I recently started reading Gail Sheehy’s (1974) classic bestseller Passages. The subtitle of the book, is “Predictable Crises of Adult Life.” Passages chronicles the different life stages men and women experience over the course of their adult lives. As the author was in her 30’s when she wrote the book, she stopped the book with life in the decade of the 50’s. In her follow up book, New Passages, Sheehey (1995) creates a “New Map of Adult Life.” In this map, there are three major stages of life: provisional adulthood from 18-30, first adulthood from 30-45, and then a second adulthood from 45-85+. These categories are then split into decades, the tryout twenties, the turbulent thirties, the flourishing forties, the flaming fifties, the serene sixties, the sage seventies, the uninhibited eighties, the nobility of the nineties and the celebratory centenarians. Like Sheehey, Erik Erikson (1959) conceptualized adulthood in three stages too: Young Adulthood (Intimacy vs. Isolation), Middle-Age Adulthood (Generativity vs. Stagnation) and Older Adult (Integrity vs. Despair).

So, why do I mention these life stages here? I cannot help but wonder how positive psychology impacts people in different life stages. Surely there are theories of positive psychology that hold true for all life stages, but perhaps they manifest themselves differently at different times in life. While it seems likely that Barbara Fredrickson’s (1998) Broaden and Build theory, the practice of gratitude (Emmons, 2007) and the process of visioning (King, 2001) holds true at all stages of life, perhaps Barry Schwartz’s (2004) theory of “Maximizers and Satisfiers” changes over stages of life development. As we get older, are we more willing to satisfice on certain decisions? As we get older, does our ability to monitor our emotional intelligence, as described by Salovey, Caruso, and Mayer (2004) (and highlighted in this article) change?

Perhaps the most interesting question for positive psychologists is how the search for meaning changes through the lifespan. Whether the pillars of positive psychology are the pleasant life, the engaged life and the meaningful life, or if positive relationships and accomplishment are added to the triumvirate, it is clear that how we feel about all of these things change dramatically as we age. As positive psychologists we need to expand our understanding of the science of positive psychology to include the dimension of life stages. As every psychologist and life coach will tell you, the issues 20 year olds face are very different from those of 60 year olds; they grapple with different kinds of questions. It is our responsibility as good scientists and practitioners to ask questions about how the psychology we are researching and creating addresses the needs of these different populations. Understanding the different kinds of positive psychology that reflects different demographics, we will be able to craft interventions to address the kind of questions that preoccupy the positive psychology of each age. This new mandate for the study of positive psychology should be researched, examined and put into practice with care. Perhaps if we are successful as positive psychologists in finding better ways to manage the transitions between life stages, Gail Sheehey would have to change the subtitle of her book from “Predictable Crises of Adult Life” to something more soothing like “Predictable Transitions in Adult Life.”

Emmons, R. A. (2007). Thanks!: How the new science of gratitude can make you happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Erikson, E. H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle. New York: International Universities Press, Inc.
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2, 300-319.
King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 798-807.
Salovey, P., Caruso, D., & Mayer, J. D. (2004) Emotional intelligence in practice. In P. A. Linley & S. Joseph (Eds.) Positive psychology in practice (pp. 447-463). Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley & Sons.
Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice. New York: Harper Perennial
Sheehey, G. (1974). Passages: Predictable crises of adult life. New York: Ballantine Books.
Sheehey, G. (1995). New Passages: Mapping your life across time. New York: Ballantine Books.