The Four A's of Life Transition Effects: Attention, Accessibility, Adaptation, and Adjustment

This article integrates our previous proposals on the nature and consequences of social life phases and transition phases. Two basic sources of life transition effects are described—changes in regulatory pressures and changes in informational exposure. Research is then presented that exemplifies the effects of such life changes. The results of one study suggest that becoming a parent shifts attention to the new demands of parenting, and thereby modifies the accessibility of pre-transition self-discrepancies that involve other regulatory pressures. The emotional consequences of such cognitive changes are described. Another study provides evidence that adaptation to new gender-related information during the initial construction phase of the transition to junior high school involves greater accomodation, as reflected in an increase in gender stereotype flexibility. This increased flexibility depended on when junior high began and not on grade level. A final study found that, compared to girls, boys who have just entered high school adjust to the increased conflict between what their friends wish them to be and what their mother demands that they be by moving their own personal aspirations closer to their friends and further away from their mother. This sex difference in mode of adjustment was related to greater self-regulatory and self-evaluative problems among those high school boys who continued to have conflicts between these different self-guides.