How do the self and personality develop over the life span? - Chapter 11

What are concepts and theories about the self and personality?

Personality stands for the organized combination of attributes, motives, values and behaviors, unique to each individual. We often describe personalities with dispositional traits like independent, or extravert. People also differ in characteristic adaptions which are more situation-specific ways, in which people adapt to the environment and context. These include e.g. motives, goals, self-conceptions and coping mechanisms. And a third aspect is narrative identities which are life stories that we construct about our past and futures. This gives us identity and meaning. Both genes and environment influence these three aspects of personality. 

As you describe yourself you use your self-concept: your perceptions of your traits. And self-esteem is your evaluation of yourself as a person, based on the self-perceptions that constitute your self-concept. With all self-perceptions, an identity is formed: your sense of who you are, what you want and how you fit in.

There are three different views of development of personality:

• Psychoanalytic theory. With in-depth interviews the inner dynamics of a person are studied. Freud believed personality was formed in the stages of psychosexual development, in the first 5 years, and then stayed the same. Unpleasant early experiences would permanently affect the personality. The psychosocial theory by Erikson also stated that people undergo similar personality changes at similar ages, as they are challenged by different developmental stages. But he emphasized social influences as peers and cultures too and thought harmful experiences could be overcome. Thus, he believed personal growth and change could occur. 
• Trait theory. This is based on the psychometric approach, and states that personality is a set of trait dimensions and people differ in them. Researchers use personality scales and factor analysis to find distinct traits in people. Trait theorists believe that traits are pretty consistent and enduring. Most scholars believe human personalities can be described in 5 universal major dimensions of personality (The Big Five). These are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, and are influenced both by genetics and environment. 
• Social learning theory. These theorists do not believe in stages of personality or traits of personality. They believe people's behavior is influenced by the situations they're in, and changes as the enviroment changes: thus social context is really influential. As environment changes we change. 

The Big 5: 

• Openness to experience: curiosity and interest in different things vs. preference for the same things
• Conscientiousness: discipline and organization vs. lack of seriousness
• Extraversion: sociability and outgoingness vs. introversion
• Agreeableness: compliance and cooperativeness vs. suspiciousness
• Neuroticism: emotional instability vs. stability

What is personality to the infant?

Infants quickly develop a sense of self, baed on the perceptions of their bodies and actions, which grows out of interactions with caregivers. From 2-3 months they have a sense of agency: a sense that they can cause things to happen, and slowly they differentiate themselves from the rest of the world. From 6 months on, infants realize they and their companions are separate beings with different perspectives and things like joint attention can now occur. And around 18 months infants can recognize themselves visually as distinct individuals: self-recognition. Babies ultimately also form a categorical self: and classify themselves into social categories, based on age, sex and other characteristics. Thus they know they are babies and boys, not girls, for instance. This is between 18-24 months. 

Self-awareness happens through cognitive development and social interaction (responsiveness), and the cultural context: self-awareness develops quicker in individualistic cultures than in collectivist cultures. Toddlers that recognize themselves are more able to talk about themselves and assert their wills, experience self-conscious emotions like embarrassment, understand other people and coordinate their own perspectives with other perspectives. 

Infants do have distinctive personalities from birth, through different temperaments (tendencies to respond to events in predictable ways, the basis for later personality). Though learning theorists viewed babies as blank slates and the environment as the only influence, it is now clear that babies are born with certain temperaments. 

Most infants can be placed in one of these categories (some infants share qualities of two or more):

• Easy temperament. Typically content, open to nex experiences, regular habits, and they tolerate discomforts.
• Difficult temperament. Active, irritable and irregular habits-having infants. They adapt slow to new situations. Often throw tantrums.
• Slow-to-warm-up temperament. Relatively inactive, somewhat moody, only moderately regular infants. Slow in adapting, but they respond mildly. Eventually they adjust. 

By adulthood, someone's adjustment had little to do with infancy temperament.

Another way of defining infant temperament is by dimensions. There are three major ones, made up of more specific ones. The first two are evident from infancy on, the third emerges in toddlerhood and early childhood and continues into adulthood:

• Surgency/extraversion. This is the tendency to actively, confidently and energetically approach new experiences, in an emotionally positive way. They enjoy interaction.
• Negative affectivity. Tendency to be sad, fearful, easily frustrated, irritable and difficult to comfort.
• Effortful control. This is the ability to focus and shift attention when desired, inhibit responses, and appreciate low-intensity activities. Develops quickly around age 3-4. 

Differences in temperament partly have to do with different levels of certain neurotransmitters, and prenatal influences can also influence it. Then the postnatal environment helps determine how adaptive temperamental qualities are and if they might change. Again, goodness of fit between child's temperament and the environment is important: parents have to respond well to their child. Infant's temperament and parenting reciprocally influence each other. 

What is personality to the child?

