Adult Development - Studies

Studies

Studies are currently underway concerning adult development by Robert J. Waldinger and George Eman Vaillant at The Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Professor Robert J. Waldinger, from Boston Massachusetts, is studying a group of men who have been a part of an elaborate study for 67 years. The intention is to examine early life predictors of healthy or unhealthy aging and relationships late in life. George E. Vaillant, who has been the Director of the Study of Adult Development at the Harvard University Health Service for the last thirty five years has published is work in his books Adaptation to Life, 1977, The Wisdom of The Ego, 1993, and The Natural History of Alcoholism-Revisited, 1995. He charted adult development in 824 men and women their recovery process of schizophrenia, heroin addiction, alcoholism, and personality disorder.

Other known researchers in the field of adult development, and specifically ego development, are Jane Loevinger, William Torbert, Robert Kegan, Otto Laske and Susanne Cook-Greuter. Their developmental theories have a number of key traits in common. Specifically, they describe an unfolding of human potential, they maintain that growth occurs in a sequence of stages and that later stages are only reached by going through earlier stages, world views evolve from simple to complex, and that people's stage of development influences what they notice and can influence.

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Famous quotes containing the word studies:

    What happiness did poor Mother’s studies bring her? It is the melancholy tendency of such studies to separate people from their friends and neighbors and fellow creatures in whom alone lies one’s happiness.
    Mary Potter Playne (c. 1850–?)

    His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)