12.2 Exploring Personality (and Well-Being)

Actually, we have contradictory views about how our personality changes during adulthood. One is that we don’t change: “If Calista is irascible in college, she will be bitter in the nursing home.” Another is that entering new life stages, or having life-changing experiences, propels emotional growth: “Since getting married, I’m a more stable person.” “Coming close to death in my car accident transformed how I think about the world.”

Do people stay the same or grow as the years pass? As we see now, by looking at the research, both ideas are true!

Tracking the Big Five

Today, the main way psychologists measure personality is by ranking people according to five basic temperamental qualities. As you read this list, take a minute to think of where you stand on these largely genetically determined dimensions, which Paul Costa and Robert McCrae have named the Big Five traits:

Hundreds of studies show that our Big Five rankings have consequences for our lives. Because they are upbeat and happy, extraverts have more fulfilling relationships (Butkovic, Brkovic, & Bratko, 2011; Cox and others, 2010). People high on neuroticism, being impulsive and depressed, are more apt to suffer from chronic diseases (Sutin and others, 2013). Passionate to expand their horizons, adults high on openness are set up to grow emotionally (Lilgendahl, Helson, & John, 2013) and stay cognitively sharp (von Stumm, 2013) as the years pass. One longitudinal study even suggested that openness to experience and conscientiousness might help protect us against developing Alzheimer’s disease (Duberstein and others, 2011).

Without neglecting the role of each Big Five trait in constructing a successful life, researchers are particularly interested in the impact of conscientiousness as we travel from childhood to old age. So let’s pause to look at the lifespan path of this personality dimension in more depth. (Unless otherwise noted, these findings come from Shanahan and others, 2014; Reiss, Eccles, & Nielson, 2014.)

Hot in Developmental Science: Tracking the Fate of C (Conscientiousness)

The childhood quality that defines conscientiousness is good executive functions—meaning being able to think through your actions and modulate your emotions. Therefore, it makes sense that this Big Five quality is closely correlated with educational success. In fact C (conscientiousness) may be as important as IQ in predicting our GPA! Because, as teens, they are less apt to succumb to risky behaviors, conscientious boys and girls arrive at the brink of adulthood blessed with superior academic credentials and good health. During adulthood, their conscientious, “workerlike” personalities smooth the path to further success.

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Conscientious adults have more stable marriages. They tend to be affluent or middle class. Study after study suggests they live longer than their peers because they take such good care of their health (see, for instance, Hampson and others, 2013; Sutin and others, 2013).

For example, let’s take Sara, who ranked high on conscientiousness at age 10. Her hard-working personality ensured that she got into a good college, graduated at the top of her class, and got an excellent first job. As she traveled through her career, Sara was praised for her industriousness, got promotions, and eventually landed an executive position at a firm. Sara was committed to her marriage, had the emotion regulation talents to communicate well with her mate and—because we match up by homogamy—selected a conscientious spouse. At age 55, Sara’s life is a testament to the power of hard work in building a fulfilling life. Because Sara and her husband take care to exercise and eat right, this couple is on track to live healthy, wealthy, and happy, into old age.

Now, imagine Joe, an emerging-adult friend, who ranks low on this Big Five dimension. In his teens, Joe became ensnared in alcohol and drugs, so he never made it through school. Because Joe was so unreliable, he continually lost jobs and—over the decades—had several bitter divorces. At age 60, when you bump into Joe, he has serious health concerns and appears years older than his age. His decades of failure have left your friend penniless, demoralized, and depressed.

These descriptions suggest that because our nature (or basic temperamental traits) shape specific life experiences, we should become more like ourselves as we age. Due to an evocative and active process, Sara’s conscientious personality paved the way for her to outshine her contemporaries dramatically at each adult stage. Joe and Calista (mentioned earlier in this chapter), are set up to fail socially and work-wise, and become bitter over time. In addition to genetic and environmental forces both converging to promote consistency, we expect similar behaviors from people such as Sara, Joe, and Calista (“She’s a nasty you-know-what!”) because we yearn for a stable world (Allemand, Steiger, & Hill, 2013). If you have ever been shocked when a family member acted totally “out of character,” you know what I mean.

