Development of Personality in Early and Middle Adulthood

The Evolution of Personality Traits during Early and Middle Adulthood

The writers of this paper investigated the “Big Five” personality qualities, which include conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness, to better understand how personality traits evolve during early and middle adulthood. The authors compared biological and contextualist perceptions in a large sample of adults aged 21-26 who consented to be investigated through the internet in their study. Personality qualities, from a biological standpoint, do not alter once a person reaches the age of 30. According to contextualist views, every character feature that changes should be more diversified and should last throughout maturity.

Distinct Changes in Personality Traits during Middle Age

According to the authors’ results, distinct changes occur in middle age. For example, the study showed that conscientiousness expanded all through the age range examined and the highest increase happened to those who are in their 20’s. As for Neuroticism and extraversion, the changes dropped with respect to age for women but did not show changes for men. Agreeableness is the personality trait that showed a significant change, especially during a person’s 20’s (Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003). Openness slightly dropped with respect to age for both men and women. These findings show that as people get older, women turn out to be all the more emotionally steady and confident than men.

Implications of Personality Changes throughout Adulthood

Based on what the authors presented after their study, the variability in the personality changes proposes that the “Big Five” traits are unpredictable phenomena matter to an assortment of developmental effects. In fact, poses the greatest challenge for the study as personality traits are mostly cited to be naturally programmed to stop changing by early adulthood. However, the researchers were able to prove their counter-argument, and this shows the major strength of their study. The levels of personality traits can change step by step but systematically all through the life expectancy, at times even more after age 30.

References

Srivastava, S., John, O. P., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2003). Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: Set like plaster or persistent change? Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(5), 1041-53.