Personality Change in Adulthood

Does personality change as we age?  That’s a big question that has been debated for many years by many people.  In the past, the issue often defied resolution because much personality research was theory-driven and theoretical dimensions of personality varied widely and incomparably.  Today, by contrast, personality research is mostly atheoretical and thus readily amenable to statistical analysis.  Moreover, because the Big-Five personality dimensions—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are determined numerically and widely accepted as valid and reliable, most psychologists believe that data derived using the system are worthy of serious consideration.   Accordingly, in this post I report the work of Petar Milojev and Chris Sibley (2016) who examined personality stability versus change over the 19 to 74 year life span by using the Big Five.

Given the multi-dimensional nature of personality, even when restricted to the Big-Five, you probably will not be surprised to learn that Milojev and Sibley found both change and stability over time.  As people aged, they were said to become less extraverted, with the greatest decreases in young adulthood and again in old age. Similarly, agreeableness also decreased in young adulthood, but then it remained relatively stable.  On the other hand, conscientiousness increased in young adulthood, with no appreciable  subsequent change.  As the years progressed, they tended toward less openness to experience but also less neuroticism.  Finally, from earliest adulthood through life, honesty-humility increased regularly with increasing age. 

Interpreted broadly then, the results suggest that aging promotes introversion, conscientiousness, a more closed attitude toward experience, disagreeableness (in young adulthood only), less anxiety, and no major effect on honesty or humility.  These, of course, are only generalities, not necessarily applicable to you.  As a point of comparison, however, imagine the hypothetically average aging person as someone such as follows:  Although he used to be reasonably social, over the past several years 39 year-old John has become less and less inclined to leave the house.  He mostly spends his time watching television and surfing the Internet.  In the past, John had been keenly interested in and inclined toward everything new, from gadgets to restaurants.  But now he prefers sticking with the familiar.  He is more accepting of “things” in general and less adventuresome.  On the other hand, John not only is more laid back and reasonably content but also more conscientious, honest, and humble.

Obviously, some features of aging as depicted above can be health supporting.  Decreased anxiety means less physical and mental strain.  Other features might be construed as relatively neutral or even negative.  On the one hand, for instance, decreased openness to experience reduces your opportunities while on the other it also minimizes your need to make energy-absorbing adjustments.

All of this is to say that you would do well to consider ageing's effects on you.  Ask how your lifestyle has evolved over the last several years or decade. Did that course follow Milojev and Sibley's allegedly "average" trajectory?  Why or why not?  More important, are your changes acceptable and reasonable to you?  If not, can you do something to minimize or even totally reverse them?  All the changes are relative.  For instance, you might be willing to accept becoming more "introverted" in your relationships with former or current friends, but resolve to reverse your withdrawal tendency regarding family members whom you rarely see any more.  Irrespective of your age, you can make healthful personality alterations by following the principles explained in my Don't Rest in Peace book.

Reference:

Milojev, P. & Sibley, C. (2016) Normative Personality Trait Development in Adulthood: A 6-Year Cohort-Sequential Growth Model.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nov 10, 2016, No Pagination Specified.    http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000121

Honey, I know how you feel

When thinking about lifestyle, think about your relationships.  What you believe, feel, and do almost always has a direct or indirect social component.  Interpersonal relationships are so fundamental that the psychiatrist and theorist Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) defined personality as “the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life.”  He believed that virtually everything significant about you is related to your social milieu.

Even those resistant to Sullivan’s interpersonal definition of personality would have to concede that our intimate relationships powerfully influence our mental health.  The more constructively we interact with our intimates especially, the better we feel.  And, as I have written previously, research (Gottman, et al., 2006) suggests that healthful intimacy requires us to maintain a positive to negative interaction ratio, a so-called “magic ratio,” of five to one with those whom we love.  We must know how we are coming across emotionally to our relationship partners then, if we are to relate amicably with them and to sustain the five to one.

Margaret Clark and her colleagues (2016) investigated important features of intimate emotionality: how accurately we interpret a loved one’s recent emotional event and whether our own feelings color that interpretation.  To be specific, two studies were conducted.  The first included only married couples and the second, married and “romantically involved” couples.”  Each member of each study reported their own recent emotional experience, whether they had communicated about the emotions to their mate, and the way that they perceived their mate’s recent emotional experience.  First the investigators determined how accurately the partners perceived the mate’s emotions, and the extent to which their own emotions colored how they had interpreted the mate’s emotions.  They then looked at: 1) whether having heard the mate’s explanation of their given emotional experience enabled the partner to better perceive that emotion in future situations and 2) whether having heard the mate’s explanation of their given emotional experience enabled the partner to better refrain from projecting their own emotions into the mate’s emotional experiences.

