Work-family life courses have been associated with mental health at various time points in life but little is known about how mental health develops during these work-family life courses. The aim of ...this study was to examine mental health trajectories from adolescence to young adulthood in women and men with different work-family life courses.
Data from 992 young adults participating in the 18-year follow-up TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) were used. Work-family life courses from ages 18 to 28 years were previously constructed using sequence analysis. For each work-family life course, trajectories of internalising and externalising problems from ages 11 to 29 years were estimated using a multi-group random intercept growth model. Differences in mental health trajectories were examined across work-family life courses.
For women, trajectories of internalising and externalising problems in young adulthood differed significantly between work-family life courses (p = 0.037 and p < 0.001, respectively). Women in the inactive work-family life course reported the highest scores of internalising and externalising problems during the entire young adulthood but the differences in mental health scores became most pronounced at age 29. Trajectories of internalising and externalising problems of men did not significantly differ between the work-family life courses.
Mental health trajectories differed between women depending on their work-family life course. In men, differences between work-family life courses were less pronounced. Future studies should examine which work-family events and transitions captured in work-family life courses are associated with subsequent mental health problems during longer follow-up.
While the risk factors for infertility are well-established, research on factors associated with voluntary childlessness is limited and mainly focused on adulthood factors. Thus, we examined the ...associations between factors in childhood and young adulthood and different types of childlessness.
The analysis included 4653 women from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health from 1996 to 2021. Childlessness was categorised as: voluntary, due to infertility issues, or due to other reasons. The associations between factors in childhood and young adulthood and childlessness were assessed using multinomial logistic regression models.
In their 40s, 4.8 % of women were voluntarily childless, 6.7 % were childless due to infertility issues, and 7.8 % were childless due to other reasons. Regardless of types of childlessness, being childless was associated with poorer self-rated health during childhood and having been unpartnered and obese in young adulthood. Ex-smokers in young adulthood had lower odds of childlessness. Childhood physical abuse was associated with childlessness due to infertility issues and other reasons. Voluntary childlessness and childlessness due to infertility issues were associated with having identified as non-exclusively heterosexual in early adulthood. Lower social support in early adulthood was associated with voluntary childlessness and childlessness due to other reasons.
The direction of the associations could not be determined and using self-reported data may introduce recall bias.
Factors in childhood and young adulthood were associated with different types of childlessness, highlighting the importance of adopting a life course perspective when studying childlessness.
•Longitudinal data were used to examine factors associated with childlessness.•Several factors in childhood and young adulthood were associated with different types of childlessness.•Our results highlighted the importance of adopting a life course perspective when studying childlessness.
Life goals play a major role in shaping people's lives and careers. Although life goals have prior documented associations with occupational and other life outcomes, no prior studies have ...investigated associations between life goal
and occupational outcomes. Using two representative samples of Icelandic youth (Sample 1:
= 485, Sample 2:
= 1,339), followed across 12 years from adolescence to young adulthood, we examined life goal development and associations with educational attainment and a wide range of occupational outcomes. We found that life goals had relatively high rank-order and profile stability across the 12 years. Most life goals decreased in importance during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, except for family- and community-related goals, pointing to a continued focus on building social relationships in young adulthood. We also found meaningful variation in change at the item level within certain goal domains. Furthermore, adolescent levels of life goals, as well as
in certain goals, predicted educational attainment and occupational outcomes in young adulthood. This suggests that life goals motivate career behaviors beginning at an early age and that subsequent changes in certain life goals also matter for educational and occupational outcomes. Dominance analyses revealed that education and prestige life goals were generally the strongest predictors of future outcomes. Overall, these results highlight the importance of life goal development in predicting later educational attainment and occupational outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Among the many forms of psychological violence, gaslighting is a particularly insidious manipulative behaviour that includes acts aimed at controlling and altering one’s own partner’s sensations, ...thoughts, actions, affective state, self-perception, and reality-testing. Thepurpose of this study was to evaluate the association between the experience of gaslighting and dysfunctional aspects of the partner’s personality. Gaslighter personality facets were assessed using the Personality Inventory for DSM-5–Informant Form–Adult (PID-5-IRF), while gaslighting behaviours were assessed using a 25-item questionnaire, based on the three categories of glamour, good-guy, and intimidator (Stern, 2007). The sample was made up of a group of 177 Italian emerging adults aged between 19 and 26 (49.2% male, 50.8% female; M = 21.88, SD = 1.75), enrolled at University, who participated voluntarilyin the research. In fact, none of them received any form of direct or indirect incentive.In our study, we applied a beta regression model mapping the Likert scale into the open interval (0,1). The main results show (a) good-guy gaslighting is positively associated with manipulativeness and negatively associated with deceitfulness; (b) glamour gaslighting has a negative association with separation insecurity and manipulativeness, but it is positively associated with irresponsibility; (c) intimidator gaslighting has a positive association with separation insecurity and distractibility and a negative association with eccentricity and perceptual dysregulation; (d) all three gaslighting categories are negatively associated with anhedonia and impulsivity. Based on what emerged from the data, aspects such as separation insecurity, irresponsibility, and distractibility can be seen as serious risk factors for gaslighting.For this reason, with regard to clinical implications, an early recognition of dysfunctional traits in potential abusers should be fostered in order to protect both potential abusers and their partner from aggressive conduct within an intimate relationship.
