chapter9personality

Is personality stable across adulthood?

We tend to believe that people’s personalities are complex but remain relatively stable over time as life is easier and people easier to understan and interact with if we know what to expect.

We also believe that we can change undesirable aspects of our and others’ personalities which implies personality is modifiable.

Dispositional traits

Aspects of personality that are consistent across different contexts and can be compared across a group along a continuum, representing high and low degrees of the characteristic

Personal concerns

Things that are important to people; their goals, and their major concerns in life

Life narrative

Aspects of personality that pull everything together: those integrative aspects that give a person an idenity or sense of self

Dispositional traits

People’s characteristic behavior can be understood through attributes that reflect underlying dispositional traits, which are relatively enduring aspects of personality

Personality traits are based on 3 assumptions:

1. Traits are based on comparisons across individuals

2. The qualities of a trait must be distinctive enough to avoid confusion

3. Traits of an individual person are a stable characteristic

What can be assumed due to dispositional traits?

Trait theories assume that little change in personality occurs during adulthood

The five-factor trait model

• Costa and McCrae developed a model of personality with 5 independent dimensions, each with 6 facets":

  • Neuroticism

  • Extraversion

  • Openness to experience

  • Agreeableness

  • Conscientiousness

• Much of the research has focused on the first 3 dimensions

Neuroticism

• A person's tendency to experience negative emotions,

• Has 6 facets:

  • Anxiety

  • Hostility

    • Underlying emotions: fear and anger

  • Self-consciousness

  • Depression

    • Underlying emotions: shame and sorrow

  • Impulsiveness

  • Vulnerability

    • Manifested by behaviors rather than emotions

• Associated with a higher risk of developing AD

Conscientiousness

• A person's level of organization, responsibility, and goal-directedness

• Conscientious people are:

  • Hardworking

  • Ambitious

  • Energetic

  • Scrupulous

  • Perserving

  • Desirous to make something of themselves

• Associated with a lower risk of developing AD

• Also correlations between high conscientiousness and decreased incidence of mild cognitive impairment and reduced cognitive decline

Openness to experience

• Has 6 facets, representing 6 areas:

  • Fantasy: a vivid imagination and active dream life

  • Aesthetics: appreciation of art and beauty

  • Action: willingness to try something new

  • Ideas: curiosity; valuing knowledge for the sake of knowing

  • Values: open-minded about values

  • Open-mindedness: willingness to think of different possibilities

• Associated with a lower risk of developing AD

• Tend to be intelligent and tolerant of stressful situations

• Prefer occupations that value theoretical thinking and put less emphasis on the money aspects of jobs

Extraversion

• A person's sociability, energy levels, and preference for social interaction

• Has 6 facets divide in 2 groups:

  • Interpersonal traits

    • Warmth

    • Gregariousness

    • Assertiveness

  • Temperamental traits

    • Activity

    • Excitement seeking

    • Positive emotions

  • Like to keep busy and prefer to be in stimulating and exciting environments

  • Relates well to occupational interests

Agreeableness

• A person's tendency to be cooperative, empathetic, and trusting

• Agreeable people are not: skeptical, mistrustful, callous, unsympathetic, stubborn, rude, skillful manipulators, agressove go-getters

• May lead to being overly dependent and self-effacing

Trait stability evidence

• Over a 12-year period, in a logitudinal study of aging Costa and McCrae, 10 personality traits measured by GZTS remained stable

• They believed that personality traits stop changing by 30 an they appear to be set in plaster

Personality ajustment

Developmental changes in terms of their adaptive value an functionality

Personality growth

Ideal end states such as increased such as increased self-transcendece, wisdom, and integrity

Ego development

Fundamental changes in the ways our thoughts, values, morals, and goals are organized

What happens to dispositional traits?

• Change are complex and non-linear

  • Personality adjustment (common) vs. personality growth (rare)

Current consensus of change in the big 5 with increasing age

• Less neuroticism

• More agreeableness and conscientiousness

• Decreased emotional volatility

Wzrus an Robberts TESSERA (triggering situations, expectancy, states/state expressions, and reactions)

• Long-term personality development is the product of repeated short-term, situational processes

• These short-term processes differ across people

• Some people show changes in personality traits and others do not

Alternatives to the 5 factors model

• Lack of a cross-cultural perspective

  • HEXACO (6 factor) moel includes on honesty-humility, which taps into individual differences in fairness and modesty

• Other approaches:

  • A 7-facet model based on psychobiology

  • A dark-tetrad model based on behaviors that violate social norms
    

Conclusions about dispositional traits

• The idea that personality traits stop changing at age 30 doesn’t have uniform support

• A partial resolution of the stability/change controvery can be found by looking at how the research was conducted as personality traits tend to appear more stable when data averaged over large groups

Personal concerns

• Reflect what people want during particular times of their lives an within specific domains

• Are explicitly contextual

• Are narrative descriptions that rely on life circumstances

• Change over time

Theoretical bases of personal concerns

• Limitied empirical research

• Numerous theories that postulate developmental stages

  • Each qualitative stage reflects the core concern for that period of life

Jung’s theory

• One of the first theories that propossed personality development during aulthood

• Introuced thenotion of midlife crisis

• Emphasized that each aprct of a person’s personality must be in balance with all others

• Postulated 2 basic orientations of the Ego, and the 2 age-related trendss

  • Introversion-extraversion (introversion increasing with age)

  • Masculinity-feminity (with younger adults condorming more to gender roles)

• Argues that people move toward integrating these dimensions as they age, with midlife being an especially important period

Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development

• First to develop a truly lifespan throy of personality development

• Emphaasiez the interaction between inner maturational plan (nature) and external social demands (nurture)

• His 8 stages represent the 8 great struggles that he believed people must undergo

• Each struggle has a certain time of ascendancy and follow the epigenetic principle meaning each struggle must be resolved to continue development

Strengths developed in childhood and adolescence

• Trust vs. mistrust

• Autonomy vs shame and soubt

• Initiative vs guilt

• Industry vs inferiority

• Identity vs identity confusion

Strengths developed in adulthood

• Intimacy vs isolation: major development of young adulthood involves establishing a fully intimate relationship with another; the strength that emerges is love

  • Partners in friendship, sex competition, cooperation

• Generativity vs stagnation: major development of middle adulthood involves the struggle beween a sense of generativity (need to maintain and perpetuate in society) and sense of stagnation (feeling of self-absorption); the strength that emerges is caring

  • Divided labor and shared household

• Integrity vs despair: major development of old age involves a growing awareness of the nearness of end of life with the goal to ealuate and make sense of one’s life; the strength here is wisdom

  • Humankind

Further explorations of generativity

• McAdam;s model hows how generativity results from:

  • Complex interconnections between societal and inner forces

  • Which lea to a concern for the nex tgeneration and a belief in teh goodness of the human enterprise

  • Leaving a legacy is an important aspect of generativity

• Research indicates:

  • Middle and olderadulthood are more preoccupied with this

  • May be a strog preictor of emotional well being

Theories based on life transitions

• Based on the idea that adults go through a series of life transitions and crises alternating with periods of stability

• Not clearly supported by research

Midlife crisis

• Idea that as middle age we take a good look at ourselves in the hope of achieving a better understanding of who we are

• Very little data to support the claim that all people inevitably experience a crisis in middle age

• Midlife correction: transition may be better characterized as a midlife correction; reevaluating one’s roles and dreams an making the necessary corrections

Conclusions about personal concerns

• Evidence supports substantive change in personal concerns as adults age

• Change is not specifc to an age but is dependent on many factors