1. Chapter Nine
Personality
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2. Levels of Analysis & Personality Research
Dispositional traits
Consist of aspects of personality that are consistent
across different contexts and can be compared across a
group along a continuum representing high and low
degrees of the characteristic
Personal concerns
Consist of things that are important to people, their
goals, and their major concerns in life
Life narrative
Consists of the aspects of personality that pull everything
together, those integrative aspects that give a person an
identity or sense of self
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3. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Learning Objectives
• What is the five-factor model of
dispositional traits?
• What evidence is there for long-term
stability in dispositional traits?
• What criticisms have been leveled at the
five-factor model?
• What can we conclude from theory and
research on dispositional traits?
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4. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
The Case for Stability: The Five-Factor Model
Consists of five independent dimensions of personality:
– Neuroticism
– Extraversion
– Openness to experience
– Agreeableness
– Conscientiousness
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5. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Neuroticism
Has six facets:
– Anxiety
– Hostility
– Self-consciousness
– Depression
– Impulsiveness
– Vulnerability
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6. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Extraversion
Has six facets in two groups:
Interpersonal traits
• Warmth
• Gregariousness
• Assertiveness
Temperamental traits
• Activity
• Excitement seeking
• Positive emotions
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7. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Openness to Experience
Has six areas:
– Fantasy
– Aesthetics
– Action
– Ideas
– Values
– Occupational choice
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8. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Agreeableness (Opposite of Antagonism)
Agreeable people are not:
– Skeptical
– Mistrustful
– Callous
– Unsympathetic
– Stubborn
– Rude
– Skillful manipulators
– Aggressive go-getters
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9. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Conscientiousness
Conscientious people are:
– Hardworking
– Ambitious
– Energetic
– Scrupulous
– Persevering
– Desirous to make
something of themselves
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10. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
What is the Evidence for Trait Stability?
• Using the GZTS*, Costa and McCrae found:
– Over a 12-year period, 10 personality traits measured by
GZTS remained stable.
– Other studies similar to the GZTS found equivalent
results—however, in the very old, suspiciousness and
sensitivity increased.
*Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey
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11. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Additional Studies of Dispositional Traits
• Other studies have shown increasing evidence for
personality changes as we grow older:
Ursula Staudinger and colleagues found that:
Personality takes on two forms:
Adjustment
Developmental changes in terms of their
adaptive value and functionality.
Growth
Ideal endstates such as increased self-
transcendence, wisdom, and integrity
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12. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Additional Studies of Dispositional Traits
• Current consensus of change in the Big Five with
increasing age
– Absence of neuroticism
– Presence of agreeableness and conscientiousness
• Studies also show decrease in openness to new
experiences with increasing age.
• Adjustment aspect with increasing age could be
normative.
• Personality changes are tied to cohort differences.
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13. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
The Berkeley Studies
Participants were followed for 30 years between
ages 40 to 70. Gender differences were identified:
For women
• Lifestyle in young adulthood was best predictor of life
satisfaction in old age.
For men
• Personality was the better predictor of life satisfaction in old age.
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14. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Women’s Personality Development During Adulthood
• Two categories of women were studied with the
following personality differences:
Those who followed the social clock:
• Withdrawal from social live
• Suppression of impulse and spontaneity
• Negative self-image
• Decreased feelings of competence
• 20% were divorced between ages of 28 and 30
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15. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Women’s Personality Development During Adulthood
Those who did not follow the social clock:
• Less respectful of norms and self-assertive
• Not lower on femininity or on well-being
• More independent
• Greater confidence and initiative
• More forceful, less impulsive
• More considerate of others and organized
• More complex and better able to adapt
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16. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Critiques of the Five-Factor Model
• Block (1995) takes issue with the methodology that
uses lay people to specify personality descriptors
that were used to create the terms of the Five-
Factor Model.
• McAdams (1996, 1999) points out that any model of
dispositional traits says nothing about the core or
essential aspects of human nature.
• A major criticism is directed to the notion of stability
and change in personality.
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17. Dispositional Traits Across Adulthood
Conclusions about Dispositional Traits
• The idea that personality traits stop changing at
age 30 does not have uniform support.
• A partial resolution can be found by looking at
how the research was conducted.
