in menopause, which is marked by the cessation of the menstrual period.
In middle adulthood the crisis develops between the sense of generativity and the sense of stagnation. In this stage the individual is expected to play the role of a contributing, generative member of society.
Current results demonstrate that middle-aged adults perform better on four out of six cognitive tasks than those same individuals did when they were young adults. Verbal memory, spatial skills, inductive reasoning (generalizing from particular examples), and vocabulary increase with age until one's 70s.
He identified seven stages of an adult's life, including Early Adult Transition (age 17-22), Entering the Adult World (22-28), Age 30 Transition (28-33), Settling Down (33-40), Mid-Life Transition (40-45), Entering Middle Adulthood (45-50), and Late Adulthood (60+).
found that scores on Extraversion generally declined from age 30 to 90 although the drop in Extraversion was more pronounced after the mid 50s or so.
The available evidence suggests that, from young adulthood through middle age, mean levels of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness increase, whereas levels of Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience decline— although findings have varied somewhat across studies, especially for these last three domains.