DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESSES IN ADULTHOOD - EUROPEAN RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

The main objective of this Special European Issue is to investigate some topical aspects of recent research on adult development in Europe. More specifically, the issue offers a detailed discussion of questions involved in complex forms of adult cognition, scientific thinking, responses to the demands of everyday life, the effects of various life events on well-being, and the construction of an integrated model of the cognitive, social, and personality domains. Theoretically, the articles are based on various viewpoints such as the neo-Piagetian perspectives on thinking, although others have connections with the Vygotskian approach to learning. In conclusion, we assert that the developmental processes of adulthood should always be viewed multidimensionally, contextually and holistically, as the articles themselves clearly demonstrate.


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The research domain of adult development is in its mid-thirties today. As a human being it would be middle-aged; as a recognised research domain it is comparatively young. During the formative years of the domain, electronic means have made international communication easier than ever.
Scientific ideas have circulated quickly from one continent to another. Because of this, it is difficult to make any clear distinction between research done in Europe and elsewhere in this field.

Piagetian Roots of the Complexity of Adult Thinking
Jean Piaget's seminal theory of cognitive development focuses on processes of change in causal reasoning (Piaget, 1972). The highest stage of reasoning postulated by Piaget, formal operational thinking, would thus be the pinnacle of the development of causal reasoning abilities. However, in the last decades questions of higher-order adult psychological development have received significant attention both in North America and in Europe. Especially in the field of cognitive development, there have been remarkable scientific endeavours to create new models describing adult cognition (e.g., Alexander, Druker & Langer, 1990;Commons, Richards & Armon, 1984;Demetriou, Shayer & Efklides, 1994;Labouvie-Vief, 1994;Miller, 2000;Sinnott, 1998).
A group of scholars working mostly in the USA during the last few decades (among others Commons, Grotzer & Sinnott, 1990;Commons, Sinnott, Richards & Armon, 1989) have hypothesised a new developmental stage, postformal thinking. Generally, there seems to be a tendency to accept a schematisation of the concept of postformal thinking as a description of adult cognitive development, and the concept of >relativistic dialectical= thinking has been used interchangeably with it to refer to the ways in which thinking develops in adulthood (e.g., Yan & European Research Perspectives 4 Arlin, 1995). However, there is considerable disagreement about the empirical status of the postformal stage of development. For example, there is the contradictory evidence presented by Commons, Richards and Kuhn (1982), the failure of replication in Europe (Kallio & Helkama, 1985;Kallio, 1995), and the critical evaluation of this replication attempt by Commons et al. (1995). There have also been critical analyses of the concept of postformal thinking itself (e.g., Kohlberg, 1990;Kramer, 1983;Marchand, 2001); some of the questions raised in these articles have remained empirically and theoretically unanswered. See Kallio (1998) for a theoretical meta-analysis of the heterogeneity of the concept, but also Yan & Arlin (1995), for empirical support for a common statistical factor in some models of postformal thinking. It seems obvious that there should be a separate collection of articles in some forthcoming special issue of JAD The difficulty of mastering arguments belonging to the highest stages of cognitive development is manifested also in the article by Ms. Anna Kajanne, a doctoral student in social psychology at the University of Helsinki. Her subject is the relationship between the structure and the content of thinking -a question which has not been studied much by cognitive developmentalists (for exceptions, see e.g., Candee, 1976;Emler, 1999). A previous study by Pirttilä-Backman and Hakanen (in press) has explained how the reflectivity of one's thinking relates to one's choice of creation or evolution -or both or neither -as one's view of the origin of the human species.
Kajanne demostrates how in the area of the safety of food additives people's stages of Reflective Judgement (for Reflective Judgment see for example King & Kitchener, 1994;Kitchener & King, 1981) are related to their choices of themes from the public discussion for their own argumentative repertoire.
The Change and globalisation are a part of our Zeitgeist. Some of the ideas presented here in this Special Issue have their origin in thoughts put forward in the United States, and similar ideas are being widely tested and discussed internationally. Simultaneously our world is all the time becoming more and more complex, and on a very basic level cognitive development can be viewed as a mechanism for adapting to this complexity; in such circumstances, higher cognitive processes may function as a certain kind of coping mechanisms. At the societal level, a big concern is the difficulty of reaching the highest levels of cognitive functioning. In the midst of this complexity and in a rapidly changing information society, the role of one=s self as the critical subject of a process of selecting essential information is all the time becoming more and more important. A holistic approach is also needed to achieve an integration of distinct, often separate, research subjects (i.e., cognition, personality, emotions), something that is also demonstrated in this Special Issue.
At the same time, we are learning more about the importance of locality in people=s lives. In this Issue the theme of locality is reflected, for example, in the authors= interest not only in the contents of people=s arguments but also in concrete life events and their effects on people=s well-being. In the future we developmentalists should pay more attention to local ways of life and to how the themes of everyday life are integrated into the specific universal developmental processes which have traditionally interested developmentalists.