The Developing Structure of Temperament and Personality From Infancy To Adulthood

Charles F. Halverson, Jr., Gedolph A. Kohnstamm, Roy P. Martin, Charles F. Halverson, Geldolph A. Kohnstamm

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317781783
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is the first to bring together researchers in individual differences in personality and temperament to explore whether there is any unity possible between the temperament researchers of infancy and childhood and the major researchers in adult personality. Prior to the workshop which resulted in this volume, the existing literature seemed to document a growing consensus on the part of the adult personality researchers that five major personality dimensions -- the "Big Five" -- might be sufficient to account for most of the important variances in adult individual differences in personality. In contrast to this accord, the literature on child and infant individual differences seemed to offer a wide variety of opinions regarding the basic dimensions of difference in personality or temperament. The editors believed that they could encourage researchers from both the adult and child areas to consider the importance of a lifespan conceptualization of individual differences by discussing their research in terms of a continuity approach.

Written by some of the most distinguished scholars from Great Britain, continental Western Europe, and Eastern Europe as well as the United States and Canada, the chapters present a cross-cultural view of both adult personality and temperament in infancy and childhood. By sharing their recent data, techniques, and theoretical speculations, the chapter authors communicate the research enthusiasm engendered by the growing consensus of the adult "Big Five" as well as the exciting prospects of an integrative program of research from infancy to adulthood that will clarify and consolidate what is now a disparate set of methods, theory, and findings across the lifespan. The editors suggest that this volume will have considerable heuristic value in stimulating researchers to conceptualize their work in developmental, lifespan approaches that will lead to a consolidation of individual differences research at every age.

PART
I
CURRENT CONCEPTIONS OF THE STRUCTURE OF ADULT PERSONALITY

In this first section of the book, we have collected a set of chapters that fairly accurately mirrors the current conceptions, strategies and, to some extent, the controversies surrounding the development of taxonomies of adult personality. We do not recount here the long and complex history of the search for "the taxonomy" of adult personality, but simply say that the number of personality dimensions proposed, and the number of instruments created to measure them, is nothing short of remarkable (see for example, Goldberg, 1971; John, 1990; Wiggins & Trapnell, in press, for the detailed history of the search for personality structure).

Although such theoretical and methodological diversity may make the history of personality psychology exciting and challenging, it can, at the same time, make progress nearly impossible. In recent years there has been much emphasis on the search for a common set of personality descriptors that would identify a common dimensional structure. Such a common dimensional structure would facilitate an orderly accumulation of knowledge and stimulate more scholarly exchange of research findings.

Among personality psychologists there is a rapidly growing consensus that the domain of individual differences in adulthood, as measured by rating scales and questionnaire items, is almost completely described by five broad factors (e.g., Digman, 1989, 1990; Goldberg, 1981, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1985, 1987; McCrae, Costa, & Busch, 1986). This five-factor model of personality has proved robust across different groups of subjects, item pools, instruments, and methods of analysis, as well as across different languages and cultures. Major replications of the five factors obtained with English-speaking Americans have also been obtained in Holland (e.g., Hofstee & Van Heck, 1990) and Germany (e.g., Ostendorf, 1990).

Although theoretical explanations for these remarkable empirical regularities have begun to emerge (Buss, 1991; Costa, McCrae, & Dembroski, 1988; Hogan, 1983; John, 1990; Wiggins & Trapnell, in press), the Big Five model in adulthood owes its power more to the replicability of empirical results than to a set of generally accepted theoretical axioms about human personality structure. These models have not, however, obtained monolithic status. There is still serious debate about the generality of each of the dimensions, as well as the need for fewer or more dimensions in a "basic" personality taxonomy. The chapters in this section give the reader an excellent overview of the status of the major personality taxonomies and some of the continuing controversies in the field.

In chapter 1, Goldberg and Rosolack provide a convincing illustration of the power of the Big Five model to serve as a framework for comparison to other taxonomies such as Eysenck's well-known three-factor P-E-N model. By having Eysenck judge where each of the Goldberg Big Five clusters was located in his P-E-N model, Goldberg and Rosolak demonstrated that, contrary to Eysenck's assertions, the P-E-N model is not at a higher order level than the Big Five taxonomy; rather, E and N map onto the Extraversion and Neuroticism Big Five dimensions and Psychoticism appears to be a blend of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness (low), not a higher order dimension.

Eysenck, in chapter 2, remains unconvinced, arguing that his P-E-N system is more viable, being related to a wide nomological net of relations that have been theoretically predicted. The argument is mainly about what dimensions there may be beyond E and N (because the two major paradigms agree on those two dimensions). Eysenck discusses an extensive and impressive set of studies that he believes fills in much of the theoretically predicted nomological net with empirical findings ranging from biological causes to social consequences of P. The reader must judge the evidence provided by Eysenck as to whether P is more than "A" (Agreeableness) and "C" (Conscientiousness) from the Big Five. Clearly, the empirical work on the nomological nets of A and C remains to be done, but it could turn out to confirm any one of a variety of possibilities, from Eysenck's independent P notion to Goldberg and Rosolak's assertion that P is just a blend of A and C.

