Personality trait development in midlife: exploring the impact of psychological turning points

Abstract

This study examined long-term personality trait development in midlife and explored the impact of psychological turning points on personality change. Selfdefined psychological turning points reflect major changes in the ways people think or feel about an important part of their life, such as work, family, and beliefs about themselves and about the world. This study used longitudinal data from the Midlife in the US survey to examine personality trait development in adults aged 40-60 years. The Big Five traits were assessed in 1995 and 2005 by means of self-descriptive adjectives. Seven types of self-identified psychological turning points were obtained in 1995. Results indicated relatively high stability with respect to rankorders and mean-levels of personality traits, and at the same time reliable individual differences in change. This implies that despite the relative stability of personality traits in the overall sample, some individuals show systematic deviations from the sample mean-levels. Psychological turning points in general showed very little influence on personality trait change, although some effects were found for specific types of turning points that warrant further research, such as discovering that a close friend or relative was a much better person than one thought they were.

Studying Changes in Life Circumstances and Personality: It's about Time

“…Second, previous studies vary greatly in terms of the time lags between measurement occasions, ranging from a few months (Bleidorn, ; Vaidya et al, , Study 2) to several years (Leikas & Salmela‐Aro, ; Lüdtke et al, ; Neyer & Asendorpf, ; Specht et al, ) to a decade or more (Allemand et al, ; Sutin et al, ). Particularly striking, short‐term studies on life events with time lags of less than a year are rare.…”

Factorial structure and age-related psychometrics of the MIDUS personality adjective items across the life span.

“…Although there is a large literature on mean-level personality trait development across the entire lifespan (e.g., Allemand, Gomez, & Jackson, 2010; Costa, Herbst, McCrae, & Siegler, 2000; Donnellan & Lucas, 2008; McCrae et al, 1999; Mroczek & Spiro, 2003; Roberts, Robins, Caspi, & Trzesniewski, 2003; Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006; Terracciano, McCrae, Brant, & Costa, 2005), only a few studies have investigated age differences and age-related changes after having established MI. For example, after establishing weak MI in the form of congruency coefficients Srivastava et al (2003) reported that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness increased throughout early and middle adulthood at varying rates.…”

Personality Trait Development in Adulthood: Patterns and Implications

“…The key empirical hurdle that needs to be addressed is whether individual differences in change are real or simply represent error in measurement (Watson, 2004). This has drawn many personality development researchers toward techniques to gauge the amount and pattern of change over time, such as the Reliable Change Index (Roberts, Caspi, & Moffitt, 2001) or the variance in slopes from growth models (Allemand, Gomez, & Jackson, 2010 The irony of individual differences in change is that many individual difference researchers fail to appreciate their existence. Their meaning is rather profound for individual development, however, as they indicate that many people fail to follow the normative path of development.…”