What are the best years of adult life? The answer may surprise you: middle age. How do we know that middle age is the best time of life? The term "best" implies a common standard of value by which we can measure and compare. Emotional distress serves as that standard. Research on well-being across the life course usually maps the average levels of depression and anxiety. Depression is a feeling of sadness and dejection marked by trouble sleeping, concentrating, and acting. Anxiety is a state of unease and apprehension, characterized by worry, tension, and restlessness. Both are unpleasant feelings that most persons would rather avoid. They arouse the attention of psychiatrists when they are extreme, prolonged, or inexplicable. More commonly, depression and anxiety come and go with the challenges and adaptations of life. Life course researchers have begun studying other emotions too, particularly anger (Mirowsky & Schieman, 2008; Ross & Van Willigen, 1996; Schieman, 1999, 2003) and positive feelings such as happiness, serenity, and elation (Ross & Mirowsky, 2008; Simon & Nath, 2004). These researchers add important details that will be summarized. However, the age-group differences in depression and anxiety tell the main story, as detailed below. Both forms of distress decline from a peak in early adulthood. The predominant type of distress shifts from active (anxiety and anger) to passive (depression) as people age. This chapter has three main sections. The first describes the emotional trajectories of adulthood. The second describes the five views of age that help researchers understand why emotions change as people age. The third describes the conditions and beliefs that change across adulthood, shaping the trajectories of emotions. Readers can consider how their own experiences, or those of family members, vary across the life course.

Purpose - Despite mixed evidence, researchers often suggest that married adults tend to live generally healthier lifestyles than their unmarried counterparts. In this chapter, we propose and test a reconceptualization of the health lifestyle that distinguishes between "homebody" risks and "hedonic" risks that may help to make sense of previous findings concerning marriage and health-related behavior. Methodology/approach - Using data from the 2004 Survey of Adults (n = 1,385), we employ ordinary least squares regression to model indices of normative and conventional homebody risks (greater body mass, infrequent exercise, poorer diet, and abstinence from alcohol) and unconventional and potentially dangerous hedonic risks (smoking, heavy drinking, going out to bars, eating out, inadequate sleep, and driving without seatbelts) as a function of marital status. Findings - Our key findings indicate that married adults tend to score higher on homebody risks and lower on hedonic risks than never married adults, net of controls for age, gender, race/ethnicity, citizenship, interview language, education, employment status, household income, and religious involvement. Research limitations/implications - Research limitations include cross-sectional data, restricted indicators of health-related behavior, and narrow external validity. Originality/value - Contrary to previous research, we conclude that the lifestyle of married adults is not uniformly healthy.

Subjective alienation is the sense of being separate from oneself or others. Perceived powerlessness is the main type of alienation because it is a separation from important outcomes in one's own life. Self-estrangement is a type of powerlessness related to one's work, and the closest conceptually to Marx's ideas of alienation. Others include social isolation, normlessness, and meaninglessness. Mistrust is a recently identified type of alienation. It is a type of social alienation more profound than social isolation. We focus on perceived powerlessness and mistrust: the concepts and measures, social causes, and emotional consequences. The major social causes include socioeconomic status (education, income, and work); gender; age; and neighborhoods. We conclude with directions for future research on contextual causes of mistrust and powerlessness.

Education has a large and increasing impact on health in America. This paper examines one reason why. Education gives individuals the ability to override the default American lifestyle. The default lifestyle has three elements: displacing human energy with mechanical energy, displacing household food production with industrial food production, and displacing health maintenance with medical dependency. Too little physical activity and too much food produce imperceptibly accumulating pathologies. The medical industry looks for products and services that promise to soften the consequences but do not eliminate the underlying pathologies. This "secondary prevention" creates pharmacologic accumulation: prolonging the use of medications, layering them, and accruing their side effects and interactions. Staying healthy depends on recognizing the risks of the default lifestyle. Overriding it requires insight, knowledge, critical analysis, long-range strategic thinking, personal agency, and self-direction. Education develops that ability directly and indirectly, by way of creative work and a sense of controlling one's own life.

What explains the benefits of marriage to good health? Do cohabitors, gay or straight, receive similar benefits from their intimate relationships? Liu and her colleagues open with this statement: “Marriage is associated with good health. Yet same-sex cohabitors cannot marry in most states in the United States and therefore may not receive the health benefits associated with marriage.” Is the benefit of marriage to health its legal status?

