Lifespan Development - Science topic

Developmental Trauma offers a comprehensive introduction to the research findings that help us understand the effects on human development of early childhood trauma and adaptation to stress. It explains how DTD differs from PTSD and emerges from a toxic seed planted at the beginning of an individual’s lifespan development. This important volume e...

Lifespan development of writing has an intuitive obviousness. Of course it takes a long time to develop as a writer! Of course even famous writers keep working at it and learning new things! Of course the five year old struggling with a pencil to form letters may thirty years later be the same person struggling with a plot outline or a corporate re...

Executive Functions (EFs) are needed for effortful self-regulation of behaviour and are known to change over the lifespan in humans. In domestic dogs, EFs can be assessed through behavioural rating scales, such as the Dog Executive Function Scale (DEFS). The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether the DEFS, developed initially using a...

In Lifespan Developmental Psychology normative history-graded influences are associated with socio-historical time and experienced by the majority of the culture, these influences can be either biological or environmental. The computer revolution and simulation technology are excellent examples of environmental history-graded events and are the foc...

Lifespan development of postural control shows as an inverted U-shaped function with optimal performance in young adults and similar levels of underperformance in children and older adults. However, similarities in children and older adults might conceal differences in underlying control processes. We mapped out age-related differences in postural...

Among the many work (and life) characteristics of relevance to adult development and aging, various forms of control are some of the most extensively and diversely studied. Indeed, “control,” whether objectively held (i.e., “actual” control), perceived, or enacted through self-regulation, is a concept central to our understanding of person-environm...

Introduction: It is assumed that age-related increases in loss (e.g., health decline) motivate behavioral changes (e.g., prevention of health decline) across adulthood. This assumption has rarely been directly tested in empirical research, and the current study seeks to fill this gap. Methods: By performing random intercept cross-lagged panel mo...

Proximity-seeking in distress situations is one of attachment theory’s primary strategies; insecure individuals often also develop secondary strategies. The mechanisms implied in attachment deactivation constitute a key issue in the current debate related to their role in support-seeking. The main aim of this study is to investigate the attachment...

Increased constraints and lost opportunities inherent in the COVID-19 pandemic can threaten important life goals and erode emotional well-being. Theories of lifespan development have identified goal adjustment capacities (goal disengagement and goal reengagement) as core self-regulatory resources that can buffer against declines in well-being. Howe...

Early life adversity is a potent risk factor for poor mental health outcomes across the lifespan, including offspring vulnerability to psychopathology. Developmentally, the prenatal period is a sensitive window in which maternal early life experiences may influence offspring outcomes and demarcates a time when expectant mothers and offspring are mo...

Loneliness is associated with differences in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) within and between large-scale networks in early and middle-aged adult cohorts. However, age-related changes in associations between sociality and brain function into late adulthood are not well understood. Here, we examined age differences in the association...

As the demand for lifelong learning increases, many working adults have turned to online graduate education in order to update their skillsets and pursue advanced credentials. Simultaneously, the volume of data available to educators and scholars interested in online learning continues to rise. This study seeks to extend learning analytics applicat...

When people talk about their lives, their values, and their religiosity, they reveal a lot about how they see themselves and how they want to be seen by others. They create a narrative identity by positioning themselves and others, by emphasizing events and leaving out others. This also can be observed when looking at subjective religiosity and wor...

This commentary discusses the theoretical roots of the concept of goal disengagement in the construct of secondary control, the motivational theory of lifespan development, the dual-process model, and the personality model of control. These approaches have proposed and shown that goal disengagement is adaptive when opportunities for goal attainment...

The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose that speaker alignment is supported by the statistical structure of spoken signals and show how pauses offer a t...

We draw on the conservation of resources theory to examine how upward and horizontal career transitions contribute to both objective and subjective career success among a longitudinal sample, covering the first 10 to 15 years of their career. Further, we adopt socioemotional-selective theory to investigate how upward and horizontal career transitio...

Socioemotional selectivity theory and models of lifespan development of resources suggest that older workers may particularly benefit from social resources so as to maintain their well-being throughout their work-life span. However, the age-differential effects of social support at work have been rarely investigated. We hypothesised that age modera...

While prior literature has largely focused on marriage effects during young adulthood, it is less clear whether these effects are as strong in middle adulthood. Thus, we investigated age differences in marriage effects on problem-drinking reduction. We employed parallel analyses with two independent samples (analytic-sample N s of 577 and 441, resp...

The primary aim of this study was to uncover and reconstruct the life of Gertrude Bell (1868 – 1926), by employing a psychobiographical approach and using Daniel Levinson’s Theory of Lifespan Development. Psychobiography endeavours to understand the lives of exemplary or extraordinary individuals through the systematic application of psychological...

