1. Personality Dispositions Over Time: Stability, Change, and Coherence
Chapter 5
Personality Dispositions Over Time: Stability, Change, and Coherence

2. Conceptual Issues Personality Development Stability (& Coherence)
Change

3. What Is Personality Development?
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Focus on stability and change

4. Three Key Forms of Stability
Rank order stability
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e.g., people tend to maintain their positions on dominance or extraversion relative to others over time
Mean level stability
e.g., the average level of liberalism or conservatism in a group remains the same over time
Personality coherence
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e.g., an 8-year-old may manifest his dominance by showing toughness in rough-and-tumble play, but at age 20 he dominance is manifested by persuading others to accept his views in political discussions

5. Personality Change: Two Defining Qualities
Internal
Changes are internal to a person, ______________________
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Enduring
Changes are enduring over time, ______________________

6. Three Levels of Analysis
Population level
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e.g., almost everyone in the population tends to increase in sexual motivation at puberty
e.g., there is a general decrease in impulsive and risk-taking behaviors as people get older
Group differences level
e.g., men and women develop differently in their average levels of risk taking and degree in expressing empathy
Individual difference level
e.g., Can we predict who is at risk for psychological disturbance later in life based on earlier measures of personality?

7. Personality Coherence Over Time: The Prediction of Socially Relevant Outcomes
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8. Personality Coherence Over Time
Marital Stability, Marital Satisfaction, and Divorce
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 (accounted for more than half of the predictable variance)
Husband’s neuroticism
Husband’s impulsivity
Wife’s neuroticism

9. Personality Coherence Over Time
Alcoholism and Emotional Disturbance
In a longitudinal study of 233 men, high neuroticism predicted the later development of alcoholism and/or emotional disturbance
Alcoholic men had lower impulse control scores than men with emotional disturbance
*People that score high on sensation seeking and impulsivity, and low on agreeableness and conscientiousness, tend to use and abuse substances more than their peers

10. Personality Coherence Over Time
Religiousness and Spirituality
Adolescents who scored high on conscientiousness and agreeableness were more likely to score high on religiousness later in life
Openness to experience predicted spirituality seeking in late life

11. Personality Coherence Over Time
Education, Academic Achievement, and Dropping Out
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
Conscientiousness is the most powerful longitudinal predictor of success in school and work
Conscientiousness of children assessed between the ages of 8 and 12 predicts academic attainment two decades later!

12. Personality Coherence Over Time
Health and Longevity
Our personality predicts how long we are likely to live
This will be discussed more in Chapter 18 – Stress, Coping, Adjustment, and Health
The most important traits conducive to living a long life are high conscientiousness, positive emotionality (extraversion), low levels of hostility, and low levels of neuroticism
See p. 149 for more extensive explanation

13. Personality Coherence Over Time
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 least similar to themselves showed most personality change

14. 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