A first large cohort study of personality trait stability over the 40 years between elementary school and midlife.

Abstract

This report provides some initial findings from an investigation of the relations between childhood Big Five personality traits assessed by elementary-school teachers and similar traits assessed 40 years later by self-reports at midlife. Our analyses are based on data from a relatively large and culturally diverse sample (N = 799) that was first assessed between 1959 and 1967 when the participants were children in Hawaii. Short-term (1-3 years) test retest reliabilities were lower (.22 -.53) within childhood when personality is developing than within adulthood (.70 -.79) when personality stability may be at its peak. Stability coefficients across the 40-year interval between the childhood assessment and two measures of adulthood personality were higher for Extraversion (e.g., .29) and Conscientiousness (e.g., .25) than for Openness (e.g., .16), Agreeableness (e.g., .08) and Neuroticism (e.g., .00). Construct continuity between childhood and adulthood was evaluated by canonical analysis and by structural-equation modeling and indicated continuity at both a broad, twodimensional level and at the level of the Big Five. The findings are discussed in relation to Caspi, Roberts, and Shiner's (2005) principles of rank-order personality stability.Keywords personality stability; Big Five; construct continuity; longitudinal study The extent to which child personality is predictive of adult personality has long been a fundamental scientific, philosophical, and even poetic question. Wordsworth's "The child is father of the man" and Milton's "The child shows the man, as morning shows the day" are not unambiguous. Neither poet was necessarily suggesting perfect correspondence and complete predictability from youth to maturity. Similarly, the stability of personality characteristics over the life course remains a controversial empirical issue. Proponents of stability debate the findings with advocates of transformation and change (McCrae et al., 2000;Lewis, 2001).In this report, we provide some initial findings from an investigation of the relations between childhood personality traits assessed by elementary-school teachers and similar traits assessed by self-reports at mid-life. Our analyses are based on data from the Hawaii Personality and Health Cohort, a relatively large and culturally diverse sample that was first assessed between 1959 and 1967 when the participants were children in Hawaii. The childhood assessments were designed and supervised by the late John M. Digman, and formed the basis for some of the pioneering work on the five-factor structure of personality (e.g., Digman, 1989 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript assessments were undertaken over a four-year period (1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002) after an interval of 35 -43 years (Hampson et al., 2001). Consequently, these data offer an extraordinary opportunity to examine the question of personality stability from childhood to midlife with measures of the five-factor model of personality at each time point. We have be...

Self-Regulation and School Success

“…Empirical evidence supports neither of these extreme positions. On the contrary, generally, the rank-order stability of traits is moderate in childhood (Hampson & Goldberg, 2006 ;Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000 ). h us, while there is enough stability to make it sensible to talk about individual dif erences in self-regulation, there is enough rank-order shul ing to consider means of intentionally accelerating self-control development.…”

El modelo de los cinco grandes como predictor de la conducta agresiva en población infanto-juvenil

“…Estos son datos coincidentes con los hallados repetidamente en niños y adolescentes españoles (del Barrio, Moreno y López, 1997;del Barrio, Moreno y López, 2001). La menor potencia de la extraversión es interpretada por sus componentes tanto favorecedores (asertividad, actividad y exteriorización) como inhibidores (comunicación y amistad) de la agresión (Hampson y Goldberg, 2006). Es por esto que los datos que relacionan extraversión y agresividad no son monolíticos.…”

“I'm afraid I have bad news for you…” Estimating the impact of different health impairments on subjective well-being

“…This is not altogether implausible if one considers how important or scarring life events can alter the trajectories of human (well-) being (Srivastava et al, 2003). What also seems clear is that stability of personality traits is increasing in age: testretest reliability in childhood ranges between 0.22-0.53 and increases to 0.70-0.79 for adults (Hampson and Goldberg, 2006;Roberts et al, 2006;Roberts and DelVecchio, 2000). Since the Big Five were only asked in the BHPS once so far, we are forced by data limitations to consider personality traits to be fixed in the individuals over the course of our sample horizon.…”

“…Their high level of abstraction (and a certain vagueness about the many subtraits contained in each dimension) also facilitates their robust use across different cultural contexts (Benet-Martinez and John, 1998). While it cannot be denied that personality can evolve over time especially when young or over long time horizons (for evidence from the BHPS, see Donnellan and Lucas, 2008), there is evidence that the traits mentioned prove to be quite stable from the age of thirty onwards (Costa and McCrae, 1994) or only change quite slowly over the course of a human life (Hampson and Goldberg, 2006).…”