Personality Deelopment and Temperament
Davidson R J 1994 Asymmetric brain function and affective
style in psychopathology. Deelopment and Psychopathology
6: 741–58
Fox N A, Calkins S D, Bell M A 1994 Neuroplasticity and
development in the first two years of life. Deelopment and
Psychopathology 6: 677–96
Kagan J 1994 Galen’s Prophecy. Basic Books, New York
Kagan J, Arcus D, Snidman N, Yu-feng W, Hendler J, Greene
S 1994 Reactivity in infancy. Deelopmental Psychology 30:
342–5
Kochanska G 1993 Toward a synthesis of parental socialization
and child temperament in early development of conscience.
Child Deelopment 64: 325–47
Lin K M, Poland R E, Lesser I N 1986 Ethnicity and psychopharmacology. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 10: 151–65
Rogeness G A, Maas J W, Javors M A, Masedo C A, Harris
W R, Hoppe S K 1988 Diagnoses, catecholamines, and
plasma dopamine-beta-hydroxylase. Journal of the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 27: 121–5
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In: Kohnstamm G A, Bates J E, Rothbart M K (eds.) Temperament in Childhood. Wiley, New York, pp. 59–76
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Brunner-Mazel, New York
Werner E E 1993 Risk, resilience and recovery. Deelopment and
Psychopathology 5: 503–15
J. S. Kagan
Personality Development in Adulthood
The study of personality is arguably the broadest
subdiscipline in psychology in that it aims to understand how the whole person functions in the world (see
Personality Psychology). Historically, personality psychology has concerned itself with grand theories about
human behavior, questions about character, identity,
and morality. Most of the empirical research on
personality published over the past two decades
fails to consider potential development in adulthood,
reflecting, in part, an assumption that personality
changes little in adulthood. Nevertheless there has
been a long-standing interest in whether—and, if so,
how—people change in systematic ways in the later
years of life. The following sections summarize the
research traditions and some of the central findings
generated in the field of adult personality development.
1. Defining Personality Deelopment
In part because personality draws so broadly from so
many areas of psychology, including cognition, emotion, psychopathology, and motivation, consensus in
the field over basic definitions is difficult to obtain (see
Personality Theories). Even the preferred units of study
(e.g., traits, behaviors, or psychological processes)
11290
continue to be debated. Most recently, questions are
being raised about the degree to which personality is
bounded within the individual or is better represented
in transactions between individuals and broader
collective units. Importantly, different conceptual
approaches to the study of personality lead to different
predictions about and evidence for personality change
in adulthood. Whereas personality development is
considered by some to unfold naturally and unidirectionally from temperaments inherited at birth, other
personality psychologists emphasize the need to consider a complex interplay of factors that contribute to
personality development, including temperamental
inheritance but more importantly exposure to different
types of environments, acquired beliefs and expectations and the capacity for self-regulation (Bandura
1989).
In part, evidence for stability or change in personality in adulthood reflects which facet of human
functioning is studied. To be clear, there is no dispute
that people change in adulthood. They do. Adults
are inevitably changed in idiosyncratic ways by the
life experiences they encounter, including major life
events, such as becoming a parent, or less dramatic but
persistent experiences associated with, for example,
the pursuit of a particular career and the consequent
development of a particular type of expertise. However, change in adulthood is not automatically considered personality deelopment. Rather, changes must
be enduring, systematic (i.e., nonrandom), and predictable by age or life stage.
2. Major Approaches to Adult Personality
Deelopment
Conceptions of adult personality development have
evolved out of two very different traditions in psychology; clinical psychology and life-span developmental psychology. The approaches and the findings
about systematic change in adulthood reflect these
different paradigmatic approaches to the study of
lives. Due to considerable overlap between studies of
individual differences and clinical psychology, many
of the oldest and most influential theories of personality, most notably psychoanalytic psychology but
also ego psychology and interpersonal psychology,
were developed based on clinical observations of
patients. Although strikingly different in its basic
tenets, social cognitive theory of personality also
evolved out of close connections between clinical and
personality psychology, essentially addressing differences between normal and abnormal processing involved in basic psychological functioning. Thus, the
oldest approaches to personality were tied closely to
understanding psychopathology.
