Personality Dispositions Over Time:
Stability, Change, and Coherence
Conceptual Issues: Personality Development, Stability, Change, and Coherence
What Is Personality Development?
- Personality development: Continuities, consistencies, stabilities in people over time, and the way in which people change over time
- Three key forms of stability
- Rank order stability: Maintenance of an individual position's within group
- Mean level stability: Constancy of level in population
- Personality coherence: Maintaining rank order relative to others but changing in the manifestations of trait
- Personality change: Two defining qualities
- Internal: Changes are internal to a person, not changes in the external surrounding
- Enduring: Changes are enduring over time, not temporary
A Closer Look: A Case of Personality Stability (Ghandi)
Three Levels of Analysis
- Population level: Changes or constancies that apply more or less to everyone
- Group differences level: Changes or constancies that affect different groups differently
- Sex differences
- Cultural or ethnic group differences
- Individual difference level: e.g., Can we predict who is at risk for psychological disturbance later in life based in earlier measures of personality?
Personality Stability Over Time
Stability of Temperaments During Infancy
- Temperament: Individual differences that emerge very early in life, are heritable, and involved behaviors are linked with emotionality
- As assessed by caregivers, temperament factors include activity level, smiling and laughter, fear, distress to limitations, soothability, and the duration of orienting
- Research points to the following conclusions
- Stable individual differences emerge early in life, where they can be assessed by observers
- For most temperament variables, there are moderate levels of stability over time during the first year of life
- Stability of temperament is higher over short intervals of time than over long intervals of time
- Level of stability of temperament increases as infants mature
Stability During Childhood
- Longitudinal study: Investigation of same group of individuals over time
- Block and Block Longitudinal Study: Study of 100 children assessed at three, four, five, seven, and 11 years
- One study using Block and Block Longitudinal Study: Individual differences in activity level
- Activity level assessed in two ways: Using actometer and independent assessments of behavior and personality provided by teachers
- Stability coefficients: Correlations between same measures obtained at two different points in time (test-retest reliability)
- Validity coefficients: Coefficients between different measures of the same trait at the same time
- Actometer measurements of activity level had positive validity coefficients with teach measurements of activity level: Thus, activity level in childhood can be validly assessed with measures
- Activity level measurements are all positively correlated with measures of activity level taken at later ages: Activity level shows moderate stability during childhood
- Size of correlations decreases as the time interval between different testings increases
- Stability of childhood aggression
- Individual differences in aggression emerge early in life, by three years
- Individuals retain rank order stability on aggression over many years
- Individuals retain rank order stability on aggression over many years
A Closer Look: Bullies and Whipping Boys from Childhood to Adulthood
- Bullies in childhood tend to become juvenile delinquents in adolescence and criminal in adulthood
Rank Order Stability in Adulthood
- Across different self-report measures of personality, conducted by different investigators, over differing time intervals (3 to 30 years), broad personality traits show moderate to high levels of stability
- Average correlations across traits, scales, and time intervals is about +.65
- Stability also found using spouse-report and peer-report
- Personality consistency tends to increase in stepwise fashion with increasing age—personality appears to become more and more "set in plaster" with age
Mean Level Stability in Adulthood
- "Big five" personality factors show a consistent mean level stability over time
- Especially after 50, very little change in the average level
- Small but consistent changes, especially the during 20s
- Openness, extraversion, neuroticism decline with age until 50
- Conscientiousness and agreeableness show gradual increase with time
Personality Change
Changes in Self-Esteem from Adolescence to Adulthood
- Transition from early adolescence to early adulthood appears to be harder on women than on men, in terms of the criterion of self-esteem
- Females tend to decrease in self-esteem, males tend to increase in self-esteem
- Appears to be a coherent set of personality variables linked with changes in self-esteem over time for each sex
A Closer Look: Day-to-Day Changes in Self-Esteem
- Self-esteem variability: Magnitude of short-term changes in ongoing self-esteem
