Personality Changes Throughout Lifespan Essay

Personality Changes Across Lifespan

Personality is the study of an individual’s unique and relatively stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving over time and across situations and it is what distinguishes one individual from another. In the past changes in personality were thought to have only occurred in the developmental stages of childhood and solidifies in adolescence. After the teenage years it was thought to be set like plaster or the change seen to be inconsequential or absent( Srivastava, John, Gosling, and Potter, 2003). However, recent studies have suggested that changes in personality traits continue to occur throughout an individual’s lifespan due to multiple reasons.

The idea that a person’s personality is fully developed during the ages of puberty are being challenged by new research findings that provide evidence that small personality trait changes can still occur throughout an individual’s lifespan (Roberts and Mroczek, 2008). As suggested by Srivastava, John, Gosling, and Potter, (2003), “just as individual differences in personality lead individuals towards different experiences that subsequently affect their personalities, normative changes in personality help prepare people for normative adult roles, which in turn can support further personality changes,”

During an individual’s progression from childhood into adolescence researchers suggest that agreeableness and conscientiousness increased, while extraversion, neuroticism, and openness dropped (Srivastava, John, Gosling, and Potter, 2003). The fall in extraversion, neuroticism, and openness can be due to an individual’s increased responsibilities and time constraint. Individuals later in life tend to be more mature and experienced with emotional feelings and are able handle themselves well in emotional settings, hence getting a low score on