• It could be that, generally speaking, personality
traits tend to be stable when data are averaged
over large groups of people.
• But, looking at specific aspects of personality in
specific kinds of people, there may be less
stability and more change.
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18. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Learning Objectives
• What are personal concerns?
• What are the main elements of Jung’s theory?
• What are the stages in Erikson’s theory? What types of
clarifications and extensions of it have been offered?
• What research evidence is there to support his stages?
• What are the stages of Loevinger’s theory? What evidence is
there to support her stages?
• What are the main points and problems with theories based
on life transitions?
• How is midlife best described?
• What can we conclude about personal concerns?
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19. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
What’s Different about Personal Concerns?
• Personal concerns:
– Are explicitly contextual in contrast to dispositional traits
– Are narrative descriptions that rely on life circumstances
– Change over time
• One “has” personality traits, but “does” behaviors
that are important in everyday life.
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20. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Jung’s Theory
• Emphasizes that each aspect of a person’s
personality must be in balance with all the others
– Such as, introversion-extroversion and masculinity-
femininity
• Jung was the first theorist to discuss personality
development during adulthood.
– He invented the notion of midlife crisis.
• Jung argues that people move toward integrating
these dimensions as they age, with midlife being
an especially important period.
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21. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
• Erikson was the first theorist to develop a truly
lifespan theory of personality development.
• His eight stages represent the eight great
struggles that he believed people must undergo.
• Each struggle has a certain time of ascendancy.
– The epigenetic principle
• Each struggle must be resolved to continue development.
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22. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
The sequence of Erikson’s stages are:
– Trust versus mistrust
– Autonomy versus shame and doubt
– Initiative versus guilt
– Industry versus inferiority
– Identity versus identity confusion
– Intimacy versus isolation
– Generativity versus stagnation
– Ego versus despair
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25. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Extensions of Erikson’s Theory: Logan
• Logan argues that the eight stages are really a cycle
that repeats.
– trust achievement wholeness
• Slater (2003) expands on Logan’s reasoning on the
central crisis of generativity versus stagnation and
includes struggles between:
– Pride and embarrassment
– Responsibility and ambivalence
– Career productivity and inadequacy
– Parenthood and self-absorption
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26. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Extensions of Erikson’s Theory: Kotre
• Kotre contends that adults experience many
opportunities to express generativity that are not
equivalent and do not lead to a general state.
– Generativity as a set of impulses
– Five types of generativity:
1. Biological and parental – raising children
2. Technical – passing of specific skills to the next generation
3. Cultural – being a mentor
4. Agentic – be or do something that transcends death
5. Communal – participation in mutual, interpersonal reality
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27. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Extensions of Erikson’s Theory: Hamachek
• Provided behavioral and attitudinal descriptors of
Erikson’s last three stages:
– Creates a series of continua of possibilities for individual
development
– Few people have an exclusive orientation to either intimacy
or isolation.
• These behavioral and attitudinal descriptors provide a
framework for researchers who need to
operationalize Erikson’s concepts.
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28. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Research on Generativity
• McAdams’s model shows how generativity results from:
– Complex interconnections between societal and inner
forces
– Thus, creating a concern for the next generation and a belief
in the goodness of the human enterprise
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29. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Extensions of Erikson’s Theory: Loevinger’s Theory
Loevinger has proposed the most comprehensive
attempt at integrating cognitive and ego
development and extension of Erikson’s theory.
– Ego development results from dynamic interactions
between the person and the environment.
– Eight stages: six in adulthood (see Table 9.2)
– Four areas of importance in ego development:
1. Character development
2. Interpersonal style
3. Conscious preoccupations
4. Cognitive style
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30. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Theories Based on Life Transitions
• Among the most popular theories of adult
personality development
• Based on the idea that adults go through a series
of life transitions, or passages
– However, few of these theories have substantial
databases, and none are based on representative
samples.
• Life transitions tend to overestimate the
commonality of age-linked transitions.
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31. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
In Search of the Midlife Crisis
• A key idea in life transition theories is the midlife crisis.
The idea that at middle age we take a good look at ourselves
in the hopes of achieving a better understanding of who we
are.
Many adults face difficult issues and make behavioral changes.
