Journal of Adult Development最新文献

A set of hypotheses derived from the integrative theory of intrinsic motivation was evaluated with a sample of 607 adults. Three adult age groups were compared with respect to two sets of variables associated with intrinsic motivation. One set of measures pertained to four predictive characteristics of intrinsic motivation: self-determination, developing competence in the form of a balance of challenges and skills, self-realization values, and engaged performance in the form of effort. The second set related to four subjective experiences associated with intrinsic motivation: interest, flow experiences, feelings of personal expressiveness, and hedonic enjoyment. A brief version of the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire was used to assess these variables. Significant positive associations were found for inter-relationships among the predictive characteristics, among the subjective experience variables, and between the predictive characteristics and the subjective experiences. Further, there was a cumulative impact of the predictive characteristics for their relationships with each of the subjective experiences of intrinsic motivation. These relationships held for each of the three age groups, with minimal evidence of differences in the strength of the relationships by age group. This indicates that adults, across these age groups, experience intrinsic motivation when the predictor variables are present at high levels. The findings here are compared with earlier research conducted with emerging adult college student samples.

The transition to adulthood has become delayed, with college completion often diverging by socioeconomic background, specifically maternal education. On time, late, or never completing college can have health ramifications that reverberate into the lives of aging mothers. Using dyadic data from Waves I, III, IV, and V of Add Health and Waves I and II of Add Health Parent Study, we used logistic regression to assess whether the adult childrens’ college timing completion was associated with their aging mothers’ self-rated health. We also considered variation by mothers’ educational attainment. Results showed adult childrens’ college completion, whether on time or late, was associated with better maternal self-rated health relative to having adult children who did not complete college. We found no evidence that college completion timing and mothers’ self-rated health varied by mothers’ educational attainment.

Interpersonal escalating commitment is an individual’s continued investment in a social partner regardless of the receiver’s negative feedback. It reflects the effort that people devote into maintaining and managing interpersonal relationships. This study focused on the effect of relationship closeness on interpersonal escalating commitment among older and younger adults and the mediating role of emotional experiences. We performed a 2 (relationship closeness: close/distant) × 2 (age group: younger adults/older adults) mixed design. Forty-eight older adults (aged 60–82) and forty-nine younger adults (aged 18–28) were enrolled in this study. Participants completed eight interpersonal escalating commitment tasks that were derived from real-life situations. Participants’ final and average tendency to escalate commitment and emotional experiences was recorded. The within-subject mediation analysis results indicated that older adults showed a higher tendency to escalate commitment in close relationships through the mediation of positive emotional experiences; younger adults did not exhibit excessive interpersonal escalating commitment even though their final tendency to invest in distant relationships was relatively higher than in close relationships. Our findings revealed an age difference in the effect of relationship closeness on interpersonal escalating commitment and the driving mechanism of emotional experiences among older adults. It allowed us to understand the reasoning behind people’s seemingly irrational interpersonal investments from a perspective of lifespan motivation.

An abundance of research documents that daily negative events are linked to short- and long-term health outcomes across adulthood. One key resource that is less studied in potentially mitigating the impact of daily negative events is neighborhood context. Up to this point, much of the research has included social characteristics of neighborhood context, whereas less is known regarding economic and physical characteristics. This study explores whether and to what extent social, economic, and physical neighborhood characteristics moderate the impact of daily negative and positive events on daily well-being as measured by daily levels of positive and negative affect. We use data from a sample of participants in midlife (n = 191, ages 40–65) who completed a daily survey for 30 consecutive days. Multilevel models showed that daily negative events were associated with poorer daily well-being and daily positive events were predictive of higher daily well-being. Living in a neighborhood with more income inequality was associated with stronger declines in daily well-being on days when individuals experienced a negative event. Neighborhood greenness was associated with reporting better well-being on days when a positive event occurred. The findings suggest that the neighborhood context can strengthen or mitigate changes in daily well-being when negative and positive events occur. The discussion elaborates on how the findings can inform interventions aimed at lessening the consequences of daily negative events and elucidates future research aimed at exploring potential mechanisms underlying the associations found.

