Big Five personality stability, change, and codevelopment across adolescence and early adulthood.

Abstract

Using data from 2 large and overlapping cohorts of Dutch adolescents, containing up to 7 waves of longitudinal data each (N = 2,230), the present study examined Big Five personality trait stability, change, and codevelopment in friendship and sibling dyads from age 12 to 22. Four findings stand out. First, the 1-year rank-order stability of personality traits was already substantial at age 12, increased strongly from early through middle adolescence, and remained rather stable during late adolescence and early adulthood. Second, we found linear mean-level increases in girls' conscientiousness, in both genders' agreeableness, and in boys' openness. We also found temporal dips (i.e., U-shaped mean-level change) in boys' conscientiousness and in girls' emotional stability and extraversion. We did not find a mean-level change in boys' emotional stability and extraversion, and we found an increase followed by a decrease in girls' openness. Third, adolescents showed substantial individual differences in the degree and direction of personality trait changes, especially with respect to conscientiousness, extraversion, and emotional stability. Fourth, we found no evidence for personality trait convergence, for correlated change, or for time-lagged partner effects in dyadic friendship and sibling relationships. This lack of evidence for dyadic codevelopment suggests that adolescent friends and siblings tend to change independently from each other and that their shared experiences do not have uniform influences on their personality traits. (PsycINFO Database Record

Stability and change of basic personal values in early adolescence: A 2‐year longitudinal study

“…The findings from the various studies are largely compatible with the maturity principle of personality development (Borghuis et al, ; Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, ). This principle implies that, during adulthood, attributes that promote functioning in society and social relations tend to increase.…”

Lead Me to Train Better: Transformational Leadership’s Moderation of the Negative Relationship Between Athlete Personality and Training Behaviors

“…Alpha was set at .05 for all analyses. As substantial differences in the degree and direction of changes in personality occur across adolescence till early adulthood (Borghuis et al, 2017), we controlled athletes' age in all our analyses. Further, to remove any possible confounds that training experience may have upon training behaviours, we also controlled athletes' training experience (i.e., years of receiving formal training).…”

The Development of Effortful Control from Late Childhood to Young Adulthood

“…We can gain some insight into the likely stability of effortful control in adolescence by examining the stability of conscientiousness, which shares many core features with effortful control, but is a broader construct that also includes orderliness, punctuality, and responsibility. Conscientiousness tends to be moderately-to-highly stable from age 12 to 22, with one-year test-retest correlations ranging from .45 to .90 (Borghuis et al, 2017;Klimstra et al, 2009). Taken together, these findings suggest that self-regulatory traits are moderately stable from childhood to young adulthood, but this issue merits further attention given the lack of finegrained longitudinal studies that have assessed effortful control across multiple developmental periods.…”

“…However, more recent research has found no statistically significant mean-level change in effortful control, or conscientiousness, across adolescence (Klimstra et al, 2009;Laceulle et al, 2012). Further complicating the situation, a growing body of research suggests that self-regulatory traits may even decrease during adolescence (De Fruyt et al, 2006;Borghuis et al, 2017;Leon-Carrion, Garcia-Orza, Perez-Santamaria, 2004;Soto et al, 2011;Van den Akker, Dekovic, Asscher, & Prinzie, 2014), leading some researchers to conclude that there is a temporary "self-regulatory dip" during adolescence (Soto & Tackett, 2015). Often referred to as the disruption hypothesis, it is thought that temporary decreases in socially desirable traits during adolescence are due to the profound biological, psychological, and social changes that most youth face during this time (Soto & Tackett, 2015).…”