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AGING AND PERSONALITY: MEN, WOMEN, AND MATURITY
Contrary to what the media tell us, the much-talked-about midlife crisis rarely occurs, at least in the heart-wrenching way it is supposed to. Few of us move to Tahiti or violently reject everything we have done in the past forty years. Nor do we suddenly leap to maturity when our hair grows gray. But keeping in mind that we are talking about averages and subtle shifts, some research suggests that in many areas Jung may be surprisingly right.
In about our late thirties, our feelings about time tend to change. From thinking of our future as limitless, we begin to think of life in terms of years left to live. Our goals and aspirations are rearranged. We begin to make more realistic life plans based on a new, more accurate worldview.
Psychologist Bernice Neugarten discovered this change more than a quarter-century ago by looking at business executives in their mid-thirties. About a decade earlier, Neugarten and her University of Chicago colleagues had launched research on personality and aging by doing a different, much larger-scale study. In search of answers to that fascinating question, \' \'How do we change emotionally as we grow older?\" they chose a group of \"typical\" Americans, about seven hundred white, middle-class men and women ranging in age from forty to ninety, in a typical American city (Kansas City, Missouri) . For the next six years, they plumbed their subjects\' personalities and feelings, examining how they lived their lives. They found that by later middle age, a psychological transformation was indeed taking place.
The sexes were becoming very similar in personality - they were even trading traditional roles. The older women were more dominant and assertive, the older men more gentle and submissive, less interested in power, comfortable taking a more subservient role. These people were studied before the women\'s movement, before the emergence of the thirty-year-old female business executive, the new, nurturant young man. But research done in the 1970s at the height of the women\'s movement, using sources as different as dreams, personality tests, and the positive feeling about leaving work that most men have at retirement\'s brink, suggests that men and women may become more similar emotionally (or even reverse sex roles) in the second half of adult life.
The shift is also reflected in folklore and myths. The tough, cruel old woman is a common figure in children\'s fairy tales from around the world; so is the gentle, tenderhearted old man. On the other hand, many leading personality researchers do not agree that this change does take place.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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