Personality Development Across the Lifespan

Jule Specht, Jule Specht

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128047613
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología del desarrollo

Personality Development across the Lifespan examines the development of personality characteristics from childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, adulthood, and old age. It provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives, methods, and empirical findings of personality and developmental psychology, also detailing insights on how individuals differ from each other, how they change during life, and how these changes relate to biological and environmental factors, including major life events, social relationships, and health.

The book begins with chapters on personality development in different life phases before moving on to theoretical perspectives, the development of specific personality characteristics, and personality development in relation to different contexts, like close others, health, and culture.

Final sections cover methods in research on the topic and the future directions of research in personality development.

• Introduces and reviews the most important personality characteristics
• Examines personality in relation to different contexts and how it is related to important life outcomes
• Discusses patterns and sources of personality development

Part One

Introduction

Outline

1 Personality development research: State-of-the-art and future directions

1

Personality development research

State-of-the-art and future directions

Jule Specht^1,2,*, ¹Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany, ²German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Berlin, Germany

What can we predict for the future of an individual who happens to be a sociable, talkative, and lively young boy? Or for an open-minded, unconventional, and curious woman who enters young adulthood? From personality psychology research, we know that individuals are characterized by stable individual differences like, e.g., extraversion and openness to experience. But from developmental psychology research, we know that individuals change systematically across time depending, among other things, on their biological maturation and the developmental tasks they are faced with.

Personality development research combines these two research traditions assuming that there are relatively stable individual differences that may change in the long run. Based on the findings of these two psychological disciplines, we now have good reason to predict that the extraverted boy from the introductory example is likely to become an energetic, happy, and self-confident man. And that he is more likely to become popular, to have a lot of friends, and that he will later likely be at ease attracting romantic partners compared to a more introverted person. We can also be quite confident that these experiences will retroact on his personality, strengthening his extraversion and stimulating changes in other personality traits of his own or his social network.

We can furthermore expect on good grounds that the woman of the second introductory example, who has particularly high levels in the personality trait openness to experience, will likely remain among the most open-minded individuals of her age during the course of her life. It is likely that she will think, feel, and behave more extraordinarily even in old age compared to others of her age group. However, empirical research also suggests that she will likely be less open to new experience at age 80 compared to the time of her college years because openness to experience tends to decline during adulthood.

Taken together, recent findings from personality development research highlight the fact that personality trait levels are surprisingly stable even across several decades and even when faced with major changes in life circumstances. At the same time, it is very unlikely that a person remains at the same personality trait level across all of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age or that a person remains at the exact same position on a personality trait relative to others of the same age group across time. Personality development researchers are eager to understand why personality is highly stable even under instable life conditions, why personality changes in some people more than in others, and how life shapes who we are and who we become.

A new focus: from stability to changeability of personality traits

Personality psychologists and social psychologists have long struggled about the question of whether enduring individual characteristics or momentary situational characteristics are most relevant for predicting how a person will act in a given context. Most colleagues now agree that both—the personality and the (social) situation—have an important influence on behavior. Personality is assumed to have a particularly high impact in situations with low social pressure to behave in a specific way. For example, personality is more likely to result in individual differences at a Sunday afternoon with no obligations to go to work, and the freedom to choose between relaxing at home, doing sports, going to a museum, or meeting with friends. In contrast, personality is less likely to result in strong individual differences at a busy working day that comes along with specific demands about how to behave to comply to the situation. Thus even though individual differences can occur in every situation, they are more likely in situations that are free of specific social expectations about how to behave.

The need to argue for the important impact of enduring individual differences—compared to situational characteristics—is likely a reason for the strong focus on the stability of individual differences in personality traits in early personality psychology research. Now we can be sure that individuals show different behaviors in the same situation as a result of differences in their personality traits. Also, we now know that individuals will show similar behavior across different situations as a result of relatively stable personality traits. Thus the scientific debate between personality psychologists and social psychologists about whether personality actually exists is now largely overcome, and the idea of stable individual differences is widely acknowledged across disciplines within psychology.

The initial focus on the high stability of personality traits has lost sight of the fact that personality is far from being perfectly stable. Instead, personality changes systematically across time, with age, and in reaction to the environment. Modern personality psychology therefore shifted its focus from stability to changeability of personality traits, which resulted in a new area of research, namely personality development research.

