Adult Development

Adult development is a branch of developmental psychology that deals specifically with how adults age through physical, emotional, and cognitive means. One simple breakdown of the field is to look at its three dimensions.

  • Dimension 1: change: loss, stasis, positive adult development
  • Dimension 2: types of change: maturation, learning, developmental stage
  • Dimension 3: psychological processes in adult development.

For example, positive adult developmental may be divided into at least six parts: hierarchical complexity, (orders, stages), knowledge, experience, expertise, wisdom, and spirituality.

Nondevelopmental forms include adulthood and adult human behavior.

While adult development has long been a subject reserved for academia and medical professions, in recent years, adult development has become an integral part of leadership and executive development.

Read more about Adult Development:  Studies, Four Adult Development Theories

Famous quotes containing the words adult development, adult and/or development:

    The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.
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    Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.
    —Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)

    America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)