Nature over nurture: Temperament, personality, and life span development.

Abstract

Temperaments arc often regarded as biologically based psychological tendencies with intrinsic paths of development. It is argued that this definition applies to the personality traits of the five-factor model. Evidence for the endogenous nature of traits is summarized from studies of behavior genetics, parentchild relations, personality structure, animal personality, and the longitudinal stability of individual differences. New evidence for intrinsic maturation is offered from analyses of NEO Five-Factor Inventory scores for men and women age 14 and over in German, British, Spanish, Czech, and Turkish samples (N = 5,085). These data support strong conceptual links to child temperament despite modest empirical associations. The intrinsic maturation of personality is complemented by the culturally conditioned development of characteristic adaptations that express personality; interventions in human development are best addressed to these.There are both empirical and conceptual links between child temperaments and adult personality traits. The empirical associations are modest, but the conceptual relations are profound. Explaining how this is so requires a complicated chain of arguments and evidence. For example, we report cross-sectional data showing (among other things) that adolescents are lower in Conscientiousness than are middle-aged and older adults in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. The relevance of such data may not be immediately obvious, but in fact they speak to the transcontextual nature of personality traits and thus to the fundamental issue of nature versus nurture.

Development of personality in early and middle adulthood: Set like plaster or persistent change?

“…What do the results say about personality theories and adult development? 7 A subset of the German data reported in was also included in McCrae et al (2000). Therefore, only the 1999 data were used for the comparison baselines.…”

Personality and having children: A two-way relationship.

“…Regarding parenthood and personality change, we considered four theoretical perspectives. The five factor theory (McCrae et al, 2000), the social investment theory (Roberts, Wood, & Smith, 2005), and the literature on the psychology of parenthood provide competing hypotheses on how parenthood may influence personality change, whereas the corresponsiveness principle (Roberts, Caspi, & Moffitt, 2003) may complement these perspectives, as we outline below.…”

Adolescent Health Development: A Relational Developmental Systems Perspective

“…In discussing these three moments of scientific analysis within RDS approaches to developmental science, we point to the predominant trait model of individuality, the Five-Factor Theory (FFT, involving the purported Big Five "personality traits" of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion; McCrae 1980, 2006;McCrae et al 2000). The FFT example is a means to explain these RDS-based moments and to contrast their use with thinking associated with Cartesian, split, reductionist approaches to the study of the individual development.…”