The quality and stability of sibling relationships during adulthood were assessed by comparing Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) themes of sibling affiliation, conflict, and separation at the periods of active child-rearing (CP) and the empty nest (EN). Thirty men and 30 women, equally divided between the two life stages, were randomly selected…

Female aging, compared to male aging, is associated with a greater decline in status and attractiveness. To investigate whether sex differences in the perception of aging function at both the cognitive and affective levels, 76 college students (38 male, 38 female), with a mean age of 22.8, viewed slides of a male and female adult. Subjects were…

Examining parent-child support patterns over the life-course reveals variations in who plays the predominant provider and receiver roles. Although children can expect to play a minimal role in supporting their parents until the parents reach old age, a divorce in the parents' middle years may lead them to call on their children for help. Male…

Theorists have proposed very different patterns of adult age changes in masculine and feminine personality attributes; while some have predicted an increase in cross-sex typed individuals among older adults, others have predicted an increase in androgynous individuals. A study was conducted to further investigate adult age differences in levels of…

Until recently marriages that endured 20 years or more have been considered long-term. And only in recent years have marriages of 50 or more years duration been plentiful enough to be studied. The course of marital satisfaction across the years was traced in the 17 surviving couples of the Berkeley Older Generation Study, a group that has been…

While minor physical anomalies (MPAs), a set of 17 non-obvious but measurable characteristics of the hands, face and feet, have been linked to a number of behavioral syndromes in children, such personality correlates of MPAs in adults have not been studied. To explore the relationshp between MPAs and temperament in a college sample, 114 students…