Crae, 1984) is taken by many as evidence of defensive distortion. But
the appearance of happiness among older people is so common that wewould have to assume that older people universally resorted to the useof primitive defenses, and this would be inconsistent with the fact thatmost cope relatively well and realistically with events such as retire -
ment, death of a spouse, and personal illness.
Objective studies of age and coping show no tendency for older
people to use magical denial in solving real-life problems (McCrae,1982a). In two studies, BLSA subjects were asked to describe how theyhad coped with recent stresses, chosen either by us or by the subjectsthemselves. Using a self-report checklist of ways of coping, we assignedthem scores on 28 different coping mechanisms, including rational ac -
tion, distraction, denial of affect, intellectual denial, and passivity . We
found age differences in the kinds of stress older people faced—gener -
ally more threats to health and fewer occupational and family chal-
lenges—but when the responses had been corrected for these differ-ences only two consistent findings emerged: Younger men and womenwere more likely than middle-aged and older ones to indulge in escapistfantasy and hostile reactions. There was no evidence whatsoever thatmagical solutions were chosen by the elderly .
Gutmann himself is careful to point out that the progression he
posits occurs on the level of fantasy , not of reality . Among the HighlandDruze of Israel, in particular, the old men are respected as leaders anddecisions makers; they are anything but passive (Gutmann, 1974).
So it seems that neither self-reports nor direct observations of
behavior show parallels to the developmental sequence inferred byGutmann from TAT responses. Perhaps these changes result from cogni -
tive or perceptual shifts, or perhaps they are changes in a deeper level of
personality . In any case, they appear to have little impact on social oremotional functioning.
A few longitudinal studies have used the TAT to assess individual
stability of projectively assessed dispositions. Skolnick (1966) reported20-year stability coefficients ranging from .21 to .34 for the needs forpower, affiliation, aggression, and achievement, although the findingswere not consistently replicated across sexes. Britton and Britton (1972)also reported significant stability coefficients for TAT measures of per -
sonal and social adjustment over intervals of 3, 6, and 9 years in small
samples of men and women aged 65–85 at first testing. The magnitudeof these correlations is far smaller than the .60–.80 that we are accus -160 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD