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If you are like most people reading this chapter, you believe we enter middle age at about age 40 and exit this life stage at age 60 or 65 (Etaugh & Bridges, 2006; Lachman, 2004). Your parents or grandparents might not agree. In U.S. surveys, roughly half of all people in their late sixties and seventies call themselves middle-aged (Lachman, 2004). They may be right. When a woman, such as Jamila’s mother, is healthy and working in her seventies, should we call her middle-aged or old? When someone is starting a family at age 45 or 50, is that individual middle-aged or a young adult?

At the other extreme, you may know a middle-aged person who does feel “old”: a relative in his fifties coping with heart disease or a colleague who acts like 80 even though she is 45.

What causes one midlife adult to embrace aging and another to feel frightened about the years ahead? One poll showed an important influence fostering a downbeat view of the future, as I just suggested, is health concerns—having an off-time chronic disease.

Gender and socioeconomic status make a difference, with females and affluent adults having more upbeat aging attitudes than their peers (more about these forces in Chapter 14). But personality matters most. A basic temperamental trait called neuroticism is almost certain to cloud people’s view about the older years (Miche and others, 2014).

What exactly is neuroticism, and how do personality and cognition change as we travel into life’s afternoon? What role concerns become salient during the middle years? This chapter tackles these topics one by one.