The preschool child's emerging self-concept is concrete and physical, instead of using psychological traits. From age 8 they use these more to describe themselves. First the personal traits, and then later they form social identities and define themselves in terms of their identification with groups. Then, they become more capable of social comparison: using information about how they compare with others to characterize and evaluate themselves. Very young children see themselves as super wonderful, but later through social comparisons they get more realistic views.

Self-esteem becomes more multidimensional with age. While preschoolers discriminate just two broad aspects of self-esteem (competence, both physical and cognitive, and personal and social adequacy), older children differentiate among five aspects: (1) scholastic competence (doing well in school), (2) social acceptance, (3) behavioral conduct (staying out of trouble), (4) athletic competence and (5) physical appearance. The accuracy of self-evulations increases as children age. 

Children also form a concept of what they "should" be like - the ideal self. With age, the gap between the real and ideal self increases, and a decrease in self esteem occurs, also through more social comparisons and more critical feedback from parents and teachers as children get older. 

Three things influence why some children develop higher self-esteem than others: genetic makeup, level of competence, and social feedback. Warm and democratic parents have good influence on self-esteem. However, social feedback should not get crazy: it should be related to true achievements. Thus: you should not praise a child for doing something not so difficult or good. Helping children succeed at important tasks can boost their self-esteem.

Temperament grow into a predictable personality in childhood, and this predicts later personality. During life personalities can change in response to parenting, cultural pressures and life events. The aspects of personality that characterize young children are sometimes different than the aspects/dimensions that fit adolescents and adults, and this might be why correlations between early childhood traits and adult traits are usually small. While the roots of adult personality can be found in childhood, it takes many more years for a fully formed personality.

What is personality to the adolescent?

Adolescence is a time to find yourself. Self-descriptions change a lot between childhood and adolescence. They become less phsyical and more psychological, less concrete and more abstract, more differentiated, more integrated and coherent, and more reflected upon. Adolescents can also get really self-conscious, self-esteem decreases: however this is just for some of them. This is possibly because they are learning more about themselves, are thinking a lot, face social pressures and their bodies are changing. 

According to Erikson this is the time for the stage of identity vs role confusion. With their change of bodies and sexual desires, developed cognitive abilities that make them think more, and society pressures this can be a challenging time. Our society supports youths by allowing the moratorium period (youths are relatively responsibility-free and can experiment to find themselves). This also makes finding identity hard because there are many possibilities and you can be "anything you want to be". The status of identity can be viewed in terms of "crisis" (struggling with identity and exploring) and "commitment" (resolving the questions and settling on an identity). Then, there are four identity statuses:

• Diffusion. No crisis is yet experienced, but no commitment is made. Thus, the individual has not really thought about their identity.
• Foreclosure. An commitment seems to have been made, but is based on parents or other people: the individual has not explored other things or really thought for himself. No crisis has happened yet.
• Moratorium. An identity crisis is experienced and and commitment is not yet made.
• Identity achievement. After crisis, questions to the answers have been found and identity is established.

Identity takes quite a long time to form and another identity "crisis" can be experienced later in life. It also occurs at different rates in different domains of identity. 

In adolescence the creation of a life story, or narrative identity, is also important. They will be an important aspect of our adult personalities and will be revised and reflected upon through life. In older age, there is a process called life review of looking back at your life and coming to terms with it and with dying.

Another aspect of identity development is developing an ethnic identity, through working through the same identity statuses. This is more important for minorities and multiracial youth. A positive ethnic identity has many benefits, like good self-esteem and adjustment, and the parents can help form it. 

Vocational identity is another important aspect of identity: how do we choose career paths? Young children use their fantasy. As more realistic self-concepts emerge, more realistic careers are desired, however the associated social status is also important to them. Adolescents get even more realistic and begin to think about other factors than just their wishes. They consider their interests, capacities, and values. Realism increases with age and then personal as well as environmental factors are taken into account. Ultimately, vocational choice is a search for the best fit between personality and occupation: person-environment fit. Vocational theorist Holland identified six personality types that fit different occupations:

• Investigative types: enjoy learning, solving problems and working with ideas. E.g. scientists.
• Social types: enjoy interaction and helping others. E.g. teachers.
• Realistic types: enjoy practical work with objects. E.g. car mechanics.
• Artistic types: enjoy to express themselves creatively. E.g. musicians.
• Conventional types: enjoy order and structure. E.g. librarians.
• Enterprising types: enjoy to influence and attain status. E.g. leaders of organizations.

Unfortunately some people (like minorities, lower-income people) can have limited vocational possibilities and therefore cannot always go for what actually fits them best. There is also still a difference between men and women. 

Ultimately, an adolescent's identity formation is a product of:

• Cognitive development. More developed thinking helps to form identity.
• Personality. Adolescents that explore and achieve identity tend to score low in neuroticism and high in openness to experience and conscientiousness.
• Quality of relationship with parents. Youths stuck in the diffusion status often have emotionally distant parents, while youths stuck in the foreclosure status often are overly attached to their parents. Warm and democratic parents are associated with adolescents in the moratorium and identity achievement statuses.
• Opportunities for exploration. E.g. a moratorium period with freedom.
• Cultural context. 

