AGING AND PERSONALITY: KEYS TO RIPENING WITH AGE
In the early 1970s Henry Maas and Joseph Kuypers offered some clues when they restudied a group of middle-class people who had been interviewed and tested forty years earlier in a depression-era study of child rearing. The University of California researchers had information about these people as young parents in their thirties. What would they be like in their seventies?
In agreement with Costa, Maas and Kuypers found that the people who had genuine emotional problems in their thirties had changed little. They were still hanging on by their toenails to life at seventy, as they had been at thirty-five. Some of the more emotionally stable majority changed a good deal. People changed most when their outside lives had become most different; that is, when a good deal had happened to them over the years. For instance, if you are a widow and have had to go to work for the first time, you are likely to change more than your friend who is still married and whose life, except for the children's being grown, has stayed about the same. If you are not debilitated by illness, though, one influence seems particularly important in whether you are likely to grow or decline emotionally as the years pass: Does your life fulfill your inner interests and capacities?
Maas and Kuypers found that if a woman's only interest in her thirties had been her husband and children, she was more likely to be unhappy in later life. Some people who had chafed at being just wives and mothers were more fulfilled in their seventies because for the first time they found what fit them. They had never liked the housewife role. At seventy they were finally able to live as they wanted - to have a career. And for many lucky people life was good in their thirties and kept getting better. They were happy at any age because they always were able to arrange lives that were fulfilling to them.
A study published much more recently - in 1987 - underlines exactly how crucial it is to arrange an outer life that fits us. Rutgers University psychologist Daniel Ogilvie asked a group of retirement-aged men and women to rank their "identities," the life roles that were most meaningful to them (e.g., mother, gardener, choir member, caregiver to ailing mother, highly organized person and pillar of the community). He then asked how much time they actually spent acting out these most meaningful aspects of themselves and probed their morale - how satisfied they were with life. The two assessments were closely related. People who spent the most time living out their highest-ranking identities were the happiest human beings. While we cannot expect perfection, the lesson of this study is that one key to happiness in our later years is to spend as much time as we can in meaningful activities, enacting life roles that genuinely express our inner selves.
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