In this study 27 older adults (ages 64-80) and 23 middle-aged adults (ages 35-54) were tested for moral stage, integrative complexity of social reasoning, and perspective-taking levels twice over a 4-year period. Moral reasoning stage levels did not change over time for either age group. Older adults, but not the middle-aged, showed a significant decline over time in level of moral perspective taking. Complexity of reasoning about several interpersonal social issues declined modestly in both age groups. More social-cognitive support, a higher education level, and better self-reported health were all found to be protective factors in forestalling declines in mature adults' sociocognitive reasoning, consistent with other research on cognitive measures in later life.Do time and experience systematically alter the ways in which mature adults come to think about their social and moral lives? This question has been addressed by several means in psychological research to date. Lawrence Kohlberg's (e.g., 1976) six-stage description of moral reasoning is a prototypic example of the developmental approach to social cognition. According to this framework, individuals progress gradually from a primitive, egocentric morality to a more principled, universal view, the highest levels of which even many mature adults are believed not to achieve. The sequence of these stage progressions from childhood through middle adulthood has been documented through both cross-sectional and longitudinal investigations (e.g., Colby &Kohlberg, 1987;Walker, 1989). Research on the development of these stages of reasoning in later life is sparse and entirely cross-sectional, but it generally suggests that mature adults differ little on average from midlife to at least age 75 (e.g.

The climate of parental interactions with adolescents at 14 years of age, and its longitudinal prediction to adolescent moral reasoning at 16 years of age, was studied in 40 Canadian families. Three measures of family climate were obtained, including the authoritative parenting style construct of Baumrind, the transactive dialogue measure of Berkowitz and Gibbs, and a novel index of responsiveness to the “child’s voice” in the stories told by parents about moral socialization, based on the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. Greater operational transact use in Time 1 discussions by fathers was predictive of gains in moral reasoning for children older than the 2 years. For mothers, stronger indications of responsiveness to the child’s voice in stories told when children were 14 years of age also predicted gains over time in moral reasoning for adolescents. Most generally, results indicated the need to delineate more fully the role of each parent in the moral socialization process.

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