What is identity to the adult?

Adults differ greatly in levels of self-esteem and their self-concepts. Overall, self-esteem rises gradually through adult years and drops in old age. Males often show higher self-esteem than females, but this fades in old age. 

How can older adults maintain good self-esteem? 

• Reducing the gap between real and ideal self. Elderly scale down their ideal self and thus the ideal self and real self converge, which helps to maintain self-esteem.
• Adjusting goals and standards of self-evaluation. Our goals and standards change so we do not mind failing to achieve things that are no longer important to us or not realistic.
• Making social comparisons to others. It helps to not compare to younger people, but to people your own age and with the same possible impairments. They sometimes also select worse-off people to compare to so they feel better.
• Avoiding negative self-stereotyping. Ageism stands for negative stereotypes fuelling prejudice and discrimination against elderly. If elderly do not self-stereotype, they maintain better self-esteem and it brings a lot of other positive things. Ageism needs to stop in society.

Cultural has an influence on personal identity. For instance, whether you grow up in an individualistic country or a collectivist country has effect on how you describe yourself, from a really young age. Individualistic people also tend to feel like they have an inner self that is consistent across situations and over time, while collectivist people see situational influences and context as powerful and have a different "self" in different situations. Collectivists are also more modest and less absorbed with self-esteem, they do not emphasize their uniqueness and are self-effacing in contrast to self-enhancing like individualists. When people move from one of the kinds to the other, they seem to adjust to and take over things from the new culture.

There seems to be a good consistency in rankings on trait dimensions within a group, and this tendency increases with age. Thus: the extravert as a young adult is likely to be extravert as an older adult. 

Then: is there stability in the mean level of a trait? So does personality change generally over the years? It seems like people get more emotionally stable, cooperative, easygoing, disciplined and responsible as they age from adolescence to middle adulthood: this is the maturity principle. This principle shows up across different cultures and both nature and nurture may cause this. As people grow from middle-aged adults into older adults, personality stays quite consistent, except from activity level declining. 

What makes personalities consistent over the years? Firstly, genetic makeup contributes. Secondly, lasting effects of childhood effects play a part. Thirdly, traits will remain stable as people's environments remain stable. And fourth, gene-environment correlations promote continuity (genetics influence what kinds of experiences we have, and these may strengthen our genetically based predispositions). And what then causes the significant changes in some adults' personalities? First, biological factors like disease or dementia can contribute. Secondly, there can be changes in the environment that change personalities. And finally, change is more likely when there's a poor person-environment fit. Ultimately, the forces for continuity are often stronger than those for change. 

Erikson's theory of the psychosocial stages is important for personality and growth (chapter 2). It is a path to adulthood, and research shows indeed there is Erikson-like psychosocial growth throughout the whole life span.

Levinson believed that adults go through a repeated process of building a life structure (pattern of living) and then questioning and altering it during a transition period that happens every 7 years. The transition period from age 40-45 is especially significant and forms the midlife crisis. Research even shows that life satisfaction has an U-shaped pattern over the adult years (decreasing from early adulthood to low in middle adulthood, then increasing from middle adulthood to old age). Many scholars do not fully support Levinson and instead believe in midlife questioning: not a true universal psychological crisis, but something that can occur in response to life events and can happen at different ages. 

Early adulthood is the time for exploring careers, job changes and seeking advancement. After this, usually around their 40s, adults really settle in work and are at the peak: with much responsibilty and their job being important to them. As they get older, their work performance is not hurt, probably because have not reached the age yet when declines kick in, have much expertise, and make use of selective optimization with compensation. Personality is an important influence on how successful someone becomes and person-environment is critical too. And still, gender is influential on vocational choice and development: both through gender discrimination and traditional gender-role norms (e.g. stay at home mom). Our vocational experiences also affect our personalities. Job loss and unemployment can even really threaten adult's identities and self-esteem, and can affect people around them too. 

As people retire, they face the challenge of adjusting to the loss of their work role and the challenge of developing a satisfying, meaningful lifestyle. Atchley said adults progress through phases as they go from worker to retiree. First, there is the preretirement phase in which workers gather information about retirement and plan for the future. Just after the retiring, there is the honeymoon phase in which they love their new freedom. Then comes the disenchantment phase: they start to feel aimless and sometimes unhappy. Finally there is the reorientation phase in which they find a satisfying lifestyle. Generally, retired people fare well after a little adjustment process, but what makes for the variability among people? It seems good long-term adjustment is most likely among adults that:

• retire voluntarily and feel in control of their decision
• enjoy good physical and mental health
• have positive personality traits (like agreeableness)
• have the financial resources to live comfortably
• are married or have strong social support in another way.

There is not one path to successful aging that fits all: you have to find a good fit with your personality.