Therefore, what’s astonishing is that twin studies show personality gets less heritable as we age and encounter the random ups and downs of life (Bleidorn, Kandler, & Caspi, 2014; Briley & Tucker-Drob, 2014; Specht and others, 2014). Moreover, although the main theme is consistency (who you are as a person probably won’t basically change), the good news is that during adulthood many of us get more mature.

Making the Maturity Case

One early influence fostering maturity is confronting the challenges of adult life (see Hutteman and others, 2014). As I suggested in Chapters 9 and 10, after leaving the cocoon of our families, we need to emotionally grow up. In a mammoth study exploring the Big Five in 62 nations, researchers found that in every society, agreeableness and extraversion increased from youth into middle age (Bleidorn and others, 2013). Not unexpectedly, however, worldwide conscientiousness rose the most (Walton and others, 2013).

This study also offered compelling evidence that assuming adult roles makes us more mature. In cultures with an earlier onset of marriage or parenthood, people became more conscientious and agreeable at younger ages (Bleidorn and others, 2013).

A delightful example of the power of adult relationships to mold our character (meaning the Big Five trait of conscientiousness) comes from a German study exploring personality changes in relation to the living arrangements of emerging adults. While young people who cohabited with roommates did not increase much in conscientiousness over a four-year period, moving in with a romantic partner was apt to be accompanied by a real boost in that core trait (Jonkmann and others, 2014). Bottom line: close, adult encounters—especially of the romantic kind—force us to toe the maturity line.

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But emotional growth doesn’t just stop after we assume adult roles. Many people feel more in control of their lives and grow self-assured well into their older years (Specht and others, 2014).

Consider a cross-sectional study examining the prevalence of mature (resilient) personalities at different ages in huge samples of Australian and German adults. As Figure 12.1a shows, the percentages of women classified as resilient (people ranking high on the positive Big Five traits) floated upward from a low during emerging adulthood, to a high in old age (Specht, Luhmann, & Geiser, 2014). Now scan the findings relating to self-criticism in Figure 12.1b. This chart comes from another thousand-plus person poll of Canadian adults. From a high point at age 19, notice that self-criticism scores decline for men and women at older ages (Kopala-Sibley, Mongrain, & Zuroff, 2013).

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FIGURE 12.1a: In huge cross-sectional studies conducted in Germany and Australia, the percentage of resilient personalities floated upwards in older groups: This chart, showing the findings for women, reveals that the probability of being classified as resilient increases dramatically particularly during middle age.
Data from: Specht, Luhmann, & Geiser, 2014.
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FIGURE 12.1b: The relationship between age and self-criticism in over 300 Canadian adults ranging in age from 19 to 59, recruited from the Internet: In this study, when people of different ages were asked to respond to items such as “There is a big difference between how I am and how I want to be,” far fewer people (especially men) gave self-critical ratings at each of the older ages.
Data from: Kopala-Sibley, Mongrain, & Zuroff, 2013, p. 135.

Moreover, this self-assured worldview does not signal narcissism. In creative studies conducted in Switzerland and the United States, researchers offered convincing evidence that midlife and older people have a less egocentric, more altruistic attitude toward life (Freund & Blanchard-Fields, 2014). When asked to imagine owning an apple orchard, older age groups were more prone to choose an ecology-friendly harvesting strategy over one maximizing profit. Midlife adults were more apt to donate their funds from participating in the study to a social cause than young people provided with the same choice (see Figure 12.1c). This greater generosity had nothing to do with older adults having more personal wealth, as it appeared controlling for people’s income, too.

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FIGURE 12.1c: Donation behavior at different ages in several thousand Swiss and U.S. adults: When asked to either keep or donate the money from participating in this study to charity, notice, in particular, the dramatic rise in altruism (donating) among middle-aged people.
Data from: Freund & Blanchard-Fields, 2014.