As most of us would expect, the study indicated that intimate partners were generally accurate in perceiving their mate’s emotions.  That was true for happiness, sadness, guilt, and fear in study 1, and for happiness, sadness, guilt, compassion, anxiety, hurt anger/irritability, and gratitude in study 2.  The only emotion not accurately perceived by partners was “disgust,” but that likely was a statistical quirk due to the low occurrence of disgust.  

The projection of emotion portion of the study partially confirmed the investigators' expectations.  That is, the study's partners often did project their own personal experiences of emotion when interpreting the emotional experiences of their mates.  Not as confidently anticipated, however, was that partners who had frequently experienced a personal emotion tended to overestimate the extent of their mate's experience of that same emotion, and vice verse. (Namely, that partners who had infrequently experienced a personal emotion also tended to underestimate the extent of their mate's experience of that same emotion).  Noteworthy was the fact that partners were least inclined to project their own experiences of fear, anxiety, and sadness in a way that would distort how they understood those emotions in their mates  Finally, the Margaret Clark group was surprised to find only slight support for their expectation that verbalizing to each other about their recent emotional experiences would improve partners' preexisting abilities to read their mate's future emotions.

If you accept the studies' findings then, you can be encouraged to know that you stand a reasonable chance of accurately recognizing your mate's emotions.  That is, provided you are not overly confident that the intensity of your mate's emotions is necessarily the same as the intensity of yours.. For instance, she/ he might be more or less willing to forgive a given indiscretion than you would be.  So, when you confidently believe that you share a mate's feeling, you must inquire about the intensity they are experiencing.  Only then can you decide how to proceed to offer your support.   Don't make the mistake of presuming that just because you know how your mate feels, you also know the depth of the feeling.  Proper support is support that acknowledges not just the emotion, but the depth, and that is something that only the mate can tell you.  Handled properly, supporting your mate will be good for your mental health as well as for theirs.     

References

Clark, M., et al. (2016).  Accuracy and projection in perceptions of partners’ recent emotional experiences: Both minds matter. Emotion, November, No Pagination Specified. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000173.

Gottman, J., Schwartz Gottman, J., & DeClaire, J. (2006). 10 lessons to transform your marriage.  New York, NY: Crown Publishers

Sullivan, H.,S. (1953).The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. Norton: New York, NY: 1953.

   

Thanks. Now, What Should I Do?

Positive emotions are called “positive” because they benefit both the individual and the society.  Among the positives are serenity, joy, and cheerfulness.  Gratitude also is one and it is the focus of today’s blog post.  Barbara L. Frederickson (2004) specifically notes that, as all positive emotions, gratitude facilitates in the grateful person a broaden and build orientation.  By that she means that when experiencing gratitude the individual opens up to the surrounding environment, feels well, and is better able to entertain new ideas.

Accepting the prosocial value of gratitude - gratitude that prompts us to do for others, rather than for ourselves - as a foregone conclusion, Jomel Ng and his colleagues (2016) wondered whether there is more to the gratitude virtue.  Specifically, they explored whether gratefulness not only increases discrete prosocial actions, but also incites us to follow social norms in general.  The group proceeded to explore general social norms via two experiments. In the first, subjects were induced to feel grateful by having them write in vivid detail about an authentic personal gratefulness experience.  Shortly thereafter they began what they were told was a color discrimination task, requiring them to decide whether an ambiguous sample was mostly red, green, or blue. In the midst of performing the discrimination, the subjects were further informed that other participants reported that the sample was blue when it truly was green. Subsequently, subjects who had been induced into gratefulness proved significantly more likely to conclude that the sample was indeed blue than were those not induced into gratefulness. That is, the grateful subjects were more inclined to follow the social norm as they understood it.

The second experiment continued to assess the subjects' tendencies to follow general social norms.  In that case, the experimenters wanted to determine whether inducing joy within subjects would cause the same proclivity for following social norms as inducing gratefulness did. Thus, they sought to ensure that those induced into gratefulness were acceding to social norms because of the gratefulness experience per se, rather than because they simply were in a positive emotional state.  