The sense of personal control is the cognitive link between social structural conditions and emotional distress. The sense of personal control is the perception that one’s life is shaped by one’s own efforts and actions. Perceived control versus powerlessness is the cognitive imprint of structured inequality, disadvantage, and objective powerlessness, including socioeconomic status and its elements (educational attainment, work, and income); gender, age, neighborhoods, and race/ethnicity. A low sense of personal control in turn leads to depression, anxiety, and anger.

The positive associations between education and health and survival are well established, but whether the strength of these associations depends on gender is not. Is the beneficial influence of education on survival and on self-rated health conditioned by gender in the same way, in opposite ways, or not at all? Because women are otherwise disadvantaged in socioeconomic resources that are inputs to health, their health and survival may depend more on education than will men's. To test this hypothesis, we use data from the National Health Interview Survey-Linked Mortality Files (NHIS-LMF). We find that education's beneficial influence on feeling healthy and on survival are conditional on gender, but in opposite ways. Education has a larger effect on women's self-rated health than on men's, but a larger effect on men's mortality. To further examine the mortality results, we examine specific causes of death. We find that the conditional effect is largest for deaths from lung cancer, respiratory disease, stroke, homicide, suicide, and accidents. Because women report worse health but men's mortality is higher, education closes the gender gap in both health and mortality.

"Trying all things":Romantic Polymaths, Social Factors, and the Legacies of a Rhetorical Education Catherine E. Ross There is perhaps no practical art which may not be acquired, in a very considerable degree, by example and practice, without reducing it to rules . . . practice, joined with rules, may carry a man on in his art farther and more quickly, than practice without rules. —Thomas Reid, A Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic, with Remarks (1774, 1778), 414-15 In the summer of 1810 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing in the eighteenth of the sixty-seven commonplace books he kept during his lifetime. Trained in the classical tradition at both Christ Hospital School and at Cambridge, Coleridge filled his commonplace books with ideas, bits of facts, and lines of argument that he might use in his writing. In the book he kept in the summer of 1810, Coleridge describes his notes as "Hints & first Thoughts. . . . cogitabilia . . . a me." These writings, he claims, were not necessarily his "fixed opinions," though he would often use them in his lectures and published works; they were, instead, "acts of obedience to the apostolic command of Trying all things."1 The willingness to "try all things," that is, to think, write, and discourse publicly about a wide variety of topics from poetics to politics, mathematics to medicine, was more common among intellectuals of the Romantic period than it is today, cable television pundits notwithstanding. Furthermore, many Romantics did more than just scribble or chat about diverse domains of knowledge; they were "devoted to the pursuit of knowledge" and sought or possessed "great or varied learning"; in short, they were philosophical polymaths as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, Romantic-era polymaths took all of knowledge as their province, regardless of formal training, and published and often worked in various fields, either professionally or avocationally. To be a polymath in a time when disciplines were less advanced and specialized might seem like less of an accomplishment than it would be today; nevertheless, the term—and the accomplishment it implies— [End Page 401] accurately characterizes many of the Romantics, with the added differences that most Romantic polymaths were almost entirely self-taught and most considered it their duty to pass on their knowledge in what I call the "educational impulse" of the age.2 Romantic-era writers' intellectual curiosity and endeavors to create a "commonwealth of learning" have inspired numerous interdisciplinary studies, such as Heringman's work on literature and geology (2004), Cantor et al. on the literary periodicals and science (2004), Caldwell on literature and Romantic-era medicine (2004), and the collaborative effort of Fulford, Lee, and Kitson on "bodies of knowledge" in the Romantic period (2004). Broader studies have fruitfully explored aspects of the development and relationships of intellectual disciplines; among these are Siskin's The Work of Writing (1999), Valenza's Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680- 1820 (2009), and a recent volume of Critical Inquiry on disciplinarity, with contributions by W. J. T. Mitchell, Judith Butler, James Chandler, and other distinguished scholars (January 2009). In this essay I have begun to map an area of investigation that has largely been neglected: the educational attitudes and practices that helped to train a group of writers notable for the breadth of their intellectual reach and the audacity of their aspirations. I offer a glimpse of the social frameworks and institutional conditions that made it possible for so many Romantic thinkers to be polymaths and that inspired them in their impulse to educate. In the first half of this essay, I document the ubiquity of Romantic polymathy with evidence from the private lives, social activities, and periodical reading of individuals from all social strata. In the second half of my essay, I locate one of the primary sources of the Romantics' polymathic and educational impulses in the principles and pedagogies of the English grammar school tradition, with its deep roots in classical learning and rhetoric. Though the English grammar school system of the long eighteenth century had many flaws, and though it was poised to shift radically from its classical orientation to the scientific one still in place today, grammar school...

