Midlife Crisis Research Articles

RESILIENCE, REJECTION SENSITIVITY AND ANGER AMONG ADULTS WITH MIDLIFE CRISIS

BACKGROUND: The midlife period can be considered an important phase of transition in a person's life course. This phase is characterized by an identiable change in personal circumstances. The midlife period has an important preparatory role in the transition to the next stage of development, that is, to old age. The midlife period is characterized by losses and readjustments. This period covers a large portion of an individual's life span. A woman may go through multiple social, psychological, and biological challenges during this midlife transition. Effective management of these challenges is essential for a healthy midlife period among women. OBJECTIVES: The objectives of the study were to assess the resilience, rejection sensitivity and anger among adults with Midlife Crisis in selected community areas in Malappuram District, Kerala. METHODS:Adescriptive study was conducted among 61 female adults with Mid Life Crisis in different community areas at Malappuram district, Kerala. The data collection was done in January 2021. The Resilience In Midlife scale, the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire-Adult version (A-RSQ), and the Clinical Anger Scale were used for the data collection. Using descriptive statistics, the collected data was analyzed. RESULTS: The results of the study showed that the mean Resilience score among the sample was 46.67, the mean Rejection Sensitivity score was 20.05, and the mean Anger score was 39.51. CONCLUSION: Resilience building, rejection sensitivity management, and anger management are essential in the management of Mid Life Crisis among women.

Australia's GAAR Turns 40: In its Prime or Mid-Life Crisis?

This article explores aspects of the legislative evolution of Australia's general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) in pt IVA of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (ITAA36) and considers how it shapes up after 40 years. It considers the legislative interaction of the GAAR with other parts of the income tax statute and explores the GAAR in an international context, including the Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law (MAAL) and Diverted Profits Tax (DPT) inserted into pt IVA. It concludes with consideration of the role and legitimacy of the GAAR in respect of both domestic and international economic and legal transactions.

“Generativity versus Stagnation”

This paper discusses midlife crisis as a driving force behind the thought and action of the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The whole novel contains a diary written by the English butler Stevens who relates his history of servitude at Darlington Hall and concludes with some revelations about the true nature of his past. Since the butler’s account gives hints of his concern for the extent of his achievement in life, his reassessing act of delving into the past can be taken as an attempt to resolve his midlife crisis. Being the seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s developmental psychology, a midlife crisis is primarily characterized by the binary “generativity versus stagnation” and the subject’s struggle to decide on the meaning of life. Occurring between 40 and 65, midlife crisis is stimulated by the reconsideration of social demands such as career and marriage. Applying this psychoanalytic approach to Stevens’ experience of midlife crisis, the present research investigates the place of Lord Darlington and Miss Kenton, the former Stevens’ employer and the latter his only love object, as embodiments of the social demands of career and marriage that the butler reviews in his midlife stage. Ultimately, this research discusses the butler’s success in resolving his midlife crisis through considering the individuation process, namely self-awareness, self-actualization, and the caring power, which the protagonist goes through.

Osećanje smisla života u odraslom dobu i starosti

Every life crisis prompts one to eventually bring up and examine the essential existential questions on the meaning of life. Throughout a mid-life crisis, one experiences significant inner turmoil which brings about great changes in the experience of personal identity, i.e., the need for its restructuring and reconstruction. The transformative learning processes gain great importance here. The questions regarding the meaning of life become dominant. The main goal of this research is to identify the changes in the feeling of the meaning of life during a mid-life crisis. We are examining whether the persons going through this period possess a stable feeling of the meaning of their own lives or whether they are still in search of it. We made use of the Meaning of Life Questionnaire (MLQ) in interviewing 600 adult participants, out of which 200 were middle-aged, 200 were young and 200 were older adults. This enabled us to establish differences and specificities in the variations of the feeling of the meaning of life in middle-aged persons. We processed the data using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Furthermore, we implemented the Kruskal-Wallis test to determine the significance of the differences among several groups of participants.