Research on job resources suggests strong links with work engagement, but less is known about its association with personal resources and possible mechanisms linking personal resources to work engagement. Based on the job demands-resources (JD-R) model and lifespan development theories, we develop and test a model of the indirect relationships betw...

Although gains and losses are an integral part of human development, the experience of change and readjustment that often comes with major life events may be particularly influential for an individual's subjective aging experience and awareness of age-related change (AARC). Thus, this study focused on the role of life events in the domains of famil...

Introduction: Medical challenges, including perinatally acquired HIV (PHIV), can be considered adversity with the potential to compromise individuals' ability to meet societal expectations across the lifespan. Studies suggest that resilience, defined as positive adaptation in the context of adversity, helps individuals overcome challenges and impr...

With the development of deep learning and big data technology, artificial neural network methods are used to simulate new areas with high potential to develop tourist attractions. They break through the limitation of the lifespan development of domestic tourist attractions and improve the credibility of results caused by the sample size and scale e...

Digitalization and demographic change represent two megatrends that impact organizations and workplaces around the globe. Rapid developments in information and communication technology (ICT) are fundamentally changing the ways in which work is conducted. At the same time, workforces are becoming increasingly older and age diverse. Integrating the m...

Increasing global policy interest in measuring and improving population wellbeing has prompted academic investigations into the dynamics of lifespan life satisfaction. Yet little research has assessed the complete adolescent age range, although it harbours developmental changes that could affect wellbeing far into adulthood. This study investigates...

Since early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted societies worldwide. As we moved from expecting the closure of society to be a short-term one to experiencing it as a longer-term phenomenon, we lacked understanding about how the pandemic has affected the working lives and wellbeing of employees in different life and career stages. Drawing from life...

Flow experience is a psychological state characterized by simultaneous absorption, concentration, and enjoyment. Examining the change and continuity of the flow experience––an optimal state that contributes to well-being––is critical to the understanding of the lifelong trajectory of human flourishing. Nevertheless, to date there has been no system...

The confluence of the aging population and economic conditions that require working longer necessitate a focus on how to best train and develop older workers. We report a meta‐analysis of the age and training relationship that examines training outcomes and moderators with 60 independent samples (total N = 10,003). Framed within the lifespan develo...

In the original article [...]

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform an intended action at the appropriate time in the future. After providing an introduction to standard laboratory and naturalistic research paradigms for the study of PM, this chapter includes a critical review of current theories of PM and formal modelling approaches for the study of cognitive...

Most psychiatric disorders are chronic, associated with high levels of disability and distress, and present during pediatric development. Scientific innovation increasingly allows researchers to probe brain-behavior relationships in the developing human. As a result, ambitions to (1) establish normative pediatric brain development trajectories akin...

In this study, we investigated the association between positive emotion expression in children’s writing at age 11, as indicated by objective raters, and age 50 self-reported well-being outcomes—positive emotions, optimism, life satisfaction, meaning in life, social well-being, and physical health. Using a representative sample (N = 436) from the U...

Work design plays an important role in workers' job-related well-being, but not every employee responds to work design in the same way. Given trends toward longer working lives and higher age diversity in the workforce, worker age is an important factor to consider. However, knowledge about the interplay between worker age and work design is limite...

Sense of purpose can be understood as the extent to which one feels that they have personally meaningful goals and directions guiding them through life. Though the predictive value of this construct is well-established based on the robust research illustrating that it predicts a host of desirable cognitive, physical, and well-being benefits, the na...

The importance of taking a lifespan approach to describe and understand human development has long been acknowledged (e.g., Baltes, 1987). Nevertheless, theoretical or empirical research that actually encompasses the entire lifespan, that is, from early childhood to old age, is rare. This is not surprising given the challenges such an approach enta...

Although singing is a nearly universal human behavior, many adults consider themselves poor singers and avoid singing based on self‐assessment of pitch matching accuracy during singing (here referred to as singing accuracy), in contrast to the uninhibited singing exhibited by children. In this article, I report results that shed light on how singin...

Stress exposure and stress reactivity may be potent factors associated with increased risk of dementia. The 2017 Lancet Commission on Dementia and its 2020 update reviewed modifiable risk factors associated with dementia, but stress was not addressed directly. The present study provides a focused review of the association between stress and dementi...

The spiritual identity development of six South African, emerging adult, female, postgraduate psychology students (21 to 22 years old) was explored using reflective writing exercises and individual interviews. Interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed that spiritual identity exploration occurs continuously across the lifespan, with optimal...

Objective The purpose of this study was to examine what college women wish their parent–child sexual communication (PCSC) would have been like. Background Parents/guardians have a critical role in assisting their children on every aspect of their development, including sexual development, but parents/guardians face numerous barriers in communicati...

