What is personality? According to Kendrick and Funder (1988), personality traits are “internal dispositions and tendencies to behave, think and feel in consistent ways”. Costa and McCrae (1997) defined it as a way to represent our feelings, our thoughts, and how we behave. In contrast to this, Reber and Reber (2001) warns us that personality is “a term so resistant to definition and so broad in usage that no coherent simple statement about it can be made” (p.525). Due to the very broad and uncertain definition of personality, our textbook Development Through The Lifespan (1998), it states that the many personality traits were shortened to five basic ones, to which Costa and McCrae (1992) coined the theory “the Five-Factor/Big Five Mode of Personality”
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Neuroticism is one of the traits and they described it as: people who score very high on this worry a lot, they have a short temper, they pity themselves, are self-conscious, emotional and vulnerable. People who scored low are the opposite. Individuals who scored high on extroversion are loving, chatty, active and passionate. For openness to experience, the high scorers are imaginative, inventive, unique, curious, and liberal. Agreeableness is soft-hearted, confiding, giving, acquiescent, indulgent and good-natured. And lastly, conscientiousness are individuals who are hard-working, neat, on-time, aspirant and persevering. Now that these are all defined, an example of a study conducted by Herbst et al. (2000) will support the theory that our personality traits stay consistent over time in our middle adult life due to the little variation between middle and late adulthood. According to the textbook, Herbst et al. found two thousand people in their forties to reflect on their personalities over six years using the “Big Five” measure. 52 percent claimed they stayed the same, 39 percent said they only changed a little and 9 percent changed a lot. Personality is very fluid, but these statistics goes to show that there is not much of a dramatic change as you are already older. Longitudinal research will prove the stability of these five traits. In a study of such, …show more content…
Many various factors can influence this change, all to which include environmental factors, experience, maturity, etc. There is a bigger dramatic change from adolescence to adulthood, which is why we can see increases in change during those times. From middle to late adulthood, we see more stability because there is not much of a change. These individuals do not go through the same process and change as teens do, such as responsibilities, influences, maturity, etc. There is clearly a debate on whether change is greater than it is stable, but to my conclusion and as a response to the findings of studies, I would say that stability beats change. There is a greater percentage of people who have remained the same their whole life in contrary to those who change their personality. Longitudinal studies are a big help in determining these results. But as already mentioned, personality could change at some point, it depends on the external factors
Neuroticism is one of the traits and they described it as: people who score very high on this worry a lot, they have a short temper, they pity themselves, are self-conscious, emotional and vulnerable. People who scored low are the opposite. Individuals who scored high on extroversion are loving, chatty, active and passionate. For openness to experience, the high scorers are imaginative, inventive, unique, curious, and liberal. Agreeableness is soft-hearted, confiding, giving, acquiescent, indulgent and good-natured. And lastly, conscientiousness are individuals who are hard-working, neat, on-time, aspirant and persevering. Now that these are all defined, an example of a study conducted by Herbst et al. (2000) will support the theory that our personality traits stay consistent over time in our middle adult life due to the little variation between middle and late adulthood. According to the textbook, Herbst et al. found two thousand people in their forties to reflect on their personalities over six years using the “Big Five” measure. 52 percent claimed they stayed the same, 39 percent said they only changed a little and 9 percent changed a lot. Personality is very fluid, but these statistics goes to show that there is not much of a dramatic change as you are already older. Longitudinal research will prove the stability of these five traits. In a study of such, …show more content…
Many various factors can influence this change, all to which include environmental factors, experience, maturity, etc. There is a bigger dramatic change from adolescence to adulthood, which is why we can see increases in change during those times. From middle to late adulthood, we see more stability because there is not much of a change. These individuals do not go through the same process and change as teens do, such as responsibilities, influences, maturity, etc. There is clearly a debate on whether change is greater than it is stable, but to my conclusion and as a response to the findings of studies, I would say that stability beats change. There is a greater percentage of people who have remained the same their whole life in contrary to those who change their personality. Longitudinal studies are a big help in determining these results. But as already mentioned, personality could change at some point, it depends on the external factors