Personality trait development in midlife: exploring the impact of psychological turning points

This study examined long-term personality trait development in midlife and explored the impact of psychological turning points on personality change. Self-defined psychological turning points reflect major changes in the ways people think or feel about an important part of their life, such as work, family, and beliefs about themselves and about the world. This study used longitudinal data from the Midlife in the US survey to examine personality trait development in adults aged 40-60years. The Big Five traits were assessed in 1995 and 2005 by means of self-descriptive adjectives. Seven types of self-identified psychological turning points were obtained in 1995. Results indicated relatively high stability with respect to rank-orders and mean-levels of personality traits, and at the same time reliable individual differences in change. This implies that despite the relative stability of personality traits in the overall sample, some individuals show systematic deviations from the sample mean-levels. Psychological turning points in general showed very little influence on personality trait change, although some effects were found for specific types of turning points that warrant further research, such as discovering that a close friend or relative was a much better person than one thought they wer

Forgiveness in Younger, Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Age and Gender Matters

The present study investigated age and gender differences in forgiveness of real-life transgressions. Emerging and young, middle-aged, and older adults recalled the most recent and serious interpersonal transgression and then completed the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM-18), which measured their avoidance, revenge, and benevolence motivation toward an offender and indicated to what extent they are generally concerned with the subject of forgiveness. The results revealed a trend among middle-aged adults to express more avoidance than younger adults. Moreover, young men had a greater motivation to seek revenge than middle-aged and older men. No such age differences were apparent for women. Additionally, forgiveness was a more manifest subject in everyday life for middle-aged adults and women. These findings emphasize the importance of age and gender when investigating forgivenes

Are open and neurotic behaviors related to cognitive behaviors in daily life of older adults?

OBJECTIVE: Previous research has shown a positive relationship between Openness and cognitive engagement as well as Neuroticism and cognitive complaints at the between-person level. However, less is known about these associations at the within-person level in daily life. Using daily assessments, the present study examined these associations both at the between-person and within-person level. Knowing the within-person associations is important to provide valuable information for simple preventive and interceptive intervention strategies. METHOD: This study sampled 136 healthy older participants (M = 70.45 years; 41.2% male). Open and neurotic behaviors as well as cognitive engagement and complaints were measured every evening over 11 days. RESULTS: The results of multilevel models showed a positive association between open behaviors and cognitive engagement at the between-person and within-person level. For neurotic behaviors and cognitive complaints, no association was found at either level of analysis. CONCLUSIONS: These findings extend previous research by providing the investigation of the associations between specific naturally occurring behaviors related to personality and cognition in the daily life of older adults at the within-person level. Furthermore, these results may offer some basis for future intervention studies that should test whether a simple intervention aimed at promoting Openness-related behaviors may increase cognitive engagement

Within‐ and between‐patients associations between self‐efficacy, outcome expectation, and symptom change in cognitive behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety disorder

Objectives There is limited information on how a change in patients' expectations over time results in symptom change in psychotherapy. This study aimed to investigate the changes in patients' expectations and symptoms during treatment and across follow‐up as well as to determine the within‐ and between‐patient relationships between two types of patient expectations, that is, self‐efficacy and outcome expectation, and symptom change. Methods Participants (80 participants × 6 repeated measures; 480 observations) with generalized anxiety disorder were treated using cognitive behavioral therapy and the within‐ and between‐patient scores of self‐efficacy and outcome expectation were evaluated in multilevel models as predictors of symptom change. Results Patients' self‐efficacy and outcome expectation increased, whereas severity of their symptoms reduced during and after treatment. At the within‐patient (WP) level, an increase in self‐efficacy was associated with a decrease in worry and depressive symptoms, and an increase in outcome expectation was associated with a decrease in depressive symptoms. The between‐patient (BP) effect, however, was contrary to the WP effect, that is, self‐efficacy was positively correlated with worry and outcome expectation was positively correlated with depressive symptomsConclusionThese results highlight the importance of disaggregating the WP variability from BP variability in psychotherapy process–outcome research as they exhibit different associations at the within‐ and between‐patient levels.  Clinical Trial Registration: ClinicalTrial.gov (NCT03079336)

Does realizing strengths, insight, and behavioral practice through a psychological intervention promote personality change? An intensive longitudinal study

The mechanisms of change underlying the effectiveness of personality change interventions are largely unclear. In this study, we used data from a three-month digital intervention with an intensive longitudinal design to test whether a greater realization of general change factors is partly responsible for personality change. Participants ( N = 679, 53.0% female; age: M = 25.3 years, SD = 7.1) seeking to increase either Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, or Extraversion provided self-ratings on their weekly personality states and the three generic change factors of strengths, insights, and behavioral practice. We found a single-factor structure of change factors within and between individuals. Results showed within-person increases in Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness states as well as increases in change factors across the intervention. Changes in personality states were coupled with changes in generic change factors. Finally, the results provide initial support for the hypothesis that the realization of general change factors is partly responsible for the effects of the intervention. Within-person increases in the change factors were associated with subsequent increases in Extraversion and Emotional Stability states during the following week. The present findings highlight the need to better understand how and why people change in personality as a result of interventions

Looking on the bright side of life: Gratitude and experiences of interpersonal transgressions in adulthood and daily life

OBJECTIVE: Gratitude plays an important role in individual and social well-being. However, less is known about the link between gratitude and experiences of interpersonal stressors. The current research examined the associations between gratitude and interpersonal transgressions. METHOD: One cross-sectional study with a broad age range and two daily diary studies (total N = 2,348; total age range: 18-91) were used to test the associations on the between- and within-person level. RESULTS: A consistent result across all studies was that dispositionally grateful individuals tended to report fewer interpersonal transgressions than less grateful people. In turn, people who generally reported more interpersonal transgressions were less grateful in daily life. Moreover, higher gratitude on one specific day was associated with fewer reported transgressions on the same day. However, the results from the daily diary studies indicated differences between the samples. Whereas gratitude was consistently associated with interpersonal transgressions in one daily diary sample, the findings in the second daily diary sample were less consistent. CONCLUSION: The present findings suggest that grateful people tend to perceive their social exchanges differently and/or actually experience fewer interpersonal transgressions. Future work is needed to test the underlying mechanisms of this negative association

Unobtrusive Recognition of Personality Traits with Health Impact: A Literature Review with a Focus on Conscientiousness and Neuroticism

Non communicable diseases (NCDs) impose the greatest burden on global health. Any technology that helps making treatment more effective or efficient can potentially benefit humanity at a grand scale. Health information technology (HIT) has been identified as offering such potential, and indeed, existing HIT-based interventions are targeting NCD-related specific diseases such as diabetes, asthma, or mental illness. Rather generic determinants impacting health outcomes are the personality traits conscientiousness and neuroticism. We argue in this article that HIT-based interventions can benefit from an unobtrusive recognition of conscientiousness and neuroticism, both for tailoring interventions and for the adaptation of these traits. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify relevant behavioral features representing conscientiousness and neuroticism. Overall, 17 out of 262 articles have been found to be relevant for this purpose. We found that for conscientiousness, features relating to media consumption (video) and creation (photo) were highly relevant, as well as features related to communication style (use of negations), and features relating to the behavior of social contacts and variety of balancedness of relationships. For neuroticism, we found that features relating to the use of words of certain classes (religion, hearing) were particularly relevant, as well as variation in message length across contacts, and communication style (use of exclamation marks). This work concludes with an outlook on future research

Leveraging The Potential Of Personality Traits For Digital Health Interventions : A Literature Review On Digital Markers For Conscientiousness And Neurotism

Digital health interventions (DHIs) are designed to help individuals manage their disease, such as asthma, diabetes, or major depression. While there is a broad body of literature on how to design evidence- based DHIs with respect to behavioral theories, behavior change techniques or various design features, targeting personality traits has been neglected so far in DHI designs, although there is evidence of their impact on health. In particular, conscientiousness, which is related to therapy adherence, and neuroticism, which impacts long-term health of chronic patients, are two personality traits with an impact on health. Sensing these traits via digital markers from online and smartphone data sources and providing corresponding personality change interventions, i.e. to increase conscientiousness and to reduce neuroticism, may be an important active and generic ingredient for various DHIs. As a first step towards this novel class of personality change DHIs, we conducted a systematic literature review on relevant digital markers related to conscientiousness and neuroticism. Overall, 344 articles were reviewed and 21 were selected for further analysis. We found various digital markers for conscientiousness and neuroticism and discuss them with respect to future work, i.e. the design and evaluation of personality change DHIs

Cognitive complaints mediate the effect of cognition on emotional stability across 12 years in old age

Previous research supports a positive relationship between cognition and emotional stability, although findings regarding healthy older adults are inconsistent. Additionally, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie this association. Thus, the present study investigated the mediating effect of cognitive complaints on the bidirectional longitudinal association between cognition and emotional stability in old age. The study sample consisted of 500 older individuals (M age = 62.97 years, SD = 0.91, range = 60-64 years; 52% male) from the Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Adult Development. The results showed that cognitive complaints mediated the effect of cognition on emotional stability over 12 years even when taking baseline emotional stability, baseline cognitive complaints, depressive affect, gender, sensory functioning, and objective and subjective health into account. However, cognitive complaints did not mediate the effect of emotional stability on cognition. The results of the current study emphasize the importance of investigating cognition as a predictor of personality traits, and indicate that cognitive resources may serve as a protective factor for emotional stability in old age. (PsycINFO Database Record