Learning about life from the movies.

Winona Ryder is addressing young adulthood; Billy Crystal is handling mid life; Henry Fonda is taking on old age; and Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger are covering death and dying. They are the "guest instructors" in Marsha Weinraub's psychology class at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa., where students are learning about adult development by examining characters in popular movies.

"It's not a film class," she emphasizes. Indeed, while film courses routinely examine plot, dialogue, and camera angles in movies such as "Reality Bites," "City Slickers," "On Golden Pond," and "Shadowlands," Weinraub's class is looking strictly at the stages of development in the characters in the films.

Take Mitch, Crystal's character in "City Slickers," a comedy in which three men nearing mid life decide to join a cattle drive. Mitch has a good job, a loving wife, a nice house, cute kids, and good friends. He has fulfilled the three criteria for defining adulthood: economic independence, readiness to marry and raise children, and decisiveness about his career. Yet, Mitch is having a mid-life crisis, Weinraub explains to her class. "His crisis is that his life is boring. There are no risks. There's no challenge."

The spice returns to Mitch's life when he takes risks, climaxing when h e almost drowns while saving Norman, a way ward calf. That's a prime example of generativity, the idea that adults in middle age begin to take a unselfish interest in establishing and guiding the next...