1971; Butler, 1963; Lowenthal, Thurner, & Chiriboga, 1975; Maas &
Kuypers, 1974; Neugarten, 1964; Reichard, Livson, & Peterson, 1962).In the late 1970s, a new generation of theories of adult developmentemerged (Gould, 1978; Levinson et al., 1978; Vaillant, 1977), Sheehy’sPassages (1976) became a major best-seller, and the popular press began
to feature stories on crises in adulthood, particularly the midlife crisis.
During the 1970s there was also a proliferation of undergraduate
and graduate programs in human development and gerontology . Mostof these programs were explicitly interdisciplinary , examining the soci -
ology , biology , and economy of aging as well as its psychology . Stage
theories of adult development had a powerful appeal as a way of inte -
grating such diverse material: Predictable changes in personality might
prepare the individual for the social transitions and economic changesof adult life.
All these intellectual developments were consistent with the zeit-
geist. The 1950s had focused on children; the 1960s, on youth. As the
baby boomers passed 30, their lives still seemed to form the center ofthe culture’s interest. Personal growth and development were promisedby humanistic psychology , and theories of life stages seemed to fill aparticular need. Personal problems could be attributed to universal de-velopmental changes; predictable crises offered both security and spiceto adult life.
The same period also saw the “graying of America,” a dramatic in-
crease in the proportion of men and women living beyond age 65, and aconcomitant increase in their awareness of their economic and politicalpower. Older people began to demand attention, and academics took upthe challenge. Personality development offered an attractive alternativeto studies of cognition, where decline, if not inevitable, was the generalrule (Arenberg & Robertson-Tchabo, 1977; Salthouse, 1989).
But it is the nature of science to be self-correcting. Not only did sci -
entific ideas generate theories of adult development; they also led to re -
search. Instead of talking about what might be or about what we want
to be, we can use the research efforts of the past 40 years to see what isreally going on. More and more, we believe, the findings are coalescinginto a pattern, and the pattern is one of predominant stability (Costa &McCrae, 1980c). Maddox (1968) showed that well-adjusted elderlypeople remained active. Havighurst, McDonald, Maculen, and Mazel(1979), who studied professional careers, were led to formulate whatthey called “continuity theory .” Neugarten (1982) propounded the no -Facts and Theories of Adult Development 5