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32. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
The Midlife Crisis
However, very little data supports the claim that all
people inevitably experience a crisis in middle
age.
– Most middle-aged people do point to both gains and
losses, positives and negatives in their lives.
• This transition may be better characterized as a
midlife correction.
– Reevaluating ones’ roles and dreams and making the
necessary corrections
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33. Personal Concerns and Qualitative Stages
Conclusions about Personal Concerns
• Evidence supports a sharp change in personal
concerns as adults age.
– This is in contrast to stability in dispositional traits
supporting McAdam’s contention that this middle level
of personality should show some change.
• Change is not specific to an age but is dependent
on many factors.
• All agree that there is a need for more research in
this area.
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34. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Learning Objectives
• What are the main aspects of McAdams’s life-story model?
• What are the main points of Whitbourne’s identity theory?
• How does self-concept come to take adult form? What is
its development during adulthood?
• What are possible selves? Do they show differences
during adulthood?
• What role does religion play in adult life?
• How does gender-role identity develop in adulthood?
• What conclusions can be drawn from research using life
narratives?
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35. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
McAdams’s Life-story Model
• Argues that people create a life story
– That is, an internalized narrative with a beginning,
middle, and an anticipated ending
• There are seven essential features of a life story:
– Narrative tone
– Image
– Theme
– Ideological setting
– Nuclear episodes
– Character
– An ending
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36. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
McAdams’s Life-story Model
• Adults are said to reformulate their life stories
throughout adulthood both at the conscious and
unconscious levels.
The goal is to have a life story that is:
• Coherent
• Credible
• Open to new possibilities
• Richly differentiated
• Reconciling of opposite aspects of oneself
• Integrated within one’s sociocultural context
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37. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Whitbourne's Identity Theory
• Argues that people build conceptions of how their
lives should proceed
• They create a unified sense of their past, present,
and future.
– The life-span construct
• People’s identity changes over time via Piaget’s
concepts of assimilation and accommodation.
• The life-span construct has two parts:
– A scenario
• This includes future expectations or a game plan for one’s life;
it is strongly related to age norms.
– A life story
• A personal narrative history that organizes past events into a
coherent sequence.
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38. Whitbourne’s Model of Adult Identity

39. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Self-Concept
The organized, coherent, integrated pattern of self-
perceptions that includes self-esteem and self-image
– Mortimer and colleagues
• A 14-year longitudinal study showed that self-
concept influences the interpretation of life events.
• Kegen
– Self-concepts across adulthood are related to the
cognitive-developmental level.
– Proposes six stages of development which correspond
to levels of cognitive development
– Emphasizes that self-concept and personality does not
occur in a vacuum
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40. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Possible Selves
• Created by projecting yourself into the future and
thinking about what you would like to become,
and what you are afraid of becoming
• Age differences have been observed in both
hoped-for and feared selves.
– Young adults and middle-aged adults report family
issues as most important.
– Middle-aged and older adults report personal
issues to be most important.
• However, all groups included physical aspects as part of
their most feared selves.
– Interestingly, young and middle-aged adults see
themselves as improving in the future, while older
adults do not.
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41. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Possible Selves
Ryff identified six aspects of psychological well-being:
– Self-acceptance
– Positive relationships with others
– Autonomy
– Environmental mastery
– Purpose in life
– Personal growth
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42. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Religiosity and Spiritual Support
• Older adults use religion more often than any other
strategy to help them cope with problems in life.
Spiritual support includes:
• Pastoral care
• Participating in organized and non-organized religious
activities
• Expressing faith in a God who cares for people
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43. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Religiosity and Spiritual Support
• Spiritual support provides a strong influence on
identity.
– This is especially true for African Americans, who are
more active in their church groups and attend services
more frequently.
– Other ethnic groups also gain important aspects of
their identity from religion.
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44. Life Narratives, Identity, and the Self
Gender-Role Identity
• People’s beliefs about the appropriate
characteristics for men and women
– They reflect shared cultural beliefs and stereotypes about
masculinity and femininity.
• There is some evidence that gender role identity
converges in middle age.
– Men and women more likely to endorse similar self-
descriptions.
• However, these similar descriptions do not necessarily translate
into similar behavior.
• Also, older men and women tend to endorse similar statements
about masculinity and femininity.
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