In contrast to the traditional individual difference
approach, life-span psychology was born only in about
Personality Deelopment in Adulthood
the 1970s and reflects the view that human development is a continuous adaptive process (Baltes and
Goulet 1970). Life-span psychology aims to identify
and illuminate normal developmental changes in all
areas of psychological functioning, including but not
limited to personality, from birth until death. Perhaps
most notably, life-span psychology is distinguished by
the presumption that human growth is at no time
during the life course complete. Consequently, the
different presumptions inherent in the two approaches
direct attention to different research foci. Whereas
traditional adult personality psychologists ask
whether traits acquired in childhood persist across
adulthood, whether particular personality crises
present themselves at particular stages of life, or how
personality disorders are transformed in later life, lifespan psychologists are more likely to target specific
age-related issues, like whether people grow wiser with
age, whether conceptions of the self grow more or less
complex over time, and whether self-regulatory processes change in systematic ways over time. As noted
above, whether one finds evidence for stability or
change depends importantly on where one looks and
the particular questions one poses.
The next sections include a birdseye view of the
earliest approaches to personality development and
brief synopses of research on personality development
deriving from the trait approach to personality development and from life-span developmental psychology.
3. Early Stage Approaches to Adult Personality
Deelopment
Following the tradition established by child developmentalists, early thinking about adult personality
development was rooted in stage theories. Whereas
Freud’s (see Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)) psychosexual stage model of personality suggested that
personality was formed in early childhood and that,
barring long-term psychotherapy, was highly resistant
to change, his skeptical follower, Carl Jung (see Jung,
Carl Gusta (1875–1961)), argued that the most
interesting aspects of personality do not develop fully
until middle age. Jung believed that only after basic
biological and reproductive issues are resolved in early
adulthood, are people freed to engage in more psychic
pursuits. Jung posited that whereas in early adulthood
biological imperatives predominate and demand
adherence to gender roles, in mid-life feminine and
masculine sides of people grow more integrated and
spiritual concerns grow more salient. As people age,
feelings and intuitions come to dominate thoughts and
sensations. Thus, albeit in rather unspecified ways,
Jung advanced the position that people developed in
adulthood and that spirtuality played an increasingly
central role. Jung wrote far less about advanced old
age, but suggested that people predictably turned
inward and deteriorated psychologically as they
approached the end of life and wrestled with fears
about death.
In the 1930s and 1940s, in Europe and the US,
several stage stages theories, such as that offered by
Charlotte Bu$ hler, concretized thinking about adult
personality development and allowed for empirical
tests of theoretical predictions. Of these, Erik Erikson’s
(see Erikson, Erik Homburger (1902–94)) stage theory
had the most enduring influence. Like Freud and
Jung, Erikson was a classic ego psychologist and his
theory was grounded in the psychoanalytic tradition.
However, rather than focus on psychosexual needs,
Erikson argued that human needs for psychological
intimacy fueled systematic development that continued into old age. According to this epigenetic
theory, people pass through a fixed sequence of stages
during life each of which requires the successful
resolution of a central psychic crisis. In early adulthood, the central issue involves the establishment of
intimacy. In middle age, generativity, namely the
passing on of power and knowledge to younger
generations, is achieved or failed. In old age egointegrity vs. despair (self-acceptance of a life lived or
regret and dismay) is the focal crisis in life.
In the 1960s and 1970s, major research projects
aimed at profiling adult development were undertaken
at Yale (Levinson 1978) and Harvard (Vaillant 1977),
which continued the stage theory tradition in the US
and longitudinal studies undertaken in the 1930s
began to come of age. As research participants in
the Stanford Terman study of ‘gifted’ children, for
example, entered adulthood, researchers began to
examine connections between childhood and adult
personality. The Child Guidance and Oakland
Growth Studies undertaken at the University of
California at Berkeley offered resources by which to
examine predictable change. At the University of
Chicago, a group of social scientists, including Bernice
Neugarten, Morton Lieberman, and David Guttman,
formalized the study of life-span personality development.
In the end, however, empirical support for stage
theories failed to withstand empirical tests. Although interesting patterns were displayed in some
very homogenous samples, identified developmental
patterns failed to generalize broadly. Critics of stage
theories claimed that the patterns that did emerge
reflected the influence of consistent surrounding social
structures around highly selected groups of people,
not human development. Virtually all of the longitudinal studies included predominately (if not exclusively) white, middle-class individuals, often only
males. In the 1980s, Costa and McCrae (1990) essentially waged a war against stage theories declaring
that personality does not change systematically in
adulthood. In a decade dominated by the trait approach to personality, the central and reliable finding
11291
Personality Deelopment in Adulthood
of the 1980s was that personality changes little after
the age of 30 years.
4. The Trait Approach to Adult Personality
Deelopment
Traits are continuous variables represented by broadly
encompassing lexical terms that account for individual
differences (John 1990). Traits—such as shy, lively,
outgoing, anxious, and intelligent—are conceptualized as predispositions within individuals to behave in
certain ways manifest across a wide variety of situations. Gordon Allport (see Allport, Gordon W
(1897–1967)) argued that cardinal traits are those
around which a person organizes life (self-sacrifice).
Central traits (e.g., honesty) represent major features
and secondary traits are specific traits that help to
predict behavior more than underlying personality
(e.g., dress type, food preferences). Allport’s definition
is compatible with modern trait and temperament
approaches to personality which attempt to describe
people in terms of one or more central features of the
person.
Personality psychologists in the trait tradition seek
to identify the traits along which people differ and to
explore the degree to which these traits predict
behavior. Many taxonomies of traits have been offered
over the years, but unquestionably the five-factor
model is most widely accepted today (see also Personality Structure). Based on factor analysis of selfdescriptions, the five traits that emerge reliably across
many studies of Europeans and Americans are: (a)
openness to experience, (b) conscientiousness, (c)
extraversion, (d) agreeableness, and (e) neuroticism.
Traits and temperaments appear to be relatively
stable through the second half of life (Costa and
McRae 1990). It appears that beyond the age of 30,
extraverts remain extraverts and neurotics remain
neurotics. Trait theorists have found reliable evidence
for stability in personality well into old age. This
finding emerges whether researchers ask individuals to
describe themselves repeatedly over time or, alternatively, ask significant others, like spouses, to describe
those same individuals repeatedly (Costa and McRae
1990). It should be noted that even though persistent
rank-order differences remain the same, there is some
recent evidence that modest mean level changes may
appear, with older adults scoring slightly higher than
younger adults on agreeableness and conscientiousness and slightly lower on neuroticism, extraversion,
and openness to experience (McCrae et al. 1999).
Importantly, similar findings come from studies sampling Asian and European populations. However,
identified changes are quite small. Overall, there is
remarkable consistency in the characteristics that
distinguish individuals from one another over time.
There is some evidence that the core set of traits that
differentiate people are genetically based and exert
11292
their influence throughout the life course (Gatz 1992).
Genetic influence is as strong in old age as early
adulthood.
In summary, researchers adopting a trait approach
to personality development find that along at least
some of the important dimensions of personality,
there is little change in personality well into old age.
Critics of a trait approach, however, argue that traits
communicate little about how people manage their
lives in day-to-day life and because of the broadband
focus exaggerate the consistency of behavior across
time and situations. They criticize the trait approach
for failing to better predict behavior and redirect focus
to specific strategies (e.g., how an individual cognitively appraises a situation; expectancies, subjective
values, self-regulatory systems, and competencies).
Life-span approaches—influenced strongly by the
social cognitive theory of personality (Bandura
1989)—view individuals as agentic creatures who
shape their own environments (see also Interactionism
and Personality; Self-regulation in Adulthood ).
5. Life-span Approaches to Adult Personality
Deelopment
Rather than focus on taxonomies of personality, lifespan developmental psychologists view development
as a dynamic process aimed at adaptation (Baltes
1987). Two principal stays of life-span theory speak
directly to personality. The first states that adaption is
always time and space bound. In other words, behavioral adjustment must occur within a particular
environmental and social niche. In life cycle context,
what is adaptive in infancy and early childhood may
not be adaptive in adolescence. Stranger anxiety, for
example, may serve a highly adaptive function in
infancy because it motivates dependent creatures to
stay in close proximity to caregivers. It may also
facilitate attachment to primary adult figures, a key
developmental task of early life. Yet, stranger anxiety
among adults is clearly maladaptive. Similarly, it can
be argued that pursuing multiple prospective mates is
adaptive in adolescence and early adulthood as people
‘practice’ intimate relationships but less so in middle
and old age at which point emotional investment in a
select few may hold greater gains than the continual
exploration of all possible mates.
The second stay of life-span theory is that development inevitably demands selection (Baltes and
Baltes 1990). In order for specialized (i.e., effective)
adaptation to occur within a particular social, historical and physical niche, active and passive selections
must be made. As people age, they come to have
greater choice in the selection of environments and
select environments that support their self-views.
Throughout adulthood, people actively construct
skills and hone environments to meet selected goals.
There is good evidence that people narrow their social
Personality Deelopment in Adulthood
spheres with age, for example, forming increasingly
well contoured social convoys that accompany them
throughout life (Carstensen et al. 1999). Caspi and
Herbener (1990) found that people tend to choose
spouses similar to themselves, and further show that
people who have spouses similar to themselves are less
likely than people with dissimilar spouses to display
personality change in adulthood. Thus, it may be that
stability is maintained across the life course because
people actively create environments that maintain
stability.
Finally, life-span theory holds that development is
never fully adaptive because adaptation to one set of
circumstances inevitably reduces flexibility to adapt to
another. In this way development always entails gains
and losses. Subsequently, life-span theory obviates the
presumption that antecedent losses are the only or
even the primary reasons for changes that occur with
age and examines how people’s relative strengths and
weaknesses at different points in the life cycle influence
successful adaptation.
5.1 Personality Deelopment from a Motiational
Perspectie
Life-span developmental approaches, because they are
rooted in adaptation, lead naturally to consideration
of the ways that goals and goal attainment may change
throughout the life course (Baltes and Baltes 1990,
Brandtsta$ dter et al. 1999, Carstensen et al. 1999) (see
also Adulthood: Deelopmental Tasks and Critical
Life Eents). Motivational psychologists presume
that there is continuity in basic human needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy across the life
course. There is every reason to expect, for example,
that regardless of age, people seek to control their
worlds (see also Control Behaior: Psychological
Perspecties).
Researchers who take a goal-focused approach have
brought a different set of findings to bear on discussions of personality and aging, showing that goals and
preferences do change with age and influence behavior.
Carstensen and co-workers, for example, have shown
that the perception of time left in life importantly
influences social goals. Because aging is inextricably
and positively associated with limitations on future
time, older people and younger people differ in the
goals they pursue (Carstensen et al. 1999). Older
people are more likely to pursue emotionally meaningful goals whereas younger people are more likely to
pursue goals that expand their horizons or generate
new social contacts. Brandtsta$ dter et al. (1999) argue
that people adjust goal strivings to accommodate
external and internal constraints placed on goal
achievement at different points in the life cycle; a
central finding coming out of this line of work, for
example, is that older people respond to the loss of
resources in advanced age by downgrading the importance of some previously desirable goals.
5.2
Emotion and Personality
Another way of conceptualizing personality, which is
particularly conducive to life-span approaches, places
emotional experience and emotional regulation at the
core. In this view, emotions are not related simply
to personality, they are the essence of personality
(Carstensen et al. in press, Rothbart and Derryberry
1981) (see also Adulthood: Emotional Deelopment).
The emotions people feel when they face challenges,
and the effectiveness with which they learn to regulate
their emotions, are the cardinal components of personality development, forming the basis of individual
differences in persistent tendencies to behave, think
and feel in day-to-day life. Individual differences in the
propensity to experience specific emotions influence
not only the psychological and biological reactivity of
the person in the moment, but come to influence
conscious choices about preferred environments,
behavioral styles, and also determine the social
partners to which people are drawn.
Ryff (1995) has taken a differentiated approach to
understanding emotions and well-being across the
life-span. Rather than calculating global positive and
negative affect as indicators of psychological wellbeing, Ryff conceptualizes well-being in terms of
self-acceptance, environmental mastery, purpose in
life, personal growth, positives relations with others,
and autonomy. The dimensions appear to have differential relationships with age, with older adults
scoring higher than younger adults on Environmental
Mastery and Autonomy, but lower on Purpose in Life
and Personal Growth. There also appear to be lifespan developmental trajectories concerning the relationship between people’s conception of their present
status and their ideal selves along these dimensions.
Older people tend to have less distance between their
actual and ideal selves than do younger adults.
An emotion approach to personality has particularly intriguing implications for adult development
because in adulthood emotions appear to grow
more complex (Carstensen et al. in press) and
emotion regulation appears to improve (Gross et al.
1997). With advancing age, the emotion-cognitionpersonality system also appears to become moredifferentiated, with emotions becoming linked to
an ever-increasing array of cognitions. To the extent
that such changes influence motivation (e.g., Izard and
Ackerman 1998), modify thinking and reasoning
(Labouvie-Vief et al. 1989), or result in qualitative
changes in subjective well-being (Ryff 1995), personality is importantly influenced.
5.3 Wisdom and Resilience
As noted above, the focus on adaptative development
inherent in life-span approaches generates questions
about the ways in which aging people adjust to
changing resources and changing contexts. There is a
11293
Personality Deelopment in Adulthood
delicate balance between gains and losses that occurs in
the second half of life that have important implications
for personality. As people enter advanced ages, nearly
inevitably they encounter increasingly difficult challenges, including the deaths of friends and loved ones,
assaults on physical health, and threats to social status
(see also Coping across the Lifespan). At the same time
as experience in life increases, perspectives change. In
some ironic way, the familiarity of losses may even
make losses easier to take. Considerable focus in lifespan psychology, thus, has been on the ways that
people effectively adjust in later adulthood. Resilience
(Staudinger et al. 1995) and wisdom (Staudinger 1999)
have been particular targets of interest because they
involve the use of age-based experience to compensate
for losses in circumscribed domains. Studies of wisdom, for example, show that contrary to popular lore,
wisdom is unrelated to age in adulthood (Staudinger
1999). Even though experience-based knowledge does
increase with age, wisdom requires a complex array of
abilities that draw on multiple functions, some of
which decline. Under optimal conditions, old age may
be the time in life for wisdom to best emerge, but it
does not do so normatively.
