Wiebke Bleidorn, University of Zürich, will give a presentation in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 16 December, 12:00-13:00).

Personality trait development across the lifespan—emerging principles and new directions

There is robust evidence that personality traits continue to develop throughout the lifespan, sometimes in response to environmental influences, including purposeful interventions. These findings would appear to provide a solid foundation for a deeper understanding of the course and causes of personality development. However, several open questions about the ways in which personality traits develop remain. In this talk, I will update and extend previous meta-analyses on personality trait development by synthesizing novel data on personality rank-order stability (k = 189, N = 178,503) and mean-level change (k = 276, N = 242,542) and discuss the role of genetic and environmental influences on personality development. In doing so, I will derive emerging principles of lifespan personality development, highlight limitations of past research, and present the broad outlines for future research, with a particular emphasis on relevant methodological complexities and conceptual challenges.