29 Mar 2012
School
Department
Course
Professor
Personality
Class 4: Personality Over Time
January 19 2012
What Is Personality Development?
•Personality development: Continuities, consistencies, stability in people over time, and the way
in which people change over time
• For example: Temperament, coherence, stability & change
Three Key Forms of Stability
•Rank order stability: Maintenance of an individual position’s within group
•Mean level stability: Constancy of level in population
•Personality coherence: Maintaining rank order relative to others but changing in the
manifestations of trait
Personality Change: Two Defining Qualities
•Internal: Changes are internal to a person, not changes in the external surrounding
•Enduring: Changes are enduring over time, not temporary
Three Levels of Analysis
•Population level: Changes or constancies that apply more or less to everyone
•Group differences level: Changes or constancies that affect different groups differently
•Individual difference level: e.g., Can we predict who is at risk for psychological disturbance
later in life based in earlier measures of personality?
Personality Stability Over Time :Temperament Stability During Infancy
•Temperament: Individual differences that emerge very early in life, are heritable, and involved
behaviors are linked with emotionality
• As assessed by caregivers, temperament factors include activity level, smiling and laughter, fear,
distress to limitations, soothability, and the duration of orienting
Research points to the following conclusions
•Stable individual differences emerge early in life, where they can be assessed by observers
•For most temperament variables, there are moderate levels of stability over time during the first
year of life
•Stability of temperament is higher over short intervals of time than over long intervals of time
•Level of stability of temperament increases as infants mature
Personality Stability Over Time: Childhood
Block & Block Longitudinal Study:Individual differences in activity level
•Activity level assessed in two ways:Using actometer and independent assessments of behavior
and personality provided by teachers at ages 3, 4, 5, 7, 11
•Stability coefficients: Correlations between same measures obtained at two different points in
time (test-retest reliability)
•Validity coefficients: between different measures of the same trait at the same time
Stability of childhood aggression
•Individual differences in aggression emerge early in life, by three years