Personality and Life Events: A Journey Through the Chapters of Your Life

1. CHAPTER NINEPersonality

2. Your Life Events • For each of the age ranges listed, write down a memory from that time period. If you do not remember or have not yet reached a particular age range, write down one event that you believe would be important for the age range in question. • 0-1 • 2-3 • 4-5 • 6-12 • 13-20 • 21-39 • 40-64 • 65+

3. Traits as building blocks of personality

4. Personality Traits • You will be mostly the same 50 years from now, according to trait theory research. • How do you feel about being the same in the future? • What about some of your undesirable habits?

5. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood • Dispositional traits • Aspects of personality that are consistent across different contexts • Can be represented on a continuum showing high to low degrees of the characteristic The Case for Stability: The Five-Factor Model • 5 dimensions of personality: • Neuroticism • Extraversion • Openness to experience • Agreeableness • Conscientiousness

6. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood Neuroticism • Has six facets: • Anxiety • Hostility • Self-consciousness • Depression • Impulsiveness • Vulnerability

7. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood Extraversion • Has six facets in two groups: • Interpersonal traits • Warmth • Gregariousness • Assertiveness • Temperamental traits • Activity • Excitement seeking • Positive emotions

8. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood Openness to Experience • Has six areas: • Fantasy • Aesthetics • Action • Ideas • Values • Occupational choice

9. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood Agreeableness (Opposite of Antagonism) • Agreeable people are not: • Skeptical • Mistrustful • Callous • Unsympathetic • Stubborn • Rude • Skillful manipulators • Aggressive go-getters

10. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood Conscientiousness • Conscientious people are: • Hardworking • Ambitious • Energetic • Scrupulous • Persevering • Desirous to make something of themselves

11. What is the Evidence for Trait Stability? • Costa and McCrae (1988, 1994, 1997) used the Five Factor model: • Asserted that personality was stable past age 30 • Over a 12-year period, 10 personality traits remained stable, as measured by a survey given to 114 males. • Other studies have found equivalent results • Martin and colleagues found, however, that in the very old, suspiciousness and sensitivity increased.

12. What is the Evidence for Trait Changes? • Some studies have shown increasing evidence for personality changesas we grow older. • Current Big Five research shows that, as people age there tends to be: • Absence of neuroticism • Presence of agreeableness and conscientiousness • Decrease in openness to new experiences • Why? Due to normativeprocesses of aging? Cohort differences? • Looking at specific aspects of personality in specific kinds of people, there may be less stability and more change.

13. Personal Concerns andQualitative Stages in Adulthood • Personal concerns: • Things that are important to people • Goals • Major concerns in life • Personal concerns are different from dispositional traits in that they: • Are viewed within a context • Are narrative descriptions that rely on life circumstances • Change over time

14. Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development • Erikson developed a lifespan theory of personality development • His 8 stages represent the 8 great psychosocial struggles that he believed people must undergo.

15. Epigenetic Principle: • Erikson’s idea that development occurs in such a way that certain issues have their own particular times of importance

16. Possible Outcomes of Psychosocial Stages

17. Theories Based on Life Transitions • Among the most popular theories of adult personality development • Research in area has contained many methodological problems • Midlife crisis: The idea that in middle age one has a personal crisis that changes how one thinks about oneself • Many adults face difficult issues and make behavioral changes to try to better themselves

18. The Midlife Crisis • Very little data supports the claim that all people inevitably experience a crisis in middle age. • Most middle-aged people do point to both gains and losses, positives and negatives in their lives. • Midlife correction: • Reevaluating ones’ roles and dreams and making the necessary corrections

19. Conclusions about Personal Concerns • Evidence supports a sharp change in personal concerns as adults age. • Change is not specific to an age but is dependent on many factors. • There is a need for more research in this area.

20. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self • Life narrative • Consists of the aspects of personality that pull everything together • Those integrative aspects that give a person an identity or sense of self

21. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self McAdams’s Life-story Model • Argues that people create a life story • That is, an internalized narrative with a beginning, middle, and an anticipated ending • Adults are said to reformulate their life stories throughout adulthood. • Goals of a life story are to be: • Coherent • Credible • Open to new possibilities • Richly differentiated • Reconciling of opposite aspects of oneself • Integrated within one’s sociocultural context

22. Life Narrative:Optional Extra Credit (5 points possible) • Create a “Tree of My Life” • Using any artistic medium you’d like, create a collage (drawing, painting, sculpture, etc.) that represents YOU and your life story. Provide a key to help explain your “story tree.”