Does personality change?
yes
Teens & 20s are…
more aggressive, disruptive, criminal
- slows down in 30s
Who is the most aggressive age group?
Toddlers
A Cohort is…
People who are developing or going through similar situations at same time
Childhood personalities….
Predict adulthood personalities
e.g.
• Childhood agreeableness and self-control—adult success at work, relationships
• Childhood impulsiveness—adult loud talkers
Personality disorders are….
- Personality disorders are stable
* Once a narcissist, always a narcissist
What is temperment?
• Precursor to personality
- basically baby level personality
- thought to be linked to genetics
- as babies can’t be extraverted/introverted
What are things that shape your personality?
• Body features
- attractiveness, Born male/female, tall/short –> Shape how others react to you
• Environmental features
- Born in the country/city, rich/poor, small family/large family
• Early experience
- stress
What is the relationship between stress and development?
Curvilinear relationship
- a certain threshold of stress must be experienced in childhood for optimal development
- too much or too little stress exposure in childhood and result in problems in adulthood
Do trigger warnings help?
No, they are counter productive
How do you cope with traumatic events and PTSD?
Learn to cope with reminders • Reframe • Okay to be sad • You’re not alone • Exposure therapy (slow increase exposure to that thing until you're no longer discomforted by it)
Person-Environment transactions
- People seek out environments to fit them
- Avoid environments that don’t fit them
- Shape environments that then reinforce their personality
- Positive children reinforce positive feedback from parents
- makes it difficult to disentangle genes from environment to explain this.
(e. g. warm temperament due to genes or positive feedback from parents?)
How much can personality change across different ages?
- Childhood r = .31
- University years r = .54
- 50 to 70 years old r = .74
Why does personality tend to have a lower chance of changing as we get older?
- Roles, relationships, goals stable
* Reliant on current system, oppose change
What determines if a person is not the same person anymore? What is the true self?
The true self = the moral self
e.g. used to think robbing banks is bad but now doesn’t
What are some RESEARCH methods to test personality development?
Cross-Sectional Studies
• Compare people at different ages today
• Cohort effects! (comparing 2 different generations)
Longitudinal Studies
• Compare same people at different ages
• Long studies! (follow people for years)
• Mostly similar developmental profiles for Big 5
Do people become more conservative as
they age?
No, political change often occurs not by changing
old minds but as aging generations die
What percentage of people want to change something about their personality and why don’t they?
• 87-97% want to change something about themselves• (Old people want to change as much as anyone else)
Why don’t we change? Maybe conflicted desires?
• Conscientious—but also want to relax
• Outgoing—but really just want more friends
How can you change your personality?
• Psilocybin (drug- magic mushroom)
- Increases openness to experience over a year later
• Living abroad
- Learn norms are culturally relative
- Have to be flexible
- Increased creativity
• General Interventions
- Investment in schools, nutrition & health, parenting classes, one-onone learning
- Lasting student success
• Targeted Interventions
- Easier to change specific behaviours than major traits like extraversion or neuroticism
e. g. Fear of snakes vs. general fear
• Psychotherapy
- Identify traits/behaviours you want to change
- Develop plan to change them
- Small changes in behaviour can produce lasting trait changes
How do you correlate brain and behaviour/feelings/thoughts
Brain Scans
How do you correlate body and behaviour/feelings/thoughts
- Heart rate
- Respiratory rate
• Skin conductance response
- Increased sweat gland activity
- Physiological/psychological arousal
What is the purpose of biological measures in personality psychology?
Looking for Brain and Body individual differences
–> and hoping these indicate differences in
psychological processes
(involves making an inference) –> problem of inferences reduced by prior existing evidence/data
What is the Somatic marker hypothesis?
When we notice a physiological response (e.g. increase heart rate) it can help us understand what emotion we’re feeling based on the situation we’re in.
- e.g. watching horror movie–> notice HR increase –> oh I must be fearful right now
What is the problem with drawing inferences from
Biological Measures?
This biological data can be ambiguous and make it difficult to make inferences as to what data actually means.
e.g. Brain activity -> is it fear or is the activity as a result of fear and trying to calm us down or is the brain activity causing the fear?
