Midlife Crisis In the 1970s both Daniel Levinson and Roger Gould concluded that a midlife crisis is a normal transition experienced by a majority of the people. They defined the midlife crisis as marked by reappraisal of one's life, emotional turmoil, or feeling pressed by time. However, a host of more recent studies have failed to detect Levinson and Gould's midlife crisis and propose that the original findings had been victim of investigator expectancy effects. Thus, it is clear that the fabled midlife crisis is not universal, and it probably isn't even typical.