Codevelopment of life goals and the Big Five personality traits across adulthood and old age.

Abstract

Since the new millennium, research in the field of personality development has focused on the stability and change of basic personality traits. Motivational aspects of personality and their longitudinal association with basic traits have received comparably little attention. In this preregistered study, we applied bivariate latent growth curve model to investigated the codevelopment of nine life goals and the Big Five traits. We tested age, perceived control, gender, educational background, and regional socialization as potential moderators of codevelopment. Data came from the German Socio-Economic Panel study (N = 55,040, age range: 18–103 years) and span a study period of 13 years. During this period, the Big Five traits and life goals were assessed four times. Our findings suggest that development in broader life goal domains (e.g., self-fulfillment) is more strongly connected to personality development across the life span, whereas changes in specific goals (e.g., having children) are more closely tied to trait changes during young and middle adulthood. The strongest codevelopment was found between Openness and agentic goals with a focus on personal growth followed by codevelopment between Agreeableness and communal goals. Developmental stage and educational background moderated the codevelopment of Conscientiousness and economic achievement as well as family-related goals. Contrary to the previous research, we found that Neuroticism codeveloped with communal life goals (i.e., having a happy relationship/marriage). Our findings reinforce theoretical frameworks that highlight the role of changing opportunities, constraints, and developmental tasks across adulthood.

No Evidence for Transactional Effects Between Religiosity and Self-Esteem in a Secular Country

“… 2. Before testing whether age moderates the associations between religiosity and self-esteem in a multigroup framework, we tried to use local structural equation modeling (Hildebrandt et al, 2016), with age as a continuous moderator. However, as in several other similar applications of local structural equation modeling (LSEM; for example, Buchinger et al, 2023; Lenhausen et al, 2023), these models did not converge. Unfortunately, no other statistical test is available that tests for the effect of a continuous moderator (such as age) on the cross-lagged effects between two variables.…”

Life goal development, educational attainment, and occupational outcomes: A 12-year, multisample longitudinal study.

“…Based on the goal-contents theory, an extension of the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), one can expect to encounter domain specificity of goal effects on other important life outcomes. In addition, recent evidence indicates that life goals and personality traits codevelop with age (Atherton et al, 2021; Buchinger et al, 2023). Thus, although our study only focused on life goal changes, it is important to recognize that certain changes in life goals co-occur with changes in personality traits.…”

“…For example, life goals could be regularly assessed as part of career or educational counseling to provide a more holistic perspective on what people want out of life, in addition to what they like doing (i.e., their interests) and how they typically think, feel, and behave across situations (i.e., their personality traits). Related to this, certain life goals are correlated with personality traits (e.g., Atherton et al, 2021;Buchinger et al, 2023;Larissa Bühler et al, 2021;Stoll et al, 2020). In the present study, the three strongest relations between life goals and personality traits were among Education goals and Conscientiousness (rs ranged from = .39 to .40 across samples), Openness and Esthetic goals (rs ranged from = .41 to .44 across samples), and Extraversion and Hedonistic goals (rs ranged from = .39 to .42 across samples; see Supplemental Tables S5 and S6).…”

“…Life goals form an integral part of people’s identities, and with their motivational functions, they help organize and structure how people choose to spend their time and other resources (Fleeson & Cantor, 1995). According to the neo-socioanalytic model (Roberts, 2006), life goals are part of the motivational domain of personality, and thus, like other domains of personality, they are expected to change over time (for examples of empirical evidence supporting this prediction, see Atherton et al, 2021; Buchinger et al, 2023). Moreover, these changes are expected to have consequences for future life outcomes, including occupational outcomes.…”