sults were an exact reconfirmation: There was not the slightest evidence
of a peaking of distress or midlife characteristics anywhere in the agerange we studied (Costa & McCrae, 1978).
Again, the most persuasive data may come from the NHANES sur -
vey (Costa, McCrae, et al., 1986). Short scales measuring Neuroticism,
Extraversion, and Openness were administered to nearly 10,000 menand women; about half of the respondents were in the age range from34 to 54. With so many subjects, we were able to plot personality scoresyear by year. A crisis or temporary alteration in personality should beapparent as a spike in the graph, yet Figure 8 shows that neither mennor women showed any pronounced peaking at any point during theperiod. It is particularly noteworthy that there is no increase in Neuroti -
cism around age 40, when the theories call for a period of emotional up -
set and psychological crisis.
Our disenchantment with stages of adult development can be
traced to such results, but we are not alone in our reappraisal of the cri-sis. Farrell and Rosenberg (1981), who had once been proponents of thetheory , undertook a major study of the midlife period. They commis-sioned a probability sample of about 500 men in the age ranges 25–30and 38–48, a sample from which generalizations about American mencould be made with confidence. They put together a battery of measuresof alienation, distress, depression, and crisis, including a midlife crisisscale much like ours in content. They also had measures of what theycalled authoritarian denial , which is likely related to closedness to expe-
rience.
Their analyses, dividing subjects by age and by social class, showed
almost exactly what we had: Midlife men were slightly higher in author -
itarian denial, but they were actually a bit lower in alienation. There
was no difference at all on their midlife crisis scale.
But perhaps all these studies make the mistake of tying the crisis to
age when stage of life is more important. Among 40-year-old men, someare only recently fathers, many have young children in the home, manyothers have teenagers, and some have seen all their children grow upand leave home. Perhaps the crisis occurs during one of these stages in -
stead of at a particular chronological age. Indeed, there is evidence from
large-scale epidemiological studies (Tamir, 1982) that men with teenagechildren are a bit less happy than other men (hardly a surprising findingfor those acquainted with teenagers). But most theorists had supposedthat the real crisis would come when the children left home, leaving180 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD