Personality Factors Affect Personality Stability

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Much has been debated about the stability of personality in one’s lifespan. Personality, a psychological trait, is defined as the rather enduring patterns of feelings, thoughts and behavior that differentiate individuals from each other (Roberts & Mroczek, 2008). Costa and McCrae (1988, as cited in Debast et al., 2014) stated that personality is unchangeable after 30 years old. However, later on some studies found out that personality traits changes over time and that exogenous (environmental) and endogenous (genetics/internal) factors affect personality stability. Some studies recognized that genes have a considerable influence on personality stability and that environment does influence personality stability as well (Roberts, Wood, & Caspi,…show more content…
There are several definitions of change/stability in personality stability/change. Mean-level change is the average changes in certain personality traits over a period of time/age in a population (Roberts & Mroczek, 2008). Rank-order consistency is the maintenance of an individual’s relative standing on trait dimension over time (Allemand, Steiger & Hill, 2013). Structural consistency is the consistency of patterns of relationship between the traits (Allemand et al., 2013). Lastly, individual differences in change is the average changes in certain personality traits of an individual over a period of time/age, as every individual shows different levels of stability which can be different from the mean-level patterns (Allemand et al., 2013; Roberts & Mroczek, 2008). In many studies of personality development, the Big Five personality dimensions, (openness, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), are usually…show more content…
relationship between genetic and environmental influences) to affect personality stability. There are two different ideas for the genotype-environment interface: Gene × Environment (GE) interaction and Gene × Environment correlation (Bleidorn et al., 2014; Briley & Tucker-Drob, 2014). GE interactions refer to situations whereby individual differences in the awareness to peculiar environmental influences is due to genetic influences (Rutter, 2007, as cited in Bleidorn et al., 2014). GE interaction can result in age-related variance in heritability due to changing environments with age (Bleidorn et al., 2014). GE correlation means situations where one’s exposure or selection of environment based on their genetic expression of traits, which would influence the traits development (Plomin, DeFries, & Loehlin, 1977, as cited in Bleidorn et al., 2014). The active form of GE correlation refers to one’s tendency to select environments that complement their genetically expressed traits (Bleidorn et al., 2014). The meta-analysis by Briley and Tucker-Drob (2014) revealed consistencies between their results and GE interaction/GE correlation mechanisms. It showed huge heritability in childhood due to GE interaction occurring based on shared environment with parents. However heritability decreases due to grown children exiting shared environment,

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