Research on personality development has flourished during the last decade. Nowadays, it is continuously represented with scientific talks and posters at each of the major conferences of our field (e.g., International Convention of Psychological Science, Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention, Association for Research in Personality Conference, European Conference on Personality). It gets published in the major journals of our field (e.g., Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology) and was topic of two special issues in the European Journal of Personality in 2006 (Neyer, 2006) and in 2014 (Denissen, 2014). At the moment, Web of Science (https://apps.webofknowledge.com) lists more than 8000 published papers on personality development since 2006, which is more than twice the number of papers on that topic compared to the decade before and the number is still increasing every year.

Central topics within the personality development literature

The number of researchers interested in the question of how and why personality changes across the lifespan is obviously increasing considerably, resulting in an overwhelming number of new research findings on that topic. At the same time, there is still no up-to-date book summarizing the most important findings in the most central areas of research on personality development and this is exactly what this book aims at changing.

The first part of this book deals with the question of how personality changes in different life phases by summarizing empirical findings on personality development. This includes childhood (Herzhoff, Kushner, & Tackett, Chapter 2), adolescence (Hill & Edmonds, Chapter 3), emerging adulthood (Bleidorn & Schwaba, Chapter 4), adulthood (Specht, Chapter 5), and the end of life (Mueller, Wagner, & Gerstorf, Chapter 6).

The second part of this book then introduces theoretical perspectives on personality development including Five-Factor Theory of Personality (Mõttus, Chapter 7), theoretical perspectives on the interplay of nature and nurture (Kandler & Zapko-Willmes, Chapter 8), Set-Point Theory (Ormel, VonKorff, Jeronimus, & Riese, Chapter 9), evolutionary perspectives (Smith & Weiss, Chapter 10), and the Neo-Socioanalytic Model (Roberts & Nickel, Chapter 11).

Most research within personality psychology is based on the well-known Big Five model but of course there are other important individual differences beyond emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness that require special attention. These personality characteristics and their lifespan development are summarized in the third part of this book, including self-esteem (Orth, Chapter 12), subjective well-being (Luhmann, Chapter 13), positive personality development (Reitz & Staudinger, Chapter 14), perceived control (F. J. Infurna & C. J. Infurna, Chapter 15), goals and motivation (Hennecke & Freund, Chapter 16), attachment style (Fraley & Hudson, Chapter 17), identity formation (Klimstra & van Doeselaar, Chapter 18), cognition and intelligence (Schmiedek, Chapter 19), and personal narratives (McLean, Chapter 20).

Personality development does not occur in isolation. How the context individuals are in impacts their personality is the topic of the fourth part of this book. It includes reviews on the impact of major life events (Specht, Chapter 21), close relationships (Finn, Zimmermann, & Neyer, Chapter 22), health (Jackson, Weston, & Schultz, Chapter 23), psychopathology (De Fruyt, De Clercq, De Caluwé, & Verbeke, Chapter 24), educational and organizational environments (Stoll & Trautwein, Chapter 25), and culture (Kim & Sasaki, Chapter 26) on personality development and shows that a considerable amount of systematic changes in personality can be traced back to these contexts.

The fifth part of this book offers insight into methods used to come to meaningful conclusions about how personality changes across time. It includes information about how this area of research can benefit from personality assessment in daily life (Allemand & Mehl, Chapter 27), how microprocesses of personality development likely take place (Geukes, van Zalk, & Back, Chapter 28), about the impact of genetic effects (Kandler & Papendick, Chapter 29), and statistical approaches aiming at analyzing personality change (Voelkle & Wagner, Chapter 30).

In the sixth and last part of this book, three promising new areas of research are introduced that have not received much attention in the last 10 years and therefore remain, at this point, rather speculative. However, they are also visionary because these areas of research will likely advance our understanding of personality development in the upcoming years. The first topic under consideration deals with generational changes in personality (Hülür, Chapter 31) that have been controversially discussed in the context of self-esteem and that received less attention with regard to other personality characteristics. A second topic deals with the question of how implicit aspects of personality develop with age (Rauthmann, Chapter 32), a topic that might fruitfully complement the findings that mainly—even though not exclusively—focused on explicit self-reports nowadays. The third chapter deals with the question of whether personality can be changed intentionally (Hudson & Fraley, Chapter 33), which could allow individuals to adapt to their life...