TY - JOUR
T1 - The growing evidence for personality change in adulthood
T2 - Findings from research with personality inventories
AU - Helson, Ravenna
AU - Kwan, Virginia S.Y.
AU - John, Oliver P.
AU - Jones, Constance
N1 - Funding Information:
Work by the first three authors on the Mills Longitudinal Study is supported by Grant MH 43948 from the National Institute of Mental Health; work by the fourth author on the IHD Longitudinal Studies is supported by Grant AG17280-01 from the National Institute on Aging.
Copyright:
Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2002/8
Y1 - 2002/8
N2 - Theories of adult development all agree that adulthood is a time of important changes in goals, resources, and coping. Yet, impressed with the rank-order stability of individual differences in personality, many researchers interested in personality traits and personality assessment doubt that personality changes in meaningful and systematic ways during adulthood. This article reviews large studies of mean-level change in personality characteristics measured with broad-band personality inventories, and includes both cross-sectional and cross-cohort longitudinal research. The results show considerable generalizability across samples, cohorts, and studies. In particular, people score higher with age on characteristics such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, and norm-adherence, and they score lower with age on social vitality. These findings provide evidence that personality does change during adulthood and that these changes are non-negligible in size, systematic, not necessarily linear, and theoretically important.
AB - Theories of adult development all agree that adulthood is a time of important changes in goals, resources, and coping. Yet, impressed with the rank-order stability of individual differences in personality, many researchers interested in personality traits and personality assessment doubt that personality changes in meaningful and systematic ways during adulthood. This article reviews large studies of mean-level change in personality characteristics measured with broad-band personality inventories, and includes both cross-sectional and cross-cohort longitudinal research. The results show considerable generalizability across samples, cohorts, and studies. In particular, people score higher with age on characteristics such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, and norm-adherence, and they score lower with age on social vitality. These findings provide evidence that personality does change during adulthood and that these changes are non-negligible in size, systematic, not necessarily linear, and theoretically important.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0036674868&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=0036674868&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00010-7
DO - 10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00010-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0036674868
SN - 0092-6566
VL - 36
SP - 287
EP - 306
JO - Journal of Research in Personality
JF - Journal of Research in Personality
IS - 4
ER -