Chapter 5 - Personality Dispositions over time: stability, coherence and change. Flashcards
The three most important forms of trait stability are:
- Rank order stability (Rangorden stabilitet)
- Mean level stability (Gjennomsnittsstabilitet)
- Personality coherence (Personlighetskoherens)
What is rank order stability?
Rank order stability is the maintenance of individual position within a group.
What is mean level stability?
If people tend as a group to get increasingly conservative as they get older - then that population is displaying mean level change.
What is personality coherence?
Personality coherence is a more complex form of personality development, that involves changes in the manifestations of a trait. The trait of disagreeableness is the same, but it might be expressed differently at age 5 and 40.
Mary Rothbart (1981, 1986) studied infants at different ages - examining temperament. What were her findings, and what weaknesses does the study have?
There were positive correlations between traits measured at different time intervals, and that these correlations became greater towards the end of infancy - suggesting increasing trait stability over time.
A limitation of the study is that the infants’ caregivers may have developed certain conceptions of their infants, and it may be their conceptions rather than the infants’ behavior that show stability over time.
What are the tendencies in rank order stability?
´Personality dispositons show moderate to considerable rank order stability over time in adulthood. Roberts and DelVecchio (2000) also found that personality consistency increased with age. It also seems that people score lower on neuroticism and negative affect and higher in agreeableness and conscientiousness as they get older.
What are the overall and gendered differences in self-esteem change from adolescence to adulthood?
Women tend to experience a dip in self-esteem in the transition from early adolescence to early adulthood. This effect is not as clear with men.
What is the general change in sensation seeking over time?
Sensation seeking increases with age from childhood to adolescence and peaks in late adolescence around ages 18-20; then it falls more or less continuously as people get older (Zuckerman, 1974).
What are cohort effects?
The social times in which people live in. For instance, Jean Twenge (2000, 2001a, 2001b) was at the forefront in researching whether personality change is likely to be cause by cohort effects.
What did Twenge, looking at the cohort effects in personality change, discover?
- Women’s trait scores on assertiveness rose and fell dramatically depending on the cohort in which the woman was raised.
- In 2008, she also found that scores on narcissism increased by about a third of standard deviation between 1982 and 2006.
In a longitudinal study, Kelly and Conley (1987) studied a sample of 300 couples from their engagements in the 1930s all the way through their status later in life in the 1980s. Three aspects of personality proved to be strong predictors of marital dissatisfaction and divorce, which?
- The neuroticism of the husband
- The lack of impulse control of the husband
- The neuroticism of the wife.
Neuroticism was found by Kelly and Conley (1987) to be the strongest predictor of marital dissatisfaction and divorce, but also proved to be a predictor of another related effect
- A longitudinal study by Bonnamo et al. (2002) showed that the best predictor of coping well with the death of a spouse, was the peresonality position of emotional stability (neg: neuroticism).
In Wink et al (2007) study on spirituality, what personality traits in adolescence were correlated with high scores in 1) religiousness and 2) spirituality later in life?
1) Adolescents who scored high on conscientiousness and agreeableness were more likely to score high on religiousness later in life.
2) Openess to experience was the only personality trait in adolescence that predicted spirituality seeking in late life.
What personality trait did Abe (2005 ) find to correlate with academic performance?
High conscientiousness at age 3 predicted successful academic performance 9 years later.
Which personality traits are correlated with longevity?
and why?
High conscientiousness, extraversion and low levels of hostility.
First, conscientious individuals engage in more health-promoting practices and avoid unhealthy practices. Second, extraverts are more likely to have lots of friends , leading to a good social support network. Low levels of hostility put less stress on the heart and cardiovascular system.
