Personality De elopment and Temperament

Davidson R J 1994 Asymmetric brain function and aective style in psychopathology. De elopment and Psychopathology 6: 74158 Fox N A, Calkins S D, Bell M A 1994 Neuroplasticity and development in the rst two years of life. De elopment and Psychopathology 6: 67796 Kagan J 1994 Galens Prophecy. Basic Books, New York Kagan J, Arcus D, Snidman N, Yu-feng W, Hendler J, Greene S 1994 Reactivity in infancy. De elopmental Psychology 30: 3425 Kochanska G 1993 Toward a synthesis of parental socialization and child temperament in early development of conscience. Child De elopment 64: 32547 Lin K M, Poland R E, Lesser I N 1986 Ethnicity and psychopharmacology. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 10: 15165 Rogeness G A, Maas J W, Javors M A, Masedo C A, Harris W R, Hoppe S K 1988 Diagnoses, catecholamines, and plasma dopamine-beta-hydroxylase. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 27: 1215 Rothbart M K 1989 Temperament in childhood: A framework. In: Kohnstamm G A, Bates J E, Rothbart M K (eds.) Temperament in Childhood. Wiley, New York, pp. 5976 Thomas A, Chess S 1977 Temperament and De elopment. Brunner-Mazel, New York Werner E E 1993 Risk, resilience and recovery. De elopment and Psychopathology 5: 50315

J. S. Kagan

Personality Development in Adulthood

The study of personality is arguably the broadest subdiscipline in psychology in that it aims to understand how the whole person functions in the world (see Personality Psychology). Historically, personality psychology has concerned itself with grand theories about human behavior, questions about character, identity, and morality. Most of the empirical research on personality published over the past two decades fails to consider potential development in adulthood, reecting, in part, an assumption that personality changes little in adulthood. Nevertheless there has been a long-standing interest in whetherand, if so, howpeople change in systematic ways in the later years of life. The following sections summarize the research traditions and some of the central ndings generated in the eld of adult personality development.

continue to be debated. Most recently, questions are being raised about the degree to which personality is bounded within the individual or is better represented in transactions between individuals and broader collective units. Importantly, dierent conceptual approaches to the study of personality lead to dierent predictions about and evidence for personality change in adulthood. Whereas personality development is considered by some to unfold naturally and unidirectionally from temperaments inherited at birth, other personality psychologists emphasize the need to consider a complex interplay of factors that contribute to personality development, including temperamental inheritance but more importantly exposure to dierent types of environments, acquired beliefs and expectations and the capacity for self-regulation (Bandura 1989). In part, evidence for stability or change in personality in adulthood reects which facet of human functioning is studied. To be clear, there is no dispute that people change in adulthood. They do. Adults are inevitably changed in idiosyncratic ways by the life experiences they encounter, including major life events, such as becoming a parent, or less dramatic but persistent experiences associated with, for example, the pursuit of a particular career and the consequent development of a particular type of expertise. However, change in adulthood is not automatically considered personality de elopment. Rather, changes must be enduring, systematic (i.e., nonrandom), and predictable by age or life stage.

2. Major Approaches to Adult Personality De elopment

Conceptions of adult personality development have evolved out of two very dierent traditions in psychology; clinical psychology and life-span developmental psychology. The approaches and the ndings about systematic change in adulthood reect these dierent paradigmatic approaches to the study of lives. Due to considerable overlap between studies of individual dierences and clinical psychology, many of the oldest and most inuential theories of personality, most notably psychoanalytic psychology but also ego psychology and interpersonal psychology, were developed based on clinical observations of patients. Although strikingly dierent in its basic tenets, social cognitive theory of personality also evolved out of close connections between clinical and personality psychology, essentially addressing dierences between normal and abnormal processing involved in basic psychological functioning. Thus, the oldest approaches to personality were tied closely to understanding psychopathology. In contrast to the traditional individual dierence approach, life-span psychology was born only in about

1. Dening Personality De elopment

In part because personality draws so broadly from so many areas of psychology, including cognition, emotion, psychopathology, and motivation, consensus in the eld over basic denitions is dicult to obtain (see Personality Theories). Even the preferred units of study (e.g., traits, behaviors, or psychological processes) 11290

