Personality traits

• Basic tendencies


  The abstract psychological potentials
• Characteristic adaptations


  Structures that develop as the person interacts with the environment
• Manifestations of personality


  Behaviours, thoughts, and feelings
• Objective biography


  The specific and potentially developable aspects of personality
• Five-Factor Theory (FFT) viewpoint


  • The development of personality (ie. the basic tendencies) occurs according to an intrinsic, genetic driven programme
  • External influences can contribute to personality development at the level of characteristic adaptations through a process of accommodation
• Assimilation


  When specific behaviours, thoughts, or emotional reactions fit the characteristic adaptations into particular situations
• Example of assimilation


  • A middle-aged Afrikaans-speaking person who scores high on openness to experience, has many different interests, likes different cultures, decides to learn Xhosa after relocating to another province
• Personality trait stability and change

  • Both change and stability describe personality trait development across adulthood
  • Stability and change are defined, measured, and statistically analysed in various ways
• Mean level stability/change


  The general tendencies found in most people
• Rank order stability/change

  The relative positions of individuals' traits in comparison to their age peers
• Individual differences in trait development

  Reflection of the different pathways or trajectories that individuals may encounter in adulthood
• Stability of variance


  Individual differences in the traits seem consistent over time and/or across ages
• Structural stability


  The stability of correlations (relationship) among traits or items (or facets) on a personality measure
• Personality trait stability may serve different functions, such as providing identity, routine, control, and predictability</b>
• Personality trait instability often is an indication of a psychological disorder
• Mean level changes in personality traits across adulthood

  • Neuroticism declines until middle adulthood and then remains stable, but increases slightly around the age of 80
  • Extraversion shows some decline during emerging adulthood, a relatively flat trend from young adulthood through middle age, and a noticeable drop in later years
  • Openness to experience shows increases in emerging adulthood, stability in middle adulthood, and decreases in older adulthood
  • Agreeableness remains at a stable level until age 50 and then increases with age
  • Conscientiousness increases in young and middle adulthood, increases to a peak between the ages of 50 and 70, and then declines
• Personality trait changes are much more common in young adulthood before the age of 30 than in middle age
• Changes in personality traits after age 80 are rare compared to younger age periods
• Individuals may change in some traits but not in others or deviate significantly from the average expected (normative) change
• Change in personality traits may be more adaptive for adults who seek new experiences, as it allows them to adapt better to new opportunities and situations
• Stability may be better for individuals who prefer greater consistency and control
• Biological perspective on personality trait stability and change

  • Personality trait stability and change are attributed to intrinsic maturational processes rather than to external influences
  • Proponents of the five-factor model believe that personality traits arise exclusively from biological causes and reach full maturity in early adulthood
• Costa and McCrae acknowledge a limited role for environmental factors in personality change, but only if mediated through biological processes
• Major life events can change personality, but these effects are only modest
• Personality traits


  Changes in personality traits are mostly a function of normative development governed by biology, rather than changes in personality traits themselves
• Actual changes in personality traits can be caused by non-normative environmental influences such as drugs, medication, injuries, and diseases that directly affect the brain
• Support for Costa and McCrae's contention comes from decades-long factor analytic, cross-sectional, longitudinal, sequential, and cross-cultural studies
• Development of personality traits

  • Reflects intrinsic maturation, while environmental influences play a much lesser role than researchers expected
  • Major life events can change personality, but these effects are only modest
• Perceiving stressful life events as turning points in trait change may be related to normative age-related changes
• Gender differences


  • Men tend to score higher than women on assertiveness and ideas, while women score higher than men on anxiety and tender-mindedness
  • Lend credibility to the argument for certain innate (inborn) personality traits
• Until very recently, personality measurement in South Africa either made use of imported questionnaires or personality inventories were mostly developed from existing Western-orientated personality models
• The standardisation and multilinguistic context of South Africa was not taken into account, and these measures predominantly favoured only one ethnic group
• The NEO-PI-R and by extension the FFM, is at the forefront of research, but the structural equivalence of the FFM may have some universal applicability, it is not extensive enough
• Research found support for the five factors for white research participants, but not for black participants, and openness to experience seemed to be weakly replicated in the black samples
• Researchers increasingly argued for including African dimensions of personality and also more inclusive and comprehensive personality measures for the South African population as a whole
• Individualism-collectivism, interpersonal relatedness, and religion

  Personality dimensions that have been mentioned as needing to be included for the South African context
• The Basic Traits Inventory (BTI) is an English-language measure of the FFM, and research has demonstrated that the five factors measured by the BTI can be extracted across the diversity of cultures in South Africa
• The South African Personality Inventory (SAPI) project was initiated in 2005 with the aim to overcome the challenges related to personality measurement in South Africa
• The SAPI


  • Includes six personality clusters, similar to the FFM, but its content may be distinctive to the South African context
  • The factorial structure of the SAPI is presented in Table 4.2
• The SAPI project used a modified lexical approach, making use of semi-structured interviews with participants from different cultural language groups, as well as an emic approach to explore indigenous personality structures