The primary aim of this study was to uncover and reconstruct the life of Gertrude Bell (1868 – 1926), by employing a psychobiographical approach and using Daniel Levinson’s Theory of Lifespan Development. Psychobiography endeavours to understand the lives of exemplary or extraordinary individuals through the systematic application of psychological...

Central to understanding human behavior is a comprehensive mapping of brain-behavior relations within the context of lifespan development. Reproducible discoveries depend upon well-powered samples of reliable data. We provide to the scientific community two, 10-minute, multi-echo functional MRI (ME-fMRI) runs, and structural MRI (T1-MPRAGE), from 1...

Life events during adolescence are a crucial stressor in human lifeand play a pivotal role in inividuals’ mental health. Although a growing number of researches have made an encouraging progress in understanding the behavioral architecture of life events, the longitudinal study to investigate the brain structures changes underlying life eventsremai...

Mental health literacy (MHL) training is essential in college environments. These programs are commonly delivered in-person via workshops or for-credit courses. Campuses now seek high-quality online options. We compare the effectiveness of a for-credit MHL course against a comparison course, focusing on whether online asynchronous delivery was as e...

Folk wisdom suggests that “you cannot teach an old dog new tricks.” Accordingly, as the average age of the workforce increases, there is a potential concern based on negative stereotypes that organizations will become less innovative. Drawing from lifespan development theories and theorizing on innovation, we explore this concern by testing, at the...

This study examines differential stability in attitudes toward homosexuality using panel data representative of the American adult population. While attitudes toward homosexuality have shifted considerably on the aggregate-level over the past few decades, this study shows that such attitudes are remarkably stable on the individual-level. Employing...

Psychological well-being indicates individuals’ positive psychological functioning and well-being. A growing body of literature, largely based on adults and old people, suggests that volunteering and charitable donations are related to individuals’ psychological well-being. As emerging adulthood is a vital time for lifespan development, the aim of...

Luft is professor emerita, School of Lifespan Development and Educational Sciences, College of Education, Health and Human Services, Kent State University, Kent, OH. She was president of the Council on Education of the Deaf (CED) from 2018 to 2020. Fischgrund is adjunct faculty, Department of Special Education, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelph...

Feeling meaningfully connected to others is an important aspect of lifespan development. Given that a sense of connectedness should be, in part, contingent on the kinds of social interactions people have in their daily life, this dissertation aims to explore across three studies what kinds of social interactions are perceived as meaningful connecti...

Sustainable employee performance is crucial for organization sustainability as employees play a key role. Due to the pandemic, new changes in the workplaces have created difficulties for employees and organizations to sustain performance. Employee performance sustainability refers to maintaining performance at a standard for the long term and every...

Sustainable employee’s performance is crucial for organization sustainability as employee’s play a key role. Due to pandemics, new changes create difficulties for employee’s and organizations to sustain performance. Employee performance sustainability refers to maintaining performance at a standard for the long term and every organization consist o...

Frailty is an important multi-domain measure of health status and aging. Processing speed (PS) performance may be predictive of later frailty among older adults, but the interrelation between frailty and PS at the cusp of mid-adulthood is unclear. Using data from the ongoing Colorado Adoption/Twin Study of Lifespan Behavioral Development and Cognit...

Past research has clearly demonstrated interrelations between drinking and health. However, little research has investigated this from a lifespan-development perspective, which is the objective of the current study. Our hypotheses predicted results consistent with the familiar “J-shaped curve” of drinking effects on health, including that health pr...

Gratitude is foundational to well-being throughout the life course, and an emerging body of work suggests that older adults may be more inclined to attribute gratitude to a non-human target (God). Drawing on life course theory and Erikson’s lifespan development framework, we use data from a national sample of Christian older adults from the United...

Talk about generations is everywhere and particularly so in organizational science and practice. Recognizing and exploring the ubiquity of generations is important, especially because evidence for their existence is, at best, scant. In this article, we aim to achieve two goals that are targeted at answering the broad question: “What accounts for th...

Objective Personal wellbeing reflects individuals’ experiences of positive mental health and those with high wellbeing can be described as flourishing. Increasingly, wellbeing and flourishing are informing public health policy and clinical practice. However, the long-term benefit of wellbeing and flourishing on negative mental health outcomes over...

The ongoing Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP) was established to create normative charts for brain structure and function across the human lifespan, and link age-related changes in brain imaging measures to psychological assessments of behavior, cognition, and emotion using an accelerated longitudinal design. In the initial stage, CCNP aims to recr...

