Mind-Personality Relations from Childhood to Adolescence

Abstract

We present three studies which investigated the relations between cognition and personality from 7 to 20 years of age. The first investigated developmental relations between three reasoning domains (inductive, deductive, and scientific) and Eysenck's four personality dimensions in a design where 260 9-14-year-olds received the cognitive tests 3 and the personality test 2 times. It was found that initial social likeability and extroversion significantly shape developmental momentum in cognition and vice-versa, especially in the 9 to 11 years period. The second study involved 438 participants from 7 to 17 years, tested twice on attention control, working memory, reasoning in different domains, and once by a Big Five Factors inventory. Extending the findings of the first, this study showed that progression in reasoning is affected negatively by conscientiousness and positively by openness, on top of attention control and working memory influences. The third study tested the relations between reasoning in several domains, the ability to evaluate one's own cognitive performance, selfrepresentation about the reasoning, the Big Five, and several aspects of emotional intelligence, from 9 to 20 years of age (N=247). Network, Hierarchical Network, and Structural Equation modeling showed that cognition and personality are distinct but related, interfaced by the ability of self-knowing. Emotional intelligence was not an autonomous dimension. All dimensions but emotional intelligence influenced academic performance. A developmental model for mind-personality relations is proposed.