Adolescence has been characterized as a period of risky and possibly suboptimal decision-making, yet the development of decision-making in autistic adolescents is not well understood. To investigate ...decision-making in autism, we evaluated performance on 2 computerized tasks capturing decision-making under explicit risk and uncertainty in autistic and non-autistic adolescents/young adults ages 12-22 years. Participants completed the Game of Dice Task (32 IQ-matched participant pairs) to assess decision-making under explicit risk and the modified Iowa Gambling Task (35 IQ-matched pairs) to assess decision-making under uncertainty. Autistic participants overall made riskier decisions than non-autistic participants on the Game of Dice Task, and the odds of making riskier decisions varied by age and IQ. In contrast, the autistic group showed comparable levels of learning over trial blocks to the non-autistic group on the modified Iowa Gambling Task. For both tasks, younger autistic participants performed poorer than their non-autistic counterparts, while group differences diminished in older ages. This age-related pattern suggests positive development during adolescence on risk assessment and decision-making in autism but also implies differential developmental trajectories between groups. These findings also suggest differential performance by the risk type, with additional complex influences of IQ and fluid cognition, which warrants further investigations.
Adolescence and young adulthood are characterized by substantial sociodemographic, family, social, and personality changes that may influence loneliness. Although loneliness is a public health ...challenge, we know little about how loneliness develops during these periods. Our study addresses this lacuna by using 4-wave longitudinal data from 3,116 Norwegians aged 13 to 31 years, making use of questionnaire (key facets and correlates of loneliness) and register linkage information (midlife outcomes). Analyses revealed that when asking directly about feeling lonely and for emotional facets, loneliness increased from early adolescence to age mid-20s, whereas social facets of loneliness declined gradually and plateaued when people had reached their mid-20s. Several predictors operated consistently across loneliness facets, whereas others operated in facet-specific ways. To illustrate, perceiving one's parents as caring, having close friends, not leaving the parental home before age 18, and reporting more agency were each associated with less loneliness across assessment modes. In contrast, when asked directly, women reported more loneliness than men at all ages, whereas men reported more social loneliness. Finally, adolescents and young adults who reported feeling lonely and/or increased in loneliness were consistently at higher risk for disability and lower income in midlife, whereas other important midlife outcomes including education, labor market inclusion, and prescriptions of antidepressants exhibited facet-specific associations. Our study is the first to provide a comprehensive picture of loneliness development throughout the second and third decade of life and highlights the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of loneliness trajectories and correlates across adolescence and early adulthood.
Theories of person–environment fit describe a dynamic process in which fit should improve over time due to changes in a person’s attributes, the environment, or both. Although these ideas are central ...in several theoretical perspectives, they have largely gone untested. Here, we report a longitudinal examination of interest congruence (i.e. interest fit) across 12 years during the transition from education to the workforce. The study uses four methods to capture interest congruence and the drivers of fit change: growth models, latent congruence models, person and environment latent difference scores, and piecewise growth models based on environmental transitions. Each method uses a different lens to understand interest congruence in educational and work domains. Across methods, three results were typically found: (1) interest congruence improved over time in school and at work, (2) participants’ interests often predicted educational and work changes, and (3) participants’ interests rarely changed in response to their environment. These results support a dynamic conceptualization of fit and suggest that selection—rather than socialization—is the main mechanism through which individuals achieve better interest fit during young adulthood. Other implications are discussed for theory development and the applied use of interest assessments.
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