- Self-esteem variability is related to the extent to which one's self-view can be influenced by events, particularly social events
- Self-esteem variability is an indicator of vulnerability to stressful life events
Flexibility and Impulsivity
- Study of architects: Measured personality twice, with testing separated by 25 years
- Sample as whole showed marked decreases in impulsivity and flexibility with age—suggests that, with age, people tend to become less impulsive and more fixed in ways
Autonomy, Dominance, Leadership, Ambition
- Longitudinal study of male managerial candidates, first when men were in their 20s and then followed them up periodically over a 20-year span, when men were in their 40s
- Steep decline in ambition—steepest during first eight years, but continued to drop over next 12 years
- Supplementary interviews suggested that men became more realistic about limited possibilities for promotion in a company
- But note that autonomy, leadership motivation, achievement, and dominance increased over time
Sensation Seeking
- Increases with age from childhood to adolescence
- Peaks in late adolescence, around ages 18–20
- Falls more or less continuously with age after the 20s
Femininity
- Mills College Study: Longitudinal study of women from an elite college, examined personality changes between the early 40s and early 50s
- Consistent drop in femininity from the early 40s to early 50s
- Drop was not related to menopause per se
- Perhaps attributable to decreases in the levels of estrogen
Competence
- In Mills study, obtained self-reports of competence for women and their husbands when women were 27 and again at 52
- Women showed a sharp increase in self-assessed competence
- Husbands showed a constant scores across two time periods
- Women's increased competence did not depend on whether they had children
Independence and Traditional Roles
- In Mills study, women were assessed for independence (self-assurance, resourcefulness, competence, distancing self from others, not bowing to conventional demands of society) at 21 and again at 43
- For divorced mothers, nonmothers, and working mothers, independence increased over time
- Only traditional homemakers show no increase in independence over time
- These results highlight utility of examining sub-groups within a sample
Personality Coherence Over Time: The Prediction of Socially Relevant Outcomes
- Personality coherence: Predictable changes in manifestations or outcomes of personality factors over time, even if underlying characteristics remain stable
Marital Stability, Marital Satisfaction, and Divorce (Kelly and Conley, 1987)
- Longitudinal study of 300 couples from engagements in 1930s to 1980s
- During first testing session in 1930s, friends rated each participant's personality on many dimensions
- Three aspects of personality strongly predicted marital dissatisfaction and divorce
- Husband's neuroticism
- Husband's impulsivity
- Wife's Neuroticism
Alcoholism and Emotional Disturbance
- In a longitudinal study of men, high neuroticism predicted the later development of alcoholism and emotional disturbance
- Alcoholic men had lower impulse control scores than men with emotional disturbance
Education, Academic Achievement, and Dropping Out (Kipnis, 1971)
- Among low SAT scorers, there is no link between impulsivity and subsequent GPA
- Among high SAT scorers, high impulsive people had consistently lower GPAs than low impulsive people
- High impulsive people are more likely than low impulsive people to flunk out of college
A Closer Look: Adult Outcomes of Children with Temper Tantrums (Caspi, 1987)
- Longitudinal study spanning 40 years
- Men who, as children, had frequent and severe temper tantrums (relative to those who did not) achieved lower levels of education, lower occupational status at their first job, changed jobs frequently, and had erratic work patterns
- If in the military, men who had temper tantrums as children achieved lower military rank than peers
Prediction of Personality Change
- Can we predict who is likely to change in personality and who is likely to remain the same?
- Caspi and Herbener (1990) studied middle-aged couples over an 11-year period, in 1970 and again in 1981
- Researchers asked: Is the choice of marriage partner a cause of personality stability or change?
- People married to a spouse highly similar to themselves showed most personality stability
- People married to a spouse at least similar to themselves showed most personality change
Elements Besides Traits That Change Over Time
Summary and Evaluation
- Personality development is the study of both the continuities and changes in personality over time
- Strong evidence for personality rank order stability over time
- Personality also changes in predictable ways, sometimes in different ways for men and women
Personality also shows evidence for coherence over time
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education