Exercises — Chapter 14: Psychological Development Across the Lifespan

Part A: Understanding Development

Exercise 1: Lifespan Assumptions

A) Before reading this chapter, what was your intuitive model of development? Did you think it happened primarily in childhood? Adolescence? Did you think it was largely complete by a certain age? Write down your pre-reading assumptions.

B) Which finding from the chapter most surprised or challenged your assumptions? Why?

C) What is the practical difference between believing development ends in early adulthood vs. believing it is lifelong? How might each belief affect how you treat your own capacity for change?

Exercise 2: The Three Forms of Development

The chapter distinguishes normative development (shared by virtually everyone), non-normative development (individual), and history-graded development (cohort-specific).

A) Identify two normative developmental changes you have experienced — changes that virtually everyone in your culture and time period goes through.

B) Identify one non-normative developmental experience — something that significantly shaped your psychological development but is not universal.

C) Identify one history-graded influence — a feature of the historical moment or cohort you grew up in that shaped your development in ways that would have been different for someone born two decades earlier or later.

Part B: Early Development and Attachment

Exercise 3: Your Attachment History

Note: This exercise invites reflection on early experiences. If your early history included significant trauma or neglect, approach at your own pace and with appropriate support.

A) Based on the four attachment patterns described in the chapter (secure, anxious-preoccupied, avoidant, disorganized), what pattern would you tentatively assign to your early attachment experience? What evidence supports this assessment?

B) Internal working models are described as unconscious mental representations of how relationships work and whether the self is worthy of care. What are yours? What do you tend to expect from close relationships? What do you expect when you show vulnerability to someone?

C) The chapter emphasizes that attachment patterns are not destiny — they can be revised by subsequent relational experience. Identify one relationship (later in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood) that provided a different kind of experience from early attachment — that offered reliability or safety that wasn't available early on. What effect did that relationship have?

Exercise 4: Piaget in Your Own Learning

A) Identify a concept or domain where your understanding underwent a qualitative shift — not just adding information but reorganizing how you thought about it. This is a Piagetian "accommodation" rather than "assimilation." Describe the before and after.

B) Piaget proposed that cognitive development involves moving from concrete to abstract reasoning. Identify one domain in your own life where your reasoning remains more concrete (specific examples, personal experience, familiar cases) than abstract (principles, patterns across cases, systematic analysis). What would it mean to develop more abstract reasoning in that domain?

Part C: Erikson's Stages — Personal Application

Exercise 5: Stage Retrospective

For each of Erikson's first five stages, briefly assess your own experience:

For each stage where you identify a residual challenge, write one sentence about how that challenge shows up in your current adult life.

Exercise 6: Your Current Developmental Stage

A) Based on your age and the Erikson framework, what is your current developmental stage? What is the core conflict of that stage?

B) Are you actively working on that stage's core task — or avoiding it? Be specific: what would it mean to genuinely engage with the task of your current stage?

C) Is there a stage from earlier in your life that you feel you did not fully resolve? What unfinished business from that stage, if any, do you carry into your current life?

Part D: Identity Development

Exercise 7: Your Identity Status History

A) Marcia's four identity statuses apply to different domains. Map your current status in each:

B) In which domains are you in moratorium (exploring actively, commitment not yet made)? Is this productive exploration or avoidance of commitment? How do you tell the difference?

C) In which domains do you have achieved identity (explored and committed)? How did you move from exploration to commitment in those domains?

Exercise 8: The Social Mirror

A) Whose evaluation of you matters most to you currently — whose opinions you most weight when constructing your sense of yourself? List three to five people or groups.

B) Are these the right people to be the primary architects of your self-image? Are their evaluations accurate? Relevant? Do they see the parts of you that most matter?

C) What is the difference between caring about the opinions of people who know and love you vs. seeking validation from a generalized "audience"? Which is more operative in your life?

Part E: Midlife and Later Life

Exercise 9: Generativity Audit

Generativity is the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation or leaving something meaningful behind.

A) In what ways are you currently generative? This can include parenting, teaching, mentoring, creating, building something that will outlast you, contributing to community.

B) If you are in midlife or approaching it: what is the primary obstacle to your generativity? Is it stagnation (turning primarily inward)? Time constraints? Unresolved identity questions from earlier stages?

C) What is one specific, concrete expression of generativity you could pursue or deepen in the next year?

Exercise 10: Imagining Later Life

A) Imagine yourself at eighty, looking back on the arc of your life. What would you most hope to have been able to say about it — in terms of relationships, work, meaning, character?

