Research Area of Specialization: Individual Development — Adulthood and Aging
Graduate study in adult development and aging allows students to explore topics in emerging adulthood, midlife, and old age. The program emphasizes the complex ways that personal characteristics, social partners, and organizations interact to influence development and change throughout the adult years. Students conduct research within a broad framework for understanding relations between developing people and the key contexts of their lives: family, workplace, community, and society. Faculty research interests include predictors of the transition to adulthood, parent-child and other family relationships, economic factors and well-being, predictors and consequences of stressful events, maintenance and enhancement of cognitive abilities, and psychosocial contributions to functional capacity in later life. Opportunities for international experience are available in several countries including Australia, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Students may combine their specialization in adult development and aging with emphases in prevention research, family studies, or methodology.
- David Almeida
- Daily stress processes; adult development; family factors in mental health; work and family linkages; fatherhood; statistical techniques for measuring change.
- Denis Gerstorf
- Multivariate approach to study heterogeneity and differential aging; cross-domain interface of cognition, well-being, and health; terminal decline, intraindividual variability; dyadic interdependencies in development; statistical techniques for measuring change.
- Melissa Hardy
- Work and Retirement; Public Policy; Political Attitudes; Women’s Issues and Aging; Cognitive Components of Saving and Investment Behavior; Older Workers.
- Lynn Martire
- Family relationships and management of chronic illness in adulthood; couple-oriented interventions; chronic pain; late-life depression.
- Nilam Ram
- Changes in the psychological processes of emotion, personality, and cognition, how they develop over the course of the lifespan, and how intraindividual change and variability study designs can contribute to our understanding of human behavior.
- Martin Sliwinski
- Stress, health and cognitive aging; linking daily experiences to long-term development; analysis of intraindividual variability and change.
- Steven Zarit
- Mental health and aging, especially the stress of caregivers; functioning of the oldest old; innovative models of service delivery.