The joy induction procedure was identical to the gratefulness induction procedure except that the subjects were told to write about an authentic personal joyfulness experience. For the second experiment then, there was both a gratefulness induction group and a joy induction group. Following each induction, subjects of each group were shown two handheld computer tablets of different brands and the marketing performance of each brand, since providing the marketing performance would indicate each brands' popularity.  After analyzing the data, Ng determined that those within the gratefulness condition were more likely to prefer the socially popular tablet than were those within the joy condition.

Accepted at face value, the aforementioned study suggests that gratefulness is a discrete experience with discrete consequences.  It is not merely that grateful people are in a generally good mood, but that gratefulness itself facilitates specific subsequent thoughts and behaviors.  Namely, those who feel grateful are predisposed both to helping others and to following social conventions.  

So, what does all this have to do with a healthful lifestyle?  Much. As Frederickson and many others have suggested, positive emotions, as gratefulness,contributes to lowering our stress and to raising our spirits,  In addition, when gratefulness prompts us to assist others - the prosocial function - it promotes an environment conducive to group physical and mental health, making healthy behavior "the thing to do."

Although I do not believe that there is anything inherently healthful about gratitude's encouraging us to follow the crowd - the social norms function - if one selects her/his crowds with an eye toward health-positive social affiliations, then judiciously following such crowds can be a very good idea.                  

References

Frederickson, B. L. (2004).  Gratitude, Like Other Emotions, Broadens and Builds.  In: The psychology of gratitude (Series in Affective Science).  Robert A. Emmons, New York: Oxford University Press.

Ng, J,, et al. (2016).  Gratitude Facilitates Private Conformity: A Test of the Social Alignment Hypothesis.  Emotion, Oct 31 , 2016, No Pagination Specified,  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000249.

Should I Take a Risk?

Your health is directly or indirectly affected by your risk-taking propensity.  For instance, those who ride a motorcycle without a helmet risk physical impairment and those who fail to save for retirement risk financial impairment that undermines their ability to afford adequate health care and illness prevention.  Moreover, all risks and their unhealthful consequences are potentially stressful. 

Because risks are critically important for physical and mental health then, Xiao-Tian Wang and his co-workers (2016) investigated several types of risk to determine how they relate to each other, and to explore the roles of genetic and environmental factors in risk-taking.  More specifically, they scrutinized the following risk-relevant areas:

Safety:                               For instance, failing to use sunscreen in the summer

Reproduction:                    For instance,deliberately waiting past age 35 to give birth to a child

Natural and physical risk:   For instance,swimming when riptides are strong

Moral risk:                          For instance,lying to achieve an employment advantage

Financial risk:                     For instance,investing a high percentage of one's wealth in a start-up business

Gambling:                          For instance,betting more than one can afford to lose during a game of chance

Regarding the interrelationships,the Wang group discovered some interesting preliminary correlations.  For one, it was found that persons inclined toward financial risks also tended toward moral, natural, and physical risks; the researchers proffered that the correlation was associated with certain personality traits, namely neuroticism (trait anxiety) and agreeableness (a strong desire to get along and not to "rock the boat").

For most risk proclivities, genetic factors generally played a minimal explanatory role, and environmental factors played a moderate role. Of note, however, was that while genes played a very substantive role in addictive gambling (57%)  environmental factors were dominant in non-addictive gambling (68%)  The Wang results also found a proactive-reactive distinction for risk-taking. In this context, a proactive condition is one in which an action is taken in anticipation of some future risk, (taking public transportation rather than driving on a icy day) whereas a reactive condition is one in which an action is taken during a risky situation (reducing speed while driving on an icy day). Proactive risk-taking was shown to be much more dependent upon environmental factors than was reactive risk-taking.

The aforementioned study implies, then, that people are not born either to be especially risk-prone or risk-averse.  Rather, their risky behaviors are mostly environmentally determined.  However, persons who find themselves taking risks in one sphere should be alert to the likelihood that they are vulnerable to other risky behaviors as well.  For instance, individuals who take excessive risks with their money might also take excessive risks with their physical safety. 

One caveat is in order: risk-taking is not inevitably a pejorative.  Reasonable, prudent risk-taking is not inconsistent with a healthful lifestyle. Marathon running is risky.  But training for a marathon and/or living life like a marathoner requires one to behave consistently in ways that promote outstanding physical and mental health.  

We all must take some risks.  The trick is to be mindful of how you handle them and of your risk-taking pattern. Weigh the pros and cons carefully and err on the side of risks that have health-enhancing potential.

Reference

Wang, X. T., et al. (2016).  Not all risks are created equal: A twin study and meta-analyses of risk taking across seven domains.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145,11,1548-1560 . http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000225