Personality and psychosocial functioning in early adolescence: Age-differential associations from the self- and parent perspective

Abstract

Although psychosocial functioning and personality are indisputably interrelated in adulthood, much less is known about these associations in early adolescence. Accordingly, the goal of the current study was twofold. First, we investigated associations between adolescents’ personality and three broad indicators of psychosocial functioning: academic achievement, social relationships, and psychosocial adjustment. Second, we tested differential effects by comparing these associations across three different cohorts (Grades 5, 7, and 9) and across two raters of adolescents’ personality: self- and parent reports. Our sample consisted of N = 2667 students and their parents. According to latent regression models, adolescents’ personality traits showed significant associations with all psychosocial functioning variables: Achievement was most consistently associated with emotional stability, openness, and conscientiousness; social relationships were most consistently associated with agreeableness and conscientiousness; and psychosocial adjustment was related to all of the Big Five traits. Most associations did not vary across grades, whereas self-reported extraversion showed lower associations in later grades. Looking at rater-specific effects, we found fewer and usually smaller associations with parent- than with self-rated personality, again with the most significant differences with extraversion. We discuss the consistent interrelatedness between adolescents’ personality and psychosocial functioning but also highlight important exceptions in grade- and rater-specificities.

The longitudinal interplay of personality and school experiences in adolescence

“…Although personality resources for positive school experiences tend to be time-unspecific from early to middle adolescence in general, we found two interesting exceptions in the domain of achievement and social relationships: On the one hand, neuroticism, extraversion, and agreeableness showed more age-differentiated effects on academic achievement, operationalized as GPA, as these traits became less important when students got older. (see also Israel et al, 2021). This finding is in stark contrast to the findings for openness and conscientiousness, which were consistently related to subsequent GPA across the entire time span.…”

“…School is a place where adolescents are confronted with new experiences, developmental tasks, and societal expectations such as to perform well on an academic level or to find their position in a community (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). Although research from the last decade has emphasized the crucial role of personality in school-related outcomes such as academic achievement (Israel et al, 2019; Israel et al, 2021; Poropat, 2009), social belonging (e.g., Harris & Vazire, 2016; Reitz et al, 2014), and well-being (e.g., Butkovic et al, 2012; Evans et al, 2018), most of these studies have been cross-sectional and have thus been limited in their information about the potential longitudinal interplay of personality and school experiences in adolescence. To address this gap, we used four-wave data to investigate the following research question: How are personality and school experiences that are mapped onto the three major domains of achievement, social relationships, and well-being interrelated in adolescence over time?…”

Disentangling the Association Between the Big Five Personality Traits and Student Achievement: Meta-Analytic Evidence on the Role of Domain Specificity and Achievement Measures

“…The personality traits described in the FFM have been found to play a key role in student achievement (Borghans et al, 2016;De Raad & Schouwenburg, 1996;Israel et al, 2022). The personality saturation of achievement measures is typically explained by different types of behavior that are beneficial for student learning and achievement.…”

“…We conducted an outlier analysis (Viechtbauer & Cheung, 2010) and identified four influential effect sizes within the 1491 effect sizes included in the data set. These cases comprised one correlation between conscientiousness and grades in the language domain (Brandt et al, 2021), two correlations between agreeableness and test scores in the STEM domain (Mammadov et al, 2021), and one correlation between neuroticism and test scores in the language domain (Brandt et al, 2022). We performed robustness checks without the outlier effect sizes, which showed a similar result pattern (see Supplementary Material, Table S6).…”

Conscientiousness and Cognitive Ability as Predictors of Academic Achievement: Evidence of Synergistic Effects From Integrative Data Analysis

“…Findings on agreeableness and extraversion have been less consistent so far. However, these socially relevant traits (MacIntyre & Charos, 1996) might be observed by teachers and included in the grading process, reflecting positive effects of being socially outgoing or friendly in the learning environment (see Israel et al, 2021; Israel et al, 2019). However, such effects would not be expected for standardized test scores as they are more objective measures.…”