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Obviously, these findings are averages. There are clearly many, selfish “out-of-control” sixty-somethings. Perhaps you have a friend who peaked emotionally in adolescence and went on to have an unhappy life: the teenage football hero who descended into drug abuse, or your high-school prom queen who now lives homeless, on the street.

Table 12.1 showcases interesting predictors at different life stages (apart from our rankings on the Big Five) that predict either growing emotionally or having problems down the road. The last item—processing traumatic events in a thoughtful, open way—brings me to the core quality involved in adult fulfillment: generativity.

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Generativity: The Key to a Happy Life

By now you should be impressed with the power of the Big Five to predict life success. But while knowing where we stand on these core dimensions can help reveal our journey’s outcome, it tells us nothing about specifics of the journey itself. Think of several friends who rank high on conscientiousness. One person might be a full-time mother; another might be a company manager; yet another might have found the outlet for his conscientiousness through being a nurse. In order to really understand what makes human beings tick, we have to move in closer and interview people about their lives. This is the strategy that Dan McAdams has used to explore personality during the adult years. Let’s eavesdrop on one of McAdams’s interviews:

I was living in a rural North Dakota town and was the mother of a 4-year-old son. One summer afternoon . . . Jeff left without me and was hit by a car. When I got there, he was lying in the street unconscious . . . . I felt sure he was dying, and I didn’t know of anything I could do . . . . My friend did, though, and today [Jeff?] is 18 years old and very healthy. That feeling of being helpless . . . while I was sure I was watching my son die was a turning point. I decided I would never feel it again and I became an E.M.T.

(quoted in McAdams, de St. Aubin, & Logan, 1993, p. 228)

In listening to these life stories, McAdams realized the power of random life events in shaping personality. Although this woman might have always ranked high in conscientiousness, the specific path her life took was altered by this pivotal experience. In McAdams’s opinion, in order to really understand development, we need to get up close and personal and talk to people about their missions and goals.

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Examining Generative Priorities

Actually, McAdam’s professional mission has been to scientifically test the ideas of the pioneering theorist who does believe that our goals shift dramatically in different life stages: Erik Erikson. Does generativity, or nurturing the next generation, become our main agenda during midlife? Is Erikson (1969) correct that fulfilling our generativity is the key to feeling happy during “the afternoon” of life? When people in their forties or fifties don’t feel generative, are they stagnant, demoralized, and depressed? (See Table 12.2.)

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To capture Erikson’s concept, McAdams’s research team constructed a questionnaire to generally measure generative concerns (you can take the first ten items on this scale in Table 12.3). The researchers also explored people’s generative priorities by telling them to “list the top ranking agendas in your life now” (see McAdams, 2001a).

When these researchers gave their measures to young, middle-aged, and elderly people, they found few age differences in generative attitudes. People were just as likely to care about making a difference in the world at age 20 or 50 or 85.

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The researchers did discover age differences in generative priorities—with emerging adults ranking very low on this scale (McAdams, Hart, & Maruna, 1998). Young people’s goals were centered on identity issues. A 20-year-old might say, “I want to make it through college and get a good job” or “My plan is to figure out what I want to do with my life.” Midlife and older adults were more likely to report: “My mission is to help my teenage son,” or “My goal is to work for justice and peace in the world.”

This makes sense. Remember from Chapters 3 and 6 that prosocial behaviors are in full swing by toddlerhood. There is no reason to think that our basic human drive to be nurturing changes at any life stage. But, just as Erikson would predict, we need to resolve issues related to our personal development before our primary concern shifts to giving to others in the wider world.