ДИСКУССИОННОСТЬ ВОПРОСА О ТАБУИРОВАНИИ ТЕМЫ СМЕРТИ

Death is one of the most exciting, common, emotional and taboo topics. Taboo is a complete ban or restriction. The article discusses the reasons for the taboo of death and the problems arising from it. The fear of death is one of them. Fear itself is a normal physiological reaction of the body to danger, however, when it acquires a pathological form, that is. phobia, the quality of life is declining. The stages when a person is most susceptible to the fear of death are considered. For the first time a child encounters this phenomenon at the age of about five years. The loss of a beloved pet or family members makes you think, during this period it is important to honestly answer questions about death in a language accessible to the child in order to avoid problems in adulthood. The next stage when ideas about death undergo changes is adolescence. During this period, it is typical to romanticize death, unlike adults, who perceive it exclusively as a tragic phenomenon. As you grow older, fear dulls and goes into the background, it is replaced by thoughts about building a career and starting a family. Further collision with fear occurs during crisis periods, for example, in the midlife crisis, when basic needs are closed. Together with the rethinking of the past, joy, satisfaction and meaning disappear. By old age, perception changes, acceptance of the inevitable comes. This is how the classic scheme of transforming the fear of death looks like. The functions of death, the forms of fear of death, the specifics of the attitude to this phenomenon among people of dangerous professions, as well as the consequences of the complete absence of fear of the inevitable are considered.

Preparing for a Midlife Crisis: Section 92A at 40

Preparing for a Midlife Crisis: Section 92A at 40

Гендерная специфика переживания кризиса середины жизни сотрудниками вуза

Researched are gender characteristics of experiencing a midlife crisis among university teachers. Empirically reveals the gender specifics of the parameters of the experience of the crisis: the severity of the crisis and crisis events, as well as in the perception of the time perspective and perception of subjective age. Research methods are testing and statistical analysis. Based on the data obtained, recommendations are offered on psychological assistance to young university teachers who are experiencing a midlife crisis.

Modern nihilism and Naguib Mahfouz’s faith in liberalism

ABSTRACT By mid-twentieth century, liberal thought was in crisis. Its victory over fascism ill concealed the empty promise at the heart of liberalism, that freedom defined as an absence of compulsion could substitute for a sense of human purpose. Non-western writers saw this as clearly as Camus, Arendt, Niebuhr, and Marcuse did. This essay regards Naguib Mahfouz’s 1965 novel, The Beggar, as a bid to critically intervene in debates around the crisis of liberal thought. It departs from approaches that see The Beggar as a thematization of political, Existentialist or Sufi discourses. Employing a close-reading method, it shows how the text ironizes its high-profile protagonist’s mid-life crisis and quest for spiritual awakening. Analysis reveals that ostensibly secondary female characters, especially the protagonist’s fourteen-year-old daughter, are part of a palimpsestic subtext that thematizes Christian–Muslim-Christian conversion and the potential role of faith as a corrective to the nihilistic void at the heart of liberal thought.

“Generativity versus Stagnation”: Midlife Crisis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

This paper discusses midlife crisis as a driving force behind the thought and action of the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The whole novel contains a diary written by the English butler Stevens who relates his history of servitude at Darlington Hall and concludes with some revelations about the true nature of his past. Since the butler’s account gives hints to his concern for the extent of his achievement in life, his reassessing act of delving into the past can be taken as an attempt to resolve midlife crisis. Being the seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s developmental psychology, midlife crisis is primarily characterized by the binary “generativity versus stagnation” and the subject’s struggle to decide on the meaning of life. Occurring between 40 and 65, midlife crisis is stimulated by the reconsideration of social demands such as career and marriage. Applying this psychoanalytic approach to Stevens’ experience of midlife crisis, the present research investigates the place of Lord Darlington and Miss Kenton, the former Stevens’ employer and the latter his only love object, as embodiments of the social demands of career and marriage that the butler reviews in his midlife stage. Ultimately, this research discusses the butler’s success in resolving midlife crisis by considering the individuation process, namely self-awareness, self-actualization, and the caring power the protagonist goes through. Keywords: Ishiguro, Erikson, Midlife Crisis, Generativity, Stagnation, Individuation.