Personality De elopment in Adulthood the 1970s and reects the view that human development is a continuous adaptive process (Baltes and Goulet 1970). Life-span psychology aims to identify and illuminate normal developmental changes in all areas of psychological functioning, including but not limited to personality, from birth until death. Perhaps most notably, life-span psychology is distinguished by the presumption that human growth is at no time during the life course complete. Consequently, the dierent presumptions inherent in the two approaches direct attention to dierent research foci. Whereas traditional adult personality psychologists ask whether traits acquired in childhood persist across adulthood, whether particular personality crises present themselves at particular stages of life, or how personality disorders are transformed in later life, lifespan psychologists are more likely to target specic age-related issues, like whether people grow wiser with age, whether conceptions of the self grow more or less complex over time, and whether self-regulatory processes change in systematic ways over time. As noted above, whether one nds evidence for stability or change depends importantly on where one looks and the particular questions one poses. The next sections include a birdseye view of the earliest approaches to personality development and brief synopses of research on personality development deriving from the trait approach to personality development and from life-span developmental psychology. age, but suggested that people predictably turned inward and deteriorated psychologically as they approached the end of life and wrestled with fears about death. In the 1930s and 1940s, in Europe and the US, several stage stages theories, such as that oered by Charlotte Buhler, concretized thinking about adult $ personality development and allowed for empirical tests of theoretical predictions. Of these, Erik Eriksons (see Erikson, Erik Homburger (190294)) stage theory had the most enduring inuence. Like Freud and Jung, Erikson was a classic ego psychologist and his theory was grounded in the psychoanalytic tradition. However, rather than focus on psychosexual needs, Erikson argued that human needs for psychological intimacy fueled systematic development that continued into old age. According to this epigenetic theory, people pass through a xed sequence of stages during life each of which requires the successful resolution of a central psychic crisis. In early adulthood, the central issue involves the establishment of intimacy. In middle age, generativity, namely the passing on of power and knowledge to younger generations, is achieved or failed. In old age egointegrity vs. despair (self-acceptance of a life lived or regret and dismay) is the focal crisis in life. In the 1960s and 1970s, major research projects aimed at proling adult development were undertaken at Yale (Levinson 1978) and Harvard (Vaillant 1977), which continued the stage theory tradition in the US and longitudinal studies undertaken in the 1930s began to come of age. As research participants in the Stanford Terman study of gifted children, for example, entered adulthood, researchers began to examine connections between childhood and adult personality. The Child Guidance and Oakland Growth Studies undertaken at the University of California at Berkeley oered resources by which to examine predictable change. At the University of Chicago, a group of social scientists, including Bernice Neugarten, Morton Lieberman, and David Guttman, formalized the study of life-span personality development. In the end, however, empirical support for stage theories failed to withstand empirical tests. Although interesting patterns were displayed in some very homogenous samples, identied developmental patterns failed to generalize broadly. Critics of stage theories claimed that the patterns that did emerge reected the inuence of consistent surrounding social structures around highly selected groups of people, not human development. Virtually all of the longitudinal studies included predominately (if not exclusively) white, middle-class individuals, often only males. In the 1980s, Costa and McCrae (1990) essentially waged a war against stage theories declaring that personality does not change systematically in adulthood. In a decade dominated by the trait approach to personality, the central and reliable nding 11291

3. Early Stage Approaches to Adult Personality De elopment

Following the tradition established by child developmentalists, early thinking about adult personality development was rooted in stage theories. Whereas Freuds (see Freud, Sigmund (18561939)) psychosexual stage model of personality suggested that personality was formed in early childhood and that, barring long-term psychotherapy, was highly resistant to change, his skeptical follower, Carl Jung (see Jung, Carl Gusta (18751961)), argued that the most interesting aspects of personality do not develop fully until middle age. Jung believed that only after basic biological and reproductive issues are resolved in early adulthood, are people freed to engage in more psychic pursuits. Jung posited that whereas in early adulthood biological imperatives predominate and demand adherence to gender roles, in mid-life feminine and masculine sides of people grow more integrated and spiritual concerns grow more salient. As people age, feelings and intuitions come to dominate thoughts and sensations. Thus, albeit in rather unspecied ways, Jung advanced the position that people developed in adulthood and that spirtuality played an increasingly central role. Jung wrote far less about advanced old

Personality De elopment in Adulthood of the 1980s was that personality changes little after the age of 30 years. their inuence throughout the life course (Gatz 1992). Genetic inuence is as strong in old age as early adulthood. In summary, researchers adopting a trait approach to personality development nd that along at least some of the important dimensions of personality, there is little change in personality well into old age. Critics of a trait approach, however, argue that traits communicate little about how people manage their lives in day-to-day life and because of the broadband focus exaggerate the consistency of behavior across time and situations. They criticize the trait approach for failing to better predict behavior and redirect focus to specic strategies (e.g., how an individual cognitively appraises a situation; expectancies, subjective values, self-regulatory systems, and competencies). Life-span approachesinuenced strongly by the social cognitive theory of personality (Bandura 1989)view individuals as agentic creatures who shape their own environments (see also Interactionism and Personality; Self-regulation in Adulthood ).