A threatening and dangerous neighborhood may produce distressing emotions of anxiety, anger, and depression among the individuals who live there because residents find these neighborhoods subjectively alienating. The author introduces the idea that neighborhood disorder indicates collective threat, which is alienating—shaping perceptions of powerlessness and mistrust. The author presents a theory of trust that posits that mistrust develops in places where resources are scarce and threat is common and among individuals with few resources and who feel powerless to avoid or manage the threat. Perceived powerlessness develops with exposure to uncontrollable, negative conditions such as crime, danger, and threat in one’s neighborhood. Thus, neighborhood disorder, common in disadvantaged neighborhoods, influences mistrust directly and indirectly by increasing perceptions of powerlessness among residents, which amplify disorder’s effect on mistrust. The very thing needed to protect disadvantaged residents from the negative effects of their environment—a sense of personal control—is eroded by that environment in a process that the author calls structural amplification. Powerlessness and mistrust in turn are distressing, increasing levels of anxiety, anger, and depression.

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Does education improve health more for one sex than the other? We develop a theory of resource substitution which implies that education improves health more for women than men. Data from a 1995 survey of U.S. adults with follow-ups in 1998 and 2001 support the hypothesis. Physical impairment decreases more for women than for men as the level of education increases. The gender gap in impairment essentially disappears among people with a college degree. Latent growth SEM vectors also show that among the college educated, men's and women's life course patterns of physical impairment do not differ significantly.

The association between education and good health is well established, but whether the strength of the association depends on other social statuses is not. We test a theory of resource substitution which predicts a larger correlation between education and health (measured for physical impairment) for people who grew up in families with poorly-educated parents than for those whose parents were well educated. This is supported in the Aging, Status, and Sense of control (ASOC) survey, a representative national U.S. sample with data collected in 1995, 1998, and 2001. The reason that parental education matters more to people who are poorly educated themselves is due to an unhealthy lifestyle, specifically to smoking and being overweight. Finally, as the poorly educated age, the negative health effects of their parents’ low educational attainment get worse.

Is neighborhood-specific social support the most effective type of social support for buffering the effect of neighborhood disorder on depression? Matching theory suggests that it It's. The authors extend the research on neighborhood disorder and adult depression by showing that individual, who have higher levels of both general and neighborhood-specific social relationships, measured by social support and neighborhood social ties, are less vulnerable to negative effects of neighborhood disorder Using the Community, Crime, and Health Survey, the authors found that neighborhood disorders association with depression is lower for people with supportive social ties with. neighbors and for people with more general social support. The latter conditional effect is stronger than the former, indicating that support in which the source of support matches the source of strain is not more effective than general support at buffering the effects of neighborhood strain. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Living in a threatening, noxious, and dangerous neighborhood may produce anxiety, anger, and depression because it is subjectively alienating. We hypothesize that neighborhood disorder represents ambient threat that elicits perceptions of powerlessness, normlessness, mistrust, and isolation. These perceptions in turn lead to anxious and angry agitation, and depressed exhaustion. We use data from the 1995 Community, Crime, and Health survey, a probability sample of 2,482 adults in Illinois, with a follow-up survey in 1998. We find that perceived neighborhood disorder is associated with high levels of anxiety, anger, and depression. Personal victimization mediates about 10 percent of the association. The rest of the association is mediated primarily by mistrust and, secondarily, by perceived powerlessness. Normlessness reflects neighborhood disorder, but it appears to have little influence on distress. Social isolation has trade-offs in its connections to neighborhood disorder and to distress.

Objectives: The goal of this research is to see if more highly educated older Chinese have lower levels of distress than do their poorly educated counterparts and whether engaging in cognitively stimulating activities such as reading and playing mahjong explains the association. Method and Results: Using the Chinese Healthy Longevity Survey, the authors find a significant negative association between education and psychological distress. Much of the association is mediated by activities, but not all in the ways expected. Reading, playing mahjong, and watching television all negatively correlate with distress. Discussion: Better-educated older Chinese have lower levels of distress than do their less-well-educated counterparts in part because they engage in cognitively stimulating activities, have better economic circumstances, and engage in more physical activity.