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Adults of every age derive great pleasure from engaging in generative activities. But now that he is in his sixties and has transcended identity concerns, cultivating a community garden to provide poor people with free vegetables qualifies as the generative center of this elderly man’s life.
digitalreflections/Shutterstock

Is Erikson right that, as people enter midlife, generativity takes center stage? According to one study, “not necessarily.” In following women from their forties into their sixties, researchers found that issues relating to identity (“developing as a person,” “expanding myself”) remained strong well into middle age. But, as these women got older, generativity gradually grew. According to this research, priorities fully focused on giving to the next generation reach a crescendo in the early sixties, once we know exactly who we are (Newton & Stewart, 2010).

Examining Adult Happiness

Is Erikson correct that generativity is the key to happiness during adult life? Here, the answer is “yes,” as long as we define happiness in the right way. If we imagine happiness as simply “feeling good” (hedonic happiness ), generativity has nothing to do with living a happy life. But, if we consider this term in its richer sense, as having purpose and meaning (eudaimonic happiness ), then, yes, highly generative people do have exceptionally happy lives (Grossbaum & Bates, 2002; Zucker, Ostrove, & Stewart, 2002; Versey, Stewart & Duncan, 2013).

So, generativity makes sense of why sacrificing for a beloved mate makes spouses feel personally fulfilled, or why parents happily spend decades changing diapers when they could be luxuriating in hotel spas (recall the last chapter). Our main mission as adults (and starting from childhood) is not simply hedonic pleasure—packing in pleasurable events—but living purposeful, generative lives (Seligman, 2011). (Check out Table 12.4 for other interesting happiness facts plus another reason why just packing in pleasures can’t permanently produce a happy life.)

When people don’t have generative goals, do their lives lack meaning? As Erikson described, do these adults feel stagnant—purposeless and at loose ends? Read what one researcher had to say about Deborah, who, in her late forties, scored very low on generativity in his study of women’s lives:

In reference to the birth of her first child, Deborah wrote, “All actions automatic. No emotional involvement . . . ; totally self-preserving but very unpleasant.” After many years of marriage, Deborah underwent a difficult divorce. She began to work in a “blur of meaningless jobs.”

(adapted from Peterson, 1998, p. 12)

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As this case history suggests, having children does not automatically evoke generativity. You can give birth and be totally nongenerative and uninvolved. Conversely, midlife adults who never have children can be incredibly generative in the wider world (see Newton & Baltys, 2014). Classic contemporary outlets for generativity, such as environmental activism, involve caring for generations “not yet born” (Morselli, 2013). Our world-class generative role models, such as Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King, lived lives devoted (in the beautiful phrase) to “repairing the world.”

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Examining the Childhood Memories of Generative Adults

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The saintly life of Martin Luther King is a testament (and reminder) that the ultimate generative activity lies in devoting one’s life to making a difference in the wider world.
Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Do the childhoods of people who embody this rich, Martin Luther King-like community-centered kind of generativity differ from those of more typical adults? To answer this question, McAdams’s research team selected community leaders who scored at the upper ends of their Generative Concern Scale (see page 363) and asked them to tell their life stories. Would these autobiographies differ from those of adults such as Deborah in my previous example, who ranked low on Erikson’s midlife task?

The answer was yes. The life stories of highly generative adults had themes demonstrating what the researchers called a commitment script. They often described early memories of feeling “blessed”: “I was my grandmother’s favorite”; “I was a miracle child who should not have survived.” They reported feeling sensitive to the suffering of others, from a young age. They talked about having an identity revolving around generative values that never wavered from their teenage years. A 50-year-old minister in one of McAdams’s studies was a teenage prostitute, and then a con artist who spent two years in a federal prison; but, throughout her life, she reported, “I was always doing ministry.”

The most striking characteristic of generative adults’ life stories was redemption sequences —examples of devastating events that turned out in a positive way (McAdams, 2006; McAdams & Bowman, 2001). For instance, in the example I just mentioned, the woman minister might view the humiliation of being sent to prison as the best thing that ever happened, the experience that turned her life around. According to McAdams (2006), early memories of feeling personally blessed, an enduring sensitivity to others’ misfortunes, caring values, and, especially, being able to turn one’s tragedies into growth experiences are the core ingredients of the commitment script and the main correlates of a generative adult life (see also Lilgendahl & McAdams, 2011).