Sustaining employees performance is a critical process. Employee sustainability is crucial for achieving organizational sustainability. For an organization, it's important to understand the individual employees perspective based on their age differences. Needs and resources are different for young employees and old employees. This paper proposes a...

Across the lifespan, narcissism is highest amongst emerging adults (aged 18-25), but narcissism may also be more adaptive for emerging adults. We replicate and extend upon previous research by examining the relative adaptiveness of psychological entitlement (a facet of narcissism) across the entire adult lifespan. Using data from a national panel s...

The global trend of increasing age diversity in workforces has called for research on understanding and managing age differences to better integrate employees across the lifespan into organizations. Integrating aging and lifespan development research and inclusion work, we conduct a daily diary study to investigate age differences in employees’ res...

Lifespan theories seek to explain the ways that individuals manage their development, staying healthy and content amidst age-related gains and losses. However, the lifespan literature is fragmented, with constructs studied separately rather than in concert. This study addresses these issues, generating evidence regarding the integrative factor stru...

Attachment scholars have long argued that insecure attachment patterns are associated with vulnerability to internalizing symptoms, such as depression and anxiety symptoms. However, accumulating evidence from the past four decades, summarized in four large meta-analyses evaluating the link between insecure attachment subtypes and internalizing symp...

Tales of indigenous peoples being disenfranchised from modern life and marginalised from formal education to the world of work within various social spheres are nothing new. Even in more developed nations, it is problematic for some indigenous peoples to adapt to the lifestyles of the majority population, what more in developing countries where soc...

Children’s cognitive functioning and educational performance are socially stratified. Social inequality, including classism and racism, may operate partly via epigenetic mechanisms that modulate neurocognitive development. Following preregistered analyses of data from 1,183 8-to 19-year-olds from the Texas Twin Project, we examined whether salivary...

Aging and health issues continue to receive attention, especially under the global health challenge of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It is important to understand how people adapt their lifespan development to face the gains and losses of resources. The purpose of this study was to test the relationships between health resources, sel...

Using a lifespan perspective, we investigated a neglected aspect of research on religion, namely, whether perceptions of growth from adversity might strengthen religious worldviews, thus accounting for feelings about one's own death in old age. A directed content analysis of in-depth interviews from 16 adults aged 65+ focused on life events, religi...

Background: This Special Issue, Future Directions in Transitional Care Research, focuses on the approaches used and lessons learned by researchers conducting care transitions studies funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). PCORI's approach to transitional care research augments prior research by encouraging researchers...

Research on well-being across the lifespan has highlighted the maintenance of resources in both the work and nonwork domains as a primary indicator of successful aging. For example, research shows that factors associated with a healthy work-nonwork interface such as social support, quality of social relationships, and marital satisfaction have a po...

Current perspectives on career success have yet to show whether and how subjective career success evaluations may change over time and across career phases. By adopting a retrospective life-span approach to careers, our qualitative inquiry into the career experiences of 63 professionals contributes to the temporal understanding of subjective career...

Gratitude is foundational to well-being throughout the life course, and an emerging body of work suggests that older adults may be more inclined to attribute gratitude to a non-human target (God). Drawing on life course theory and Erikson's lifespan development framework, we use data from a national sample of Christian older adults from the United...

Though Erikson recognized identity development as a lifelong project, most research on identity has focused on adolescents and emerging adults. Less is known about how the identity formed in adolescence is maintained and adapted across the adult lifespan. The purpose of the present paper is to provide a conceptual review and elaboration of Erikson'...

Background Prior research indicates that deficits in emotional abilities are key predictors of the onset and maintenance of eating disorders (ED). As a relatively new emotion-related construct, emotional intelligence (EI) comprises a set of basic emotional abilities. Preliminary research suggests that deficits in EI are linked with disordered eatin...

This study examined temporal and social comparisons of physical health status. Participants in two waves of the MIDUS cohort ranging in age from young adult to young-old (N = 2,408) rated current, past, and future physical health, as well as peer health. Past health was generally rated as better than current health (particularly among young adults)...

A great deal of attention has been paid to various contextual features of the aging process, and this is especially true in the study of aging, work, and retirement. Here, we review two books—one written for a “popular” audience, the other for an “academic” audience—that explore features of later-life work and retirement. Across both texts, a commo...

Öz Günümüzde hemen hemen her çocuk, cinsiyet rollerinin sosyal olarak inşa edildiği bir topluma doğmakta ve bu roller bazında ayrıştırılmış bir dünyada büyümektedir. Bebeklik ve çocukluk dönemi boyunca sosyalleştirme sürecinde rol oynayan aile, arkadaş, medya gibi faktörlerin etkisiyle çocuklar, toplum tarafından belirlenen ve uyum göstermeleri bek...