Essay on Adulthood

Adulthood

Various aspects of human development play a key role in the developmental psychology of the adulthood stage. These human development aspects include physical, personality, moral, social, and cognitive development. Physical function and performance in a person normally peaks from the age of 20-35, and starts to decline after the age of 35. Throughout the adulthood stage flexibility will also decrease while strength peaks around the mid 20's and begins to level off at 35 or 40 years old. As you would probably expect each individual is different and in some cases a 20 year old will be outperformed by a fit 40 year old. The mortality rate in adults from the age of 20 years old to the age of 40 year old are normally very low in developed countries. Women are less likely than men to die at this age but women start to increase the gap during their late 20's or 30's. Good health and a closer concentration on a less risk taking lifestyle is a major contributing factor of men not being as much of a risk as women in this age group.

Cognitive refers to the growth and development of knowledge through experience. Such growth and development can involve information processing needed in planning, attention, or memory, as well as development of expertise in particular knowledge domains. (Ferrari & Fernando, 2005, p. 259) Cognitive development incorporates the internal and mental attributes of communication, memory, and solving problems. The study of cognitive development includes topics such as the development of motor skills and language acquisition. There is an early psychologist theory by the name of Piaget that argues cognitive development progresses through stages from infancy to adulthood and at the end of the stages there is a goal. More recently Piaget's theory has been moved away from and influenced by the evolution and content specific information processing. Social development is the process of achieving greater results from organizing human interaction and activities at high levels and there is an increased development with the use of human potential. The development of society is in direct response to the contact and interaction of people and there social and intellectual lifestyles. Social psychology studies the causes of human behavior as a result of nature and the outcome of how people relate and think towards each other. Early modern social development theories have decided that human behavior and social cognition should be studied in a scientific process just like most other natural sciences. Since the mind is the focal point of social behavior, social psychologists study the bond between the mind and social behaviors.

There are five basic factors to the development of personality traits and they are easily remembered by the word ocean which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. (Carpenter, S. 2008 Ch.12 fig 12.1) The development of personality over time incorporates an individual's decision making all through their life. Personality has a major role in shaping our values and beliefs as well as heredity having factors that are a major influence to our personality development. The interactions within a person's social environment will provide factors that contribute to the development of a personality. Along with certain genetic and naturally inherited factors the personality of an individual can be developed through the pursuit of higher education such as college courses. Pursuing a degree or taking college courses will help promote the personality image that a person is trying to portray to others. Personality typology tests have illustrated that there are several personality types, these tests allow insight based on how the answers are scored within the parameters of the test.

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging 10 times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could gather together only about $1,000, half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and