Stellar mid-life crisis: subcritical magnetic dynamos of solar-like stars and the breakdown of gyrochronology

ABSTRACT Recent observations have revealed the surprising breakdown of stellar gyrochronology relations at about the age of the Sun hinting the middle-aged, solar-like stars transition to a magnetically inactive future. We provide a theoretical basis for these intriguing observations inspired by simulations with a mathematical-dynamo model that can explore long-term solar cycle fluctuations. We reproduce the observed bimodal distribution of sunspot numbers, but only for subcritical dynamos. Based on a bifurcation analysis, we argue that the ageing of solar-like stars makes the magnetically weak dynamo regime readily accessible. Weak magnetic field production in this regime compromises wind-driven angular momentum losses, thus disrupting the hegemony of magnetic braking on stellar rotational spin-down. This hypothesis of subcritical magnetic dynamos of solar-like stars provides a self-consistent, unifying physical basis for a diversity of solar-stellar phenomena such as why stars beyond their mid-life do not spin-down as fast as in their youth, the break-down of stellar gyrochronology relations, the observed bimodal distribution of long-term sunspot observations, and recent findings suggesting that the Sun may be transitioning to a magnetically inactive future.

Dissecting the midlife crisis: disentangling social, personality and demographic determinants in social brain anatomy

In any stage of life, humans crave connection with other people. In midlife, transitions in social networks can relate to new leadership roles at work or becoming a caregiver for aging parents. Previous neuroimaging studies have pinpointed the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to undergo structural remodelling during midlife. Social behavior, personality predisposition, and demographic profile all have intimate links to the mPFC according in largely disconnected literatures. Here, we explicitly estimated their unique associations with brain structure using a fully Bayesian framework. We weighed against each other a rich collection of 40 UK Biobank traits with their interindividual variation in social brain morphology in ~10,000 middle-aged participants. Household size and daily routines showed several of the largest effects in explaining variation in social brain regions. We also revealed male-biased effects in the dorsal mPFC and amygdala for job income, and a female-biased effect in the ventral mPFC for health satisfaction.

Rio De Janeiro Workshops

Abstract The following three papers were presented in September 2019 at the Simposio Psicanalise e Envelhecimento convened by the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de Rio de Janeiro. They are the result of the internal production of the Travesía Foundation of Buenos Aires, institution devoted to the meta-psychological study of midlife transition and crisis since 1989. We would like to thank the SBPRJ for its invitation and the cordiality with which we were received. The fact that the three workshops were written especially for the Symposium led us to select narratives from Brazilian authors so that our words would resonate in the auditorium as something familiar. Likewise, we have allowed ourselves to disseminate psychoanalytic understanding towards other ends, contributing to the universality of the discipline. Furthermore, the workshops have been written in a way that makes previous readings of the narratives under consideration unnecessary.

The role of normative crises in the dynamics of the value-semantic sphere at midlife stage

The subject of this research is the correlation between the positive experience of going through the midlife normative crisis and the mechanisms of development of the value-semantic sphere. The goal of this article lies in description of the results of empirical study dedicated to tracing the dependence of positive experience of going through midlife normative crisis on such mechanisms of the development of value-semantic sphere as self-cognition, self-fulfillment, self-determination, and self-transcendence. The article employs the method of comparison that allows concluding on the peculiarities of value-semantic sphere in the groups of respondents with or without experience of going through midlife crisis; method of measurement for determining the numerical values of the measured quantity – the level of manifestation of certain values, mechanisms, parameters, etc; cross-sectional method is used for obtaining empirical data. The validity of the acquired results is ensured by the standardized psychological tools for collecting information, as well as by reference to the methods of mathematical statistics. The conclusion is drawn that positive experience of going through the normative midlife crisis is associated with the higher level of manifestation of such mechanisms of the development of value-semantic sphere as self-cognition, self-fulfillment, self-determination, and self-transcendence. It is established that value-semantic benchmarks in the groups of respondents with positive experience of going through the age crisis depends on the spiritual satisfaction and achievements; while negative experience is rather associated with self-centered values. The novelty of this research lies in establishing correlation between the positive experience of going through the normative midlife crisis and the mechanisms of the development of value-semantic sphere. The obtained results can be used by practicing psychologists and acmeologists dealing with the professional growth and personal becoming, family crises, and developmental crises.

Men in/and crisis: The cultural narrative of men's midlife crises

Focusing on cultural narratives about men's midlife crises, this article explores the more subtle forms that medicalization takes by broadening and re-orientating the concept of successful ageing away from strictly political, medical or/and sociological discussions of health and ageing and towards cultural representations of masculinity, optimization and the handling of a personal crisis. Using two examples; the British comedy Swimming with Men (2018) and the novel Doppler (2014) by Erlend Loe the article discusses the entanglement of masculinity, crisis and ageing and in doing so argues that cultural narratives about men's midlife crises do more than merely comment on already existing understandings of ageing and should in fact be understood as important components in the ongoing medicalization of middle-aged masculinities.

