McCrae & Costa’s (1999) five-trait theory also houses in it the plaster hypothesis, which claims that personality traits form and develop through childhood before stabilizing in middle adulthood. It is important to note that, unlike the Five Factor Theory presented by McCrae & Costa’s (1999), the contextual perspective, as noted earlier on in the paper, asserts that personality change, throughout an individual adult life, is due specifically to person-environment interactions, for it can be seen that changes in social role, life events, and social environments can influence certain personality traits. The perspective further asserts that the three most important domains for social role change here work, marriage and partnership, for each of
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Majority of the literature reviewed in this paper will draw on one or more of McCrae & Costa’s (1999) mentioned traits in terms of studying the steady or changing nature of traits, the first of which is a study conducted by Srivastava, John, Gosling and Potter (2003).
Srivastava, John Gosling and Potter (2003), through examining the big five personality trait dimensions, attempted to understand how personality traits change in early and late adulthood. Specifically, they wanted to see whether their findings corroborated McCrae & Costa’s (1999) five factor model’s assertion that the five personality factors/traits stop or slow in development at middle age. In the study, through the use of an internet sample, the researchers examined both the plaster hypothesis, which in the realm of the five-factor model ultimately yields that traits are not affected by the environment, to see whether or not personality is indeed “set like plaster’, and formed a regression model to test different changes in different times in development for both binary genders. The …show more content…
The study looks at whether there are “significant” individual differences between the trajectories of two major personality traits among a relatively large sample of males. In the study, the subject group had consisted of 1,663 men ranging between the ages of 43 to 91. Extroversion and neuroticism data for the study had consisted primarily of six administrations of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI-Q) (Floderus, 1974; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1968). The inventory is seen to measure two distinct and individual dimensions of personality only; Extraversion and Neuroticism. The inventory consists of 18 items that require dichotomous scores ranging from zero to nine. The inventory is said to have good construct validity after having been tested primarily in Swedish twin studies (Levenson, Aldwin, Bossé, & Spiro, 1988; Mroczek, Spiro, Aldwin, Ozer, & Bossé, 1993 as cites in Mroczek and Spiro, 2003). Results of the study had revealed that men differed in their personality trait trajectories. Where some males had remained stable in terms of the Extraversion and Neuroticism traits, other had presented with either large or small-scale changes over the course of the 6 inventories that had been given at three-year
Majority of the literature reviewed in this paper will draw on one or more of McCrae & Costa’s (1999) mentioned traits in terms of studying the steady or changing nature of traits, the first of which is a study conducted by Srivastava, John, Gosling and Potter (2003).
Srivastava, John Gosling and Potter (2003), through examining the big five personality trait dimensions, attempted to understand how personality traits change in early and late adulthood. Specifically, they wanted to see whether their findings corroborated McCrae & Costa’s (1999) five factor model’s assertion that the five personality factors/traits stop or slow in development at middle age. In the study, through the use of an internet sample, the researchers examined both the plaster hypothesis, which in the realm of the five-factor model ultimately yields that traits are not affected by the environment, to see whether or not personality is indeed “set like plaster’, and formed a regression model to test different changes in different times in development for both binary genders. The …show more content…
The study looks at whether there are “significant” individual differences between the trajectories of two major personality traits among a relatively large sample of males. In the study, the subject group had consisted of 1,663 men ranging between the ages of 43 to 91. Extroversion and neuroticism data for the study had consisted primarily of six administrations of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI-Q) (Floderus, 1974; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1968). The inventory is seen to measure two distinct and individual dimensions of personality only; Extraversion and Neuroticism. The inventory consists of 18 items that require dichotomous scores ranging from zero to nine. The inventory is said to have good construct validity after having been tested primarily in Swedish twin studies (Levenson, Aldwin, Bossé, & Spiro, 1988; Mroczek, Spiro, Aldwin, Ozer, & Bossé, 1993 as cites in Mroczek and Spiro, 2003). Results of the study had revealed that men differed in their personality trait trajectories. Where some males had remained stable in terms of the Extraversion and Neuroticism traits, other had presented with either large or small-scale changes over the course of the 6 inventories that had been given at three-year