B) What would constitute despair, in Erikson's sense — the inability to accept your life as your own? What elements of your current life, if they continued, would produce that despair?

C) Bronnie Ware's research on deathbed regrets (Chapter 11) found that the most common regrets were: not living authentically, working too hard, not expressing feelings, not staying in touch with friends, and not allowing more happiness. Do any of these apply to your current trajectory?

Exercise 11: The Positivity Effect

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory proposes that when time feels limited, motivation shifts toward present meaning and deepening relationships rather than novelty and information-gathering.

A) Have you ever experienced a version of this shift — perhaps after a loss, a health scare, or a period of acute mortality salience? What did your motivation look like during that period?

B) If you were to deliberately cultivate the motivational stance that SST describes — prioritizing depth over breadth, present meaning over future acquisition — what would you do differently today?

Part F: Continuity and Change Across the Lifespan

Exercise 12: Continuity and Change in Yourself

A) What aspects of yourself have remained most stable across your life so far? Consider traits, values, ways of relating, ways of managing difficulty.

B) What aspects of yourself have changed most significantly? What drove those changes — life events, relationships, deliberate effort, therapy?

C) Where in yourself do you want change that has not yet happened? What do you think is sustaining the current pattern?

Exercise 13: Your Developmental History as a Map

A) Write a brief developmental narrative of your life, organized by decade or life stage rather than by events. For each stage, identify: what were you working on? What was the central developmental challenge?

B) Where did your development get stuck — where did you experience a challenge that didn't fully resolve?

C) The chapter argues that early experience shapes you without determining you. Identify one way your early experience shaped a current default pattern that does not serve you — and one thing that would actually help revise it (not manage it but revise the underlying pattern).

Part G: Adult Development

Exercise 14: The Self-Authoring Mind

Kegan's model proposes a transition from the socialized mind (deriving values and identity from external sources) to the self-authoring mind (using an internalized value system to evaluate and organize experience).

A) On Kegan's continuum from socialized to self-authoring, where are you? Is your sense of what you should do and who you are primarily organized by external expectation (family, peer group, profession, culture), by internalized values you have genuinely chosen, or some of both?

B) In which domain are you most socialized-mind (living according to external expectation rather than internalized choice)? What would self-authoring look like in that domain?

C) What would the transition toward more self-authoring require from you in that domain? What is the cost of that transition, and what is the cost of not making it?

Exercise 15: Relationships Across the Lifespan

The Grant Study found that quality of relationships in midlife is the strongest predictor of late-life wellbeing.

A) Assess the current quality of your most important relationships — not in terms of whether they are pleasant, but in terms of whether they involve genuine knowing, genuine care, and the capacity for repair after conflict.

B) What is the quality of social connection available to you now? Are you in a period of expanding or contracting social investment?

C) If the Grant Study finding is correct — that relationships matter more to late-life wellbeing than achievement, financial success, or even health — how does that finding affect what you are currently prioritizing?

Part H: Synthesis

Exercise 16: Nana Rose's Question

Nana Rose asked: "What are you becoming?"

A) Answer the question honestly: What are you becoming right now? What direction is your development actually going — not what you intend, but what you can observe from your behavior and choices?

B) Is that what you want to be becoming? If not, what would redirect the trajectory?

C) Write one sentence that describes the person you most want to be at the end of your life. Then write one sentence about what you would need to begin doing differently now for that to be possible.

Exercise 17: Synthesis Essay

Write a 400-word essay:

"The chapter argues that development is lifelong — that the psychological work of each stage is genuine, not metaphorical, and that the person you are is always in the process of becoming something further. Do you find this claim liberating, daunting, or both? What does it mean for how you understand your current chapter of life?"

Discussion Questions

Discussion 1: Arnett's "emerging adulthood" is criticized for being a culturally and class-specific phenomenon — more applicable to middle-class Western young people with access to extended education than to working-class people who take on adult responsibilities earlier. Does this critique undermine the concept, or does it simply identify its limits?

Discussion 2: The chapter distinguishes between development (reorganization of psychological functioning) and change (behavioral or circumstantial). Can you develop without changing your behavior? Can you change your behavior without developing? What is the practical difference?

Discussion 3: Kegan's self-authoring mind is presented as developmentally more advanced than the socialized mind. Is this a value judgment? Are there circumstances where the socialized mind — living according to community norms and relational expectations — represents wisdom rather than immaturity?

Discussion 4: The Grant Study found that the quality of relationships in midlife is the strongest predictor of late-life wellbeing. Given this finding, what should people who currently have thin or troubled social connections do differently? Is the quality of adult relationships changeable?