4. The Trait Approach to Adult Personality De elopment

Traits are continuous variables represented by broadly encompassing lexical terms that account for individual dierences (John 1990). Traitssuch as shy, lively, outgoing, anxious, and intelligentare conceptualized as predispositions within individuals to behave in certain ways manifest across a wide variety of situations. Gordon Allport (see Allport, Gordon W (18971967)) argued that cardinal traits are those around which a person organizes life (self-sacrice). Central traits (e.g., honesty) represent major features and secondary traits are specic traits that help to predict behavior more than underlying personality (e.g., dress type, food preferences). Allports denition is compatible with modern trait and temperament approaches to personality which attempt to describe people in terms of one or more central features of the person. Personality psychologists in the trait tradition seek to identify the traits along which people dier and to explore the degree to which these traits predict behavior. Many taxonomies of traits have been oered over the years, but unquestionably the ve-factor model is most widely accepted today (see also Personality Structure). Based on factor analysis of selfdescriptions, the ve traits that emerge reliably across many studies of Europeans and Americans are: (a) openness to experience, (b) conscientiousness, (c) extraversion, (d) agreeableness, and (e) neuroticism. Traits and temperaments appear to be relatively stable through the second half of life (Costa and McRae 1990). It appears that beyond the age of 30, extraverts remain extraverts and neurotics remain neurotics. Trait theorists have found reliable evidence for stability in personality well into old age. This nding emerges whether researchers ask individuals to describe themselves repeatedly over time or, alternatively, ask signicant others, like spouses, to describe those same individuals repeatedly (Costa and McRae 1990). It should be noted that even though persistent rank-order dierences remain the same, there is some recent evidence that modest mean level changes may appear, with older adults scoring slightly higher than younger adults on agreeableness and conscientiousness and slightly lower on neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience (McCrae et al. 1999). Importantly, similar ndings come from studies sampling Asian and European populations. However, identied changes are quite small. Overall, there is remarkable consistency in the characteristics that distinguish individuals from one another over time. There is some evidence that the core set of traits that dierentiate people are genetically based and exert 11292

5. Life-span Approaches to Adult Personality De elopment

Rather than focus on taxonomies of personality, lifespan developmental psychologists view development as a dynamic process aimed at adaptation (Baltes 1987). Two principal stays of life-span theory speak directly to personality. The rst states that adaption is always time and space bound. In other words, behavioral adjustment must occur within a particular environmental and social niche. In life cycle context, what is adaptive in infancy and early childhood may not be adaptive in adolescence. Stranger anxiety, for example, may serve a highly adaptive function in infancy because it motivates dependent creatures to stay in close proximity to caregivers. It may also facilitate attachment to primary adult gures, a key developmental task of early life. Yet, stranger anxiety among adults is clearly maladaptive. Similarly, it can be argued that pursuing multiple prospective mates is adaptive in adolescence and early adulthood as people practice intimate relationships but less so in middle and old age at which point emotional investment in a select few may hold greater gains than the continual exploration of all possible mates. The second stay of life-span theory is that development inevitably demands selection (Baltes and Baltes 1990). In order for specialized (i.e., eective) adaptation to occur within a particular social, historical and physical niche, active and passive selections must be made. As people age, they come to have greater choice in the selection of environments and select environments that support their self-views. Throughout adulthood, people actively construct skills and hone environments to meet selected goals. There is good evidence that people narrow their social

Personality De elopment in Adulthood spheres with age, for example, forming increasingly well contoured social convoys that accompany them throughout life (Carstensen et al. 1999). Caspi and Herbener (1990) found that people tend to choose spouses similar to themselves, and further show that people who have spouses similar to themselves are less likely than people with dissimilar spouses to display personality change in adulthood. Thus, it may be that stability is maintained across the life course because people actively create environments that maintain stability. Finally, life-span theory holds that development is never fully adaptive because adaptation to one set of circumstances inevitably reduces exibility to adapt to another. In this way development always entails gains and losses. Subsequently, life-span theory obviates the presumption that antecedent losses are the only or even the primary reasons for changes that occur with age and examines how peoples relative strengths and weaknesses at dierent points in the life cycle inuence successful adaptation. 5.1 Personality De elopment from a Moti ