Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes.You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. licence. www.econstor.eu This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences: economics, sociology, psychology, survey methodology, econometrics and applied statistics, educational science, political science, public health, behavioral genetics, demography, geography, and sport science. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicatedThe decision to publish a submission in SOEPpapers is made by a board of editors chosen by the DIW Berlin to represent the wide range of disciplines covered by SOEP. There is no external referee process and papers are either accepted or rejected without revision. Papers appear in this series as works in progress and may also appear elsewhere. They often represent preliminary studies and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be requested from the author directly.Any opinions expressed in this series are those of the author(s) and not those of DIW Berlin. Research disseminated by DIW Berlin may include views on public policy issues, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. Conscientiousness showed a continuously increasing rank-order stability across adulthood.Third, personality predicted the occurrence of several objective major life events (selection effects) and changed in reaction to experiencing these events (socialization effects), suggesting that personality can change due to factors other than intrinsic maturation.Fourth, when events were clustered according to their valence, as is commonly done, effects of the environment on changes in personality were either overlooked or overgeneralized. In sum, our analyses show that personality changes throughout the life span, but with more pronoun...

Research consistently shows that personality development is a lifelong phenomenon, with mean-level and rank-order changes occurring in all life phases. What happens during specific life phases that can explain these developmental patterns? In the present paper, we review literature linking personality development in different phases of adulthood to developmental tasks associated with these phases. Building on previous work, we describe several categories of developmental tasks that are present in all phases of adulthood. However, the specific tasks within these categories change across adulthood from establishing new social roles in early adulthood to maintaining them in middle adulthood and preventing losses in old age. This trajectory is reflected in mean-level changes in personality, which indicates development towards greater maturity (increases in social dominance, conscientiousness, and emotional stability) in early and middle adulthood, but less so at the end of life. Importantly, developmental tasks are not only associated with mean-level changes, but the way in which people deal with these tasks is also related to rank-order changes in personality. We provide an outlook for future research on how the influence of historical time on the normativeness of developmental tasks might be reflected in personality development. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology Key words: personality development; developmental tasks; adulthood; old age Personality has consistently been found to change across the entire lifespan (e.g. Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000;Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). This is reflected in several theoretical notions on personality development, which consider personality development as a lifelong phenomenon (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006;Fraley & Roberts, 2005;Lerner, 1984;Roberts, Wood, & Caspi, 2008). Previous research shows that lifelong personality development is affected by environmental influences, such as work experiences (Roberts, Caspi, & Moffitt, 2003) and social relationships (Neyer & Asendorpf, 2001). However, these studies commonly focus on one specific phase of adult life, leaving it unclear whether similar environmental influences play a role in triggering personality development across different life phases.The aim of the present paper is to describe sources of personality development across the adult lifespan 1 using developmental tasks as a framework. Developmental tasks are defined as age-graded normative tasks based on societal expectations about the developmental milestones that should be reached in specific life phases (Havighurst, 1972; also McCormick, Kuo, & Masten, 2011). We first provide a general overview of personality development across adult life and then introduce a new categorization of developmental tasks that might guide personality development across different life phases. Subsequently, we provide an overview of empirical research in different life phases (early, middle, and old adulthood 2 ). We then link personali...

Most theories of personality development posit that changes in life circumstances (e.g. due to major life events) can lead to changes in personality, but few studies have examined the exact time course of these changes. In this article, we argue that time needs to be considered explicitly in theories and empirical studies on personality development. We discuss six notions on the role of time in personality development. First, people can differ before the event. Second, change can be non‐linear and discontinuous. Third, change can be reversible. Fourth, change can occur before the event. Fifth, control groups are needed to disentangle age‐related and event‐related changes. Sixth, we need to move beyond examining single major life events and study the effects of non‐normative events, non‐events, multiple events, and minor events on personality. We conclude by summarizing the methodological and theoretical implications of these notions. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology

Increasing numbers of empirical studies provide compelling evidence that personality traits change across the entire lifespan. What initiates this continuing personality development and how does this development proceed? In this paper, we compare six theoretical perspectives that offer testable predictions about why personality develops the way it does and identify limitations and potentials of these perspectives by reviewing how they hold up against the empirical evidence. While all of these perspectives have received some empirical support, there is only little direct evidence for propositions put forward by the five‐factor theory of personality and the theory of genotype → environment effects. In contrast, the neo‐socioanalytic theory appears to offer a comprehensive framework that fits the empirical findings and allows the integration of other, more specialized, perspectives that focus on specific aspects of personality development like the role of time, systematic differences between categories of social roles or the active partake of the person himself or herself. We draw conclusions on the likely driving factors for adult personality development and identify avenues for future research. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes.You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. licence. www.econstor.eu This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German SocioEconomic Panel Study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences: economics, sociology, psychology, survey methodology, econometrics and applied statistics, educational science, political science, public health, behavioral genetics, demography, geography, and sport science. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicatedThe decision to publish a submission in SOEPpapers is made by a board of editors chosen by the DIW Berlin to represent the wide range of disciplines covered by SOEP. There is no external referee process and papers are either accepted or rejected without revision. Papers appear in this series as works in progress and may also appear elsewhere. They often represent preliminary studies and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be requested from the author directly.Any opinions expressed in this series are those of the author(s) and not those of DIW Berlin. Research disseminated by DIW Berlin may include views on public policy issues, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. Conscientiousness showed a continuously increasing rank-order stability across adulthood.Third, personality predicted the occurrence of several objective major life events (selection effects) and changed in reaction to experiencing these events (socialization effects), suggesting that personality can change due to factors other than intrinsic maturation.Fourth, when events were clustered according to their valence, as is commonly done, effects of the environment on changes in personality were either overlooked or overgeneralized. In sum, our analyses show that personality changes throughout the life span, but with more pronoun...

Social investment theory (SIT) proposes that the transition to parenthood triggers positive personality trait change in early adulthood. Using data from a representative sample of first-time parents compared to nonparents, the results of rigorous tests do not support the propositions of SIT. Specifically, we found no evidence for the proposition that parents show more pronounced mean-level increases in emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness compared to nonparents. We did find that agreeableness and openness changed depending on how long someone was in the parent role. Finally, our results suggest that high extraversion and low openness in both genders and high conscientiousness in females predict the likelihood to enter into parenthood. Discussion focuses on why this transition seems to be unrelated to mean-level personality trait change and the implications of these results for SIT.

Peers are a pervasive aspect of people's lives, but their role in personality development has rarely been considered. This is surprising, given that peers are promising candidates to explain personality development over the entire lifespan. Owing to the lack of clear‐cut definitions of peers, we first elaborate on their defining criteria and functions in different life phases. We then discuss the role of peers in personality development across the lifespan. We advocate that an integration of social group perspectives and social relationship perspectives is essential to understand peer effects on personality development. Group socialization theory is particularly suited to explain developmental differences between groups as a result of group norms. However, it is blind towards differences in development within peer groups. In contrast, the PERSOC framework is particularly suited to explain individual differences in development within groups as a result of specific dyadic peer‐relationship experiences. We propose that a conjunct consideration of peer‐group effects and dyadic peer‐relationship effects can advance the general understanding of personality development. We discuss examples for a cross‐fertilization of the two frameworks that suggest avenues for future research. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The decision to publish a submission in SOEPpapers is made by a board of editors chosen by the DIW Berlin to represent the wide range of disciplines covered by SOEP. There is no external referee process and papers are either accepted or rejected without revision. Papers appear in this series as works in progress and may also appear elsewhere. They often represent preliminary studies and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be requested from the author directly. Terms of use: Documents inAny opinions expressed in this series are those of the author(s) and not those of DIW Berlin.Research disseminated by DIW Berlin may include views on public policy issues, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. to 40, then decreased until about age 60, and increased slightly afterwards; (b) The rank order of individuals in perceived control was relatively unstable, especially in young adulthood, and reached a plateau at about age 40; (c) Men perceived that they had more control than women did, but there were no sex differences in the development of perceived control; (d) Individuals with more education perceived that they had more control than those with less education, and there were slight differences in the development of perceived control dependent on education. Taken together, these findings offer important insights into the development of perceived control across the life span.