Question

what are the major personality issues of middle age according to erikson, helson, vaillant, and gould? what is your conclusion, does personality change or remain stable during this period of life?

Answer 1

what are the major personality issues of middle age according to erikson, helson, vaillant, and gould? what is your conclusion, does personality change or remain stable during this period of life?

Three of the major theories of the adult stage had been proposed by Helson, valiant and Erickson.

- According to Helson, there is a theory of normative crisis that states That depending upon the sequence of events that occur in a person’s life, there occur changes in their personality, which may also be referred to as age related crisis. This theory states that Changes in the course of events, would determine the personality development of s person.

- Erikson’s theory included two aspects, of genrativity and of stagnation where a person tries to look ahead of themselves such that they could continue to the life of themselves via people surrounding them and second is the phase of stagnation, in which a person would be more involved in looking at the trivialities of the events occurring in their life.

- gould’s Approach was built on the basics that Erickson provided, in it Gould had established seven different stages of their life that Snapchat adult would pass through and the stage that consists of 35 to 43 would be the 5th stage in their life, where there is an observed urgency in a person that they would want to attain any goal that they have set for themselves as being aware of the limitations of time. The age group from 43 to 53 would be where there would occur changes in a person’s life such that they would rather want to settle down or gain acceptance of what is happening in their life.

- the approach by valiant stated that in order to maintain a balance between righty and meaning, this would occur in the age group of 45 to 55, where adults would want to find meaning from their life such that they would accept the strengths as well as weaknesses and people who are more rigid in their thought process would strive in becoming more isolated from other people.

According to me, the era of Middle adulthood is not very stable as there occur a number of transitions, may be in the front of family, or maintain the structure of family, responsibilities, career goals, plans for future, plans for retirement, a realisation of where they might stand after the retirement. Etc. This period is also known as mid life crisis that might be accompanied by indecision and realisation of life being finite.