6. Integration of Approaches and Findings about
Adult Personality Deelopment
Does continuity or change in personality best characterize adulthood? The answer is a qualified ‘yes’ to
both continuity and change. Along some basic descriptive dimensions, such as openness to experience
and extraversion, people remain remarkably consistent in adulthood. However, in other domains just
as central to personality, such as motivation and
adaption, there is evidence for systematic change
across adulthood. Goals change predictably with age,
emotion regulation appears to improve, and wellbeing takes on different qualities.
7. Future Directions
The fundamental challenge that confronted personality researchers a century ago remains largely the
same today: predicting and understanding individual
differences in behavior. Students of adult personality
development face the additional challenge of understanding how the differences that distinguish one
person from another may change systematically over
time. Although considerable progress has been made,
the bulk of empirical findings generated simply show
that prevalent assumptions about adult personality
development in the twentieth century were wrong. For
example, people do not appear to pass normatively
through a fixed series of stages; and along broadband
11294
dimensions characterized as basic traits, people change
very little in the second half of life. Approaches that
focus on motivation and emotion are newer, but initial
findings suggest that they may shed considerable light
on ways that individuals change in middle and old age.
Finally, at the time of this writing, the human genome
project very recently was declared complete. Few, if
any, scientists expect that genetic findings alone will
shed much light on personality. However, they may
well help to do away with customary language and
algorithms (such as ‘heritability coefficients’) that have
given credence tacitly to the idea that environmental
and biological influences can be cleanly separated.
Whereas in past decades, substantial discussion has
centered around whether biology or environment was
most influential in personality development, personality researchers will now begin to address the more
interesting and more important puzzle which lies in the
interaction between the two.
See also: Adult Development, Psychology of; Ego
Development in Adulthood; Personality Development
and Temperament; Personality Development in Childhood; Personality Psychology; Personality Theories
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Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Personality Development in Childhood
To understand personality development in childhood,
we first define personality, and how it is structured.
Then we discuss how the definition is typically translated into research, noting some curious omissions and
quirks in the literature. Next, we consider the raw
materials of personality and how they are changed
over time. Once this is completed, we discuss outcomes
of research on personality development in children.
1. Personality Deelopment as the Organization
of Indiidual Differences
First, perhaps the most basic question is what is
personality? Common personality characteristics can
be shared by groups of people—say, women, Russians,
three-year-old boys—but usually we think of personality in terms of defining aspects of individual
persons. In modern theory, personality is concerned
with the organization of each person’s unique configuration of individual differences. When personality
is defined this way, rather than one difference at a time
(e.g., introversion), it is possible to recognize that over
time conflict within a person may occur due to
competing and sometimes incompatible needs (see
Personality Structure). The self-organization of the
diverse elements that live under a common skin is
motivated by the need to resolve intrapersonal conflicts and to adapt, or adjust, to the world beyond the
individual. For example, we would expect an intelligent, introverted child to make compromises in the
service of social adjustment different from those made
by a similar child who is intelligent and extraverted.
Personality is concerned with the accommodations
and compromises each individual must make among
the competing demands of these differences. The
adjustment processes occur over time, and involve
genetics, maturation, and learning. In this light,
personality development in childhood can be seen as
one segment in a life-long process that leads to the
formation of a stable adult personality structure (see
Personality Deelopment in Adulthood ). Common but
untested assumptions are that processes of personality
development are more dynamic in childhood than in
adulthood, and that personality structure is more fluid
and open to change in the former than in the latter.
Personality development does not necessarily stop
after childhood, but that period is regarded as a time
of special sensitivity for the formation of the broad
structure.
Second, we need to recognize how the definition of
personality is typically translated into research. There
are historical traditions and precedents in the personality development literature that influence the way
professionals engage in research in the area. For
example, the personality literature does not usually
regard individual differences in ability in general, and
intelligence in particular, as part of its domain, despite
the illustration given in the preceding paragraph and
the obvious importance of intelligence to adaptation.
Similarly, differences in attachment are not well
integrated into the rest of the personality development
literature, despite the importance of attachment processes for adaptation. For another (but related)
example, readers will sometimes encounter a distinction between ‘personality development’ and ‘emotional development.’ Some early writers used the term
emotional development to focus on attachment and
the psychodynamic approach to personality devel11295
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7