What produces the kind of adult devoted to “repairing the world”? According to McAdams’ interviews, one force may be the presence of caring adults in a person’s past. When his research team asked people in their late fifties to pinpoint emotional turning points in their lives, adults high in generativity described critical incidents involving family members and teachers more frequently than their less generative peers. Here is an example:

The day before my mom died, I went to the hospital . . . and I was actually on my way to pick up my senior pictures. So when I got these photographs I shared them with my mom. . . . I could just tell in her eye that she had this real proud moment . . . it was a moment I . . . treasured . . . she never saw me physically at the graduation, but in my mind I will always believe she was there in spirit. So that will always be a highlight of my life.

(quoted in Jones & McAdams, 2013, p. 168)

If you think of your own generative role models—from a favorite teacher to, hopefully, your mom or dad—these special people are apt to be sprinkled in every ethnic group. But, interestingly, McAdams’ studies consistently show that African American men and women are overrepresented in their samples of generative community-minded adults (Hart and others, 2001; McAdams, 2006; Jones & McAdams, 2013; Newton & Baltys, 2014). Does coping with discrimination—plus a strong grounding in religion—make African Americans unusually sensitive to human suffering and so prone to devote their lives to repairing the world? In support of this possibility, themes stressing progress toward overcoming adversity are central in highly generative African Americans’ autobiographies (McAdams & Bowman, 2001).

In sum, this powerful generativity research explains why raindrops—meaning stressful life events—often make us more mature (recall the last item in Table 12.1 on page 362). It all depends on how we make meaning out of our personal storms. As one 61-year-old women, who grew emotionally, in a study put it: “I do not regret the past for it is the pain of my first 50 years that has brought me to where I am now” (Lilgendahl, Helson, & John, 2013, p. 413).

Wrapping Up Personality (and Well-Being)

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This group project to restore the oldest Black Baptist church in South Carolina is typical in the African American experience, where a mission to be of service—especially in a caring community that revolves around the church—is standard.
Blend Images - Hill Street Studios/Walter Jimenez/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

Now, let’s summarize all of these messages. Having read this section, here is what you might tell an emerging-adult friend who wants insights into who she will be at 40 or 59.

As a final note, I must emphasize that it’s difficult to grow emotionally if you are mired in poverty or live in a society rife with conflict and corruption, where life traumas are routine. McAdams’s generative community-minded African Americans were typically economically secure (Jones & McAdams, 2013). The reason why Denmark clocks in with the world’s highest well-being (recall Table 12.4 on page 365) is not just that this country is comparatively affluent. People are happiest in nations where they trust their government to be fair and effective (Ott, 2011) and income inequalities are relatively small (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). So our own happiness depends on living in a generative society, where life isn’t a zero-sum game. We are most likely to flourish as people when everyone around us is flourishing, too.

In the next section, devoted to cognition, I’ll be filling in more pieces of the puzzle involved in constructing a fulfilling life.

Tying It All Together

Question 12.1

Tim is going to his thirtieth college reunion, and he can’t wait to find out how his classmates have changed. Statistically speaking, which two changes might Tim find in his undergraduate friends?

  1. They will be more conscientious and self-confident.

  2. They will have different priorities than they did earlier, caring more about nurturing the next generation.

  3. They will care more deeply about making money than they did before.

  4. They will be more depressed and burned out than they were earlier.

a and b

Question 12.2

You are giving your best friend tips about growing emotionally and feeling fulfilled during midlife. Pick the item that should not be on your list:

  1. Live a calm, stress-free life.

  2. Live a generative life.

  3. Develop prosocial goals as a young person.

  4. Be conscientious and open to experience.

a

Question 12.3

Should your professor agree with this suggestion, write about a difficult life experience, and discuss how you coped with that event.

The answers here are up to you, but it would be best to confront and process that event in a way that might promote personal growth.