Week 4 - personality development and change

Is personality fixed or changed?

Continually develops across the lifespan

Temperament

Individual differences in affect, (behavioural) activity, and self-regulation

Early forming personality early in life

Early-emerging dispositions of temperament (infancy → early childhood)

1. Surgency (high activity, positive emotion)

2. Negative emotionality (sadness, irritability, arousal)

3. Effortful control (sustained attention, persistence in tasks/activities)

4. Affiliativeness (enjoyment of social contact)

5. Orienting sensitivity (enjoyment of sensory experiences)

Little Six: a foundational youth structure (middle childhood → adolescence)

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Conscientiousness

Neuroticism

Openness to Experience

Activity (physical energy → agency, motivation, competition)

Big Five (late adolescence → adulthood)

Extraversion - sociability, positive emotion, assertiveness, energy

Agreeableness - empathy, cooperation, inhibition of hostility

Conscientiousness - self-control, planning, reliability, goal pursuit

Neuroticism - threat sensitivity, withdrawal, volatility

Openness/Intellect - imagination, curiosity, abstract exploration

Rank order stability

• If one is above average on a trait at age 30, there’s a high likelihood they will remain above average at age 60

• Trait general - does not vary across big five, assessment method (eg self reports, observer ratings), gender

Rank order stability influences

• Genetic influences

• Environment channeling - environments naturally stabilise over time, ‘settling down’ - consolidation of routines, friendships, career, etc

• Environmental selection - actively choose environments that match and reinforce our traits (eg. changing jobs, relationships, leisure pursuits, travel)

  • Assortative mating - trait correlation between partners

  • Migration - personality predicts movement between cities/countries

  • Vocational choice - personality predicts choice of major and covational choice

Mean level

• Extraversion and activity decrease

• Conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness show U-shaped trends (decrease then increase again)

• Neuroticism increases then shows different trajectories for boys and girls

Mean level influences

Genetic influences

• evolved maturation processes for “developmental tasks”

  • O and E less essential after reproduction?

  • C and A more helpful during parenthood?

• Some evidence for cross-species generalisability

• Suggestive of universal/evolved maturation patterns

Environment effects

• Responses to major life transitions, stages, events

  • Effects of gaining independence from parents, transition to work, etc

• World/historical events

  • Possibility of cohort effects?

• Weak support for cohort effects

Individual stability/change

The role of individual/life events and experiences

For all traits except N, magnitude of individual change gradually decreases over the lifespan

May have important practical implications…

Eg. Health - conscientiousness predicts health, and increases in conscientiousness predicts improvements in health

Eg. Mortality - neuroticism predicts mortality, and increases in neuroticism predicts shorter lifespan

Transition to work (again):

People often have different experiences during these transitions

Impact of life events on personality:

Starting a new relationship: conscientiousness

Getting married: openness

Starting a first job: conscientiousness

Unemployment: neuroticism

SURPRISINGLY, most personality change effects occurred prior to the major life events!

Eg. Transition to work, increases in conscientiousness and oppenness prior to employment

Can we choose to change volitional personality?

Research questions:

1. Do people want to change?

2. Do people change as desired?

3. How do they change?

1. Yes people want to change

• ~90% of people want to change their personlaity (in some way)

• On average people wanted to increase E, O, A, C and decrease N

2. Yes people did change as desired

• Increased E, O, A, C and decreased N over time

3. They change via:

• Via counter-dispositional behaviour

  • Goals → changes in personality expressions → change in traits

  • For E, A and N only

• ‘Identity’

  • Goals → change in traits → changes in personality expressions

  • For E, C and N only

• NB: No mediators identified for changes in openness