Dual tasking refers to the ability to perform two concurrent tasks. Using the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, two experiments examined whether providing a prompt that facilitated proactive control could benefit dual-task performance among younger and older adults. In Experiment 1, difficulty-related prompt words (“difficult,” “easy,” or null) were presented before easier dual tasks with a longer stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 800 ms or harder tasks with a shorter SOA of 100 ms. Experiment 2 extended the investigation by presenting these prompts (“difficult” or “easy”) before dual tasks with a fixed SOA of 150 ms. It also examined the moderating effects of actual task difficulty by manipulating task congruency. Both experiments suggested that proactive control triggered by difficulty-related prompts facilitated dual-task performance in both age groups. Notably, prompts benefited younger adults’ dual-task performance only when the actual task difficulty was relatively higher, but they benefited older adults’ dual-task performance regardless of the actual task difficulty. These findings contribute to our understanding of proactive control and the different effects of prompts on cognitive performance among younger and older adults.

Overprotective parenting refers to parents’ provision of developmentally inappropriate protection and is associated with dysfunctional developmental processes and outcomes in adolescence and emerging adulthood. In the present study, we examined whether perceived overprotective parenting is potentially associated with identity synthesis and identity confusion, as the development of a coherent sense of identity is conceived as one of the primary goals of adolescence and emerging adulthood. Thereby, we also tested whether developmentally regulatory strategies of goal engagement and disengagement are intervening variables in the association between overprotective parenting and identity. Participants were 318 Georgian emerging adults (M_age = 23.41, 58% female). Path analyses indicated that perceived overprotective parenting was directly associated with less identity synthesis and more identity confusion. It was found that overprotection was unrelated to goal engagement, but was associated with more goal disengagement. Goal engagement, in turn, was positively associated with identity synthesis and negatively associated with identity confusion, whereas goal disengagement was positively associated with identity confusion. These results suggest that overprotective parenting creates a family context that is negatively associated with the successful resolution of the identity formation task. Goal disengagement, a relatively passive, avoidant developmental strategy, particularly played an intervening role in this association between overprotection and identity confusion.

Abstract

During the transition from infancy to preschool years, children develop controlling-caregiving and controlling-punitive attachments, in addition to continuing to show disorganized behaviors, as part of a larger disorganized attachment spectrum. Despite advances in understanding disorganization in young adulthood, little is known about the controlling patterns and their relations to psychological health. This is likely due to a scarcity of well-validated and cost-effective measures assessing all three disorganized patterns in young adulthood. The Childhood Disorganization and Role Reversal Scale (CDRR) addresses this need by assessing dimensions of disorganization and role reversal, such as hostility, child affective caregiving, and child punitiveness, in addition to appropriate parent–child boundaries. Since the CDRR is a recent measure, this study aimed to further validate it by (a) evaluating whether its factor structure replicates in a university student sample (N = 286, M(SD) = 19.3(1.6); 74.48% female) and (b) assessing its construct validity through associations with conceptually relevant constructs such as childhood adversity, internalizing problems (depression and anxiety), and subjective well-being (happiness, life satisfaction, and meaning in life). Confirmatory factor analyses provided evidence for the original four-factor structure CDRR with mothers (Disorganized/Punitive, Affective Caregiving, Mutual Hostility, Appropriate Boundaries) and fathers (Disorganized, Affective Caregiving, Punitive, Appropriate Boundaries). Associations with childhood adversity, internalizing problems, and subjective well-being were in the expected directions. Overall, the results provide additional evidence for the validity of the CDRR and the importance of evaluating disorganized and controlling attachments in young adulthood.

Abstract

Adulthood has traditionally been defined by the attainment of socio-demographic milestones such as career, marriage, and parenthood, but these milestones are increasingly delayed or have become inaccessible for young people today. As a result, young people are likely to experience a discrepancy between their expectations for and their actual reality of adulthood, which can negatively affect their well-being and psychological development. To systematically study contemporary definitions of and attitudes towards adulthood, we assessed a sample of 722 UK adults with an age range from 18 to 77 years on: (a) subjective adult status, or the extent to which people feel like adults; (b) attitudes towards adulthood, or whether people think adulthood is a positive time of life; and (c) the characteristics that people use to define adulthood today. We found that most participants felt adult and had positive attitudes towards adulthood. Our participants defined adulthood predominantly through psychological characteristics, for example “Accepting responsibility for the consequences of my actions” (endorsed by 80% of the sample), rather than by socio-demographic milestones which were endorsed by only 22–40% of participants. Both subjective adult status and attitudes towards adulthood were significantly associated with older age and the attainment of the socio-demographic milestones of marriage and parenthood. Regression analyses revealed that having a positive attitude towards adulthood was the strongest psychological predictor of subjective adult status, accounting for 10% of the variance. This suggests that fostering positive attitudes towards adulthood may help improving the well-being of contemporary adults.