Do solar energy systems have a mid-life crisis? Valorising renewables and ignoring waste in regional towns in Australia’s Northern Territory

As the use of solar systems as an alternate source of energy increases, so too does the volume of waste from decommissioned systems. While several options have been suggested as solutions for the end of life of solar systems in terms of their component elements in urban regions, there is little discussion of managing waste arising in regional areas where volumes are often below necessary thresholds. This paper discusses why solar energy systems in Australia’s Northern Territory are being removed and how they are disposed of. Results suggest that there are several social and economic reasons for their removal, as it is not just a matter of failure to generate electric power. Since solar energy generation waste is a new problem, there are few or no social mechanisms in place to manage this waste. The results of this study highlight the need for addressing this gap. This paper inquires into, and attempts to formulate an early definition of this newly emergent social problem, conceptualising it as a sociomaterial issue.

Mediating Effects of Family Stress on the Relationship between Self-Efficacy and Midlife Crisis in Middle-Aged Men

Middle-aged men bridge younger and older generations and are burdened with social roles and responsibilities that increase their risk of poor health. The aim of this study was to investigate whether family stress had a mediating effect on the relationship between self-efficacy and midlife crisis in a sample of 198 middle-aged South Korean men. Mediation analysis was performed according to the Baron and Kenny method and using the Sobel test. This study confirmed that midlife crisis decreased with increased self-efficacy and increased with family stress level. Family stress was also a significant partial mediator of the relationship between self-efficacy and midlife crisis. As family stress influences all members of the family, interventions are required that engage all family members to alleviate stress. Strategies to boost self-efficacy should be utilized, and family support constitutes the best means of coping.

Mental health crisis in midlife – a proposed research agenda

There is a growing amount of evidence indicating increased levels of psychological distress, suicide rates and decreased well-being in midlife (age 45-55). We refer to this phenomenon as the ‘midlife mental health crisis’. As there is little empirical evidence or theoretical grounds to explain the midlife mental health crisis, we propose a research agenda. In order to facilitate further research, we consulted members of public, mental health professionals and researchers on potential reasons for the midlife mental health crisis. Subsequently, we translated those into research questions testable with the British birth cohorts. We propose a series of studies using three statistical modelling approaches: descriptive (what is the midlife mental health crisis?), predictive (who is at increased risk of experiencing the midlife mental health crisis?) and explanatory (what are the processes leading to the midlife mental health crisis?).

A mid-life crisis of the Universe? A giant red disk galaxy at z = 0.76

A mid-life crisis of the Universe? A giant red disk galaxy at z = 0.76

Mental health crisis in midlife – a proposed research agenda

There is a growing amount of evidence indicating increased levels of psychological distress, suicide rates and decreased well-being in midlife (age 45-55). We refer to this phenomenon as the ‘midlife mental health crisis’. As there is little empirical evidence or theoretical grounds to explain the midlife mental health crisis, we propose a research agenda. In order to facilitate further research, we consulted members of public, mental health professionals and researchers on potential reasons for the midlife mental health crisis. Subsequently, we translated those into research questions testable with the British birth cohorts. We propose a series of studies using three statistical modelling approaches: descriptive (what is the midlife mental health crisis?), predictive (who is at increased risk of experiencing the midlife mental health crisis?) and explanatory (what are the processes leading to the midlife mental health crisis?).

КРИЗОВА СИТУАЦІЯ ЯК ДЖЕРЕЛО РОЗВИТКУ ОСОБИСТОСТІ

У статті подано результати досліджень психологічного змісту понять «криза», «критична ситуація», «кризова ситуація». Розглянуто можливі варіанти поведінки суб’єкта кризових ситуацій: конструктивний та деструктивний. З позицій діяльнісного підходу доведено, що кризова ситуація є джерелом розвитку особистості, при цьому рушійною силою розвитку є особистісна активність суб’єкта саморозвитку, яка і визначає модель поведінки людини в кризових ситуаціях.