Adding to the previous discussion on taxonomy is Zuckerman's presentation of an alternative five-factor model, outlined in chapter 3. Zuckerman begins with factor analyses of personality and temperament questionnaire scales that show both established empirical validity and evidence of biological correlates. Like Eysenck, Zuckerman believes the determination of "basic factors" lies not in the lexicon, but in the nomological nets of constructs predicted from psychobiological theories. Further, he is suspicious of personality constructs based on single words or short phrases (as opposed to theoretically derived items describing a particular behavior or set of behaviors). Zuckerman goes on to reprise his steps in deriving his alternative five-factor model. It is based on several analyses of scales from a wide variety of questionnaires that meet his biological-nomological net criteria. Through several iterations and replications, Zuckerman describes three to six factors recovered from his analyses. With a final instrument in hand, he then compares his model to Eysenck's P-E-N and the Big Five model. Zuckerman clearly shows that Eysenck's P shares much variance with his own "impulsive sensation-seeking" variable and the Big Five construct of Conscientiousness, even though the labels sound quite different. Even though Zuckerman's, Eysenck's, and Costa and McCrae's models clearly stem from different assumptions, there is an impressive amount of overlap. The editors would like to see, however, some of Zuckerman's analyses done at the item level rather than the scale level. Scale-level factors analyses are biased heavily by the inclusiveness of the scales, whereas item factor analyses are not. It would be interesting to see if his constructs survived item-level factor analyses.

Following directly from the previous consideration is chapter 4 by Angleitner and Ostendorf, who also searched for a common structure among a group of temperament and personality instruments. Angleitner and Ostendorf had a group of adults respond to four widely used temperament inventories and two measures of the five-factor model of personality. Through a series of analyses, these authors clearly derived the Big Five personality structure, plus a sixth factor defined by Rhythmicity scales of the Dimensions of Temperament Scale. Given these diverse inventories, the confirmation of a single five-factor model subsuming both temperament and personality measures is impressive.

Chapter 5 by De Raad, Hendnks, and Hofstee extends the basic Big Five lexical model in important ways. These authors point out that taking measurement of personality structure one trait at a time is a problematic procedure because many trait descriptors have factor loadings on more than one of the Big Five. If one stays with the best descriptors (those with high loadings on only one trait) much of importance for person description is left out. Their solution is to combine the Big Five approach with the circumplex model, which has also a long, distinguished history in personality measurement (Trapnell & Wiggins, 1990; Wiggins, 1980).

De Raad and his colleagues show nicely how personality descriptions in the Dutch language are best represented by their intersection with two of the Big Five dimensions. In fact, the 10 two-dimensional spaces generated by the Big Five model can map nearly all personality words! The empirical finding that most words almost always load on only two dimensions means that this Abridged Big Five Circumplex (AB5C) model can represent the subtleties of person description. It may be that humans' mental structures for describing the nuances of individual differences are realized by a five-dimensional module that is tremendously generative yet relatively simple!

Chapter 6 by Panter, Tanaka, and Hoyle presents researchers with some old and new techniques to compare findings across test batteries. We believe it very important to acquaint personality researchers with improved and less biased ways to estimate a structure from two or more personality batteries. The chapter contains some needed precautions in interpreting the robustness of a particular model like the Big Five from the shared covariation across instruments, time, and/or informants. Using both exploratory and confirmatory models they give us important guidelines to test models for congruence and invariance.

Finally, Costa and McCrae examine the stability of the Big Five structure from age 12 to 63 years. That the Big Five is very stable in adulthood has been increasingly apparent to the authors from their earlier studies on the stability of personality (based on the Baltimore Longitudinal Study), They sought new data to determine in a more precise way when the major dimensions of personality reach maturity. Through a series of analyses, Costa and McCrae convincingly demonstrate both stability and change during late adolescence and early adulthood. There continue to be important developmental changes until about age 30, which the authors examine very carefully.

These seven chapters provide the reader with much data, theory, and different conceptualizations around the theme of the importance of some variant of the Big Five structure in adulthood. Subsequent portions of the book take up developmental themes in infancy and childhood in more detail. We need to move beyond adulthood and ask whether the Big Five model may be applied to earlier developmental periods. Further, we need research linking early temperament in infancy with the emergence of such personality concepts like Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience. These are the topics discussed in the remainder of the book.

References

Buss, D. M. (1991). Evolutionary personality psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 459-491.

Costa, P. T., Jr., McCrae, R. R., & Dembroski, T. M. (1988). Agreeableness versus antagonism: Explication of a potential risk factor for children. In A. Siegman & T. M. Dembroski (Eds.), In search of coronary-prone behavior (pp. 41-63). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Digman, J. M. (1989). Five robust trait dimensions: Development, stability and utility. Journal of Personality, 57, 195-214.

Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417-440.

Goldberg, L. R. (1971). A historical survey of personality scales and surveys. In P. McReynolds (Ed.), Advances in psychological assessment (Vol. 2, pp. 293-336). Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books.

Goldberg, L. R. (1981). Language and individual differences: The search for universals in personality lexicons. In L. Wheeler (Ed.), Review of personality and social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 141-165). Beverly Hills. CA: Sage.

Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216-1229.

Hofstee, W. K. B., & Van Heck, G. L. (1990). Personality language [Special issue]. European Journal of Personality, 4.

Hogan, R. (1983). Socioanalytic theory of personality. In M. Page (Ed.), 1982 Nebraska symposium on motivation: Personality—current theory and research (pp. 55-89). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

John, O. P. (1990). The "Big Five" factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In L. A. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 66-100). New York: Guilford.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa. P. T. (1985). Updating Norman's "Adequate Taxonomy": In natural language and in questionnaires. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49. 710-727.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I CURRENT CONCEPTIONS OF THE STRUCTURE OF ADULT PERSONALITY
• PART II EMERGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE CHILDHOOD PRECURSORS OF PERSONALITY STRUCTURE
• PART III DERIVING THE FIVE-FACTOR MODEL FROM PARENTAL RATINGS OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
• PART IV DERIVING THE FIVE-FACTOR MODEL FROM TEACHER RATINGS OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
• PART V A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT IN CHILDHOOD BASED ON FREE DESCRIPTION
• Author Index
• Subject Index