Chapter 8: Personality and Aging

Overview

Only three more chapters left in the course (Ch. 8, 9, 11).
Chapter 8 will focus on changes in personality over a lifetime.
Personality: enduring characteristics that define an individual (traits like emotions, coping skills, etc.).

Personality Trait: Consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Ex: behaving typically in a social situation.
Personality State: Short-term characteristics of a person. Ex: being generally miserable but upbeat due to a recent raise.
Personality Factors: Groups of traits occurring together in an individual.

Extraversion: Outgoing, upbeat, friendly (high score); reserved, less social (low score).
Neuroticism: Anxious, hostile, self-conscious (high score); calm, secure (low score).
Openness to Experience: Curiosity, flexibility, imagination (high score); practical, preferring routine (low score).
Agreeableness: Sympathetic, trusting, cooperative (high score); antagonistic, critical (low score).
Conscientiousness: Diligent, organized, dependable (high score); careless, unreliable (low score).

Developed through factor analysis, combining responses from many personality test questions to find common patterns.

Differential Continuity: Stability of individual’s rank order in a group over time. E.g., High neuroticism at 20 predicts high neuroticism at 40.
Mean Level Change: Average score changes over time, e.g., agreeableness increases with age.
Intra-individual Variability: Examines stability of specific individuals over time; results vary.

Personality and Intimacy: Traits predict relationship behavior. High neuroticism and low agreeableness predict unstable relationships.

Conscientiousness: Linked with job success and academic achievement. High conscientiousness and low neuroticism predict better health and longer life.

Identical twins' personalities more similar than fraternal twins (correlation studies).

Types of transactions:

Reactive: Interpreting experiences based on personality.
Evocative: Behaving to elicit certain reactions consistent with self-concept.
Proactive: Selecting environments that fit our personality.
Manipulative: Changing the environment to fit our personality.

Basic traits are universal but distinct personalities arise from interactions between genetic and environmental factors.
Personality studies use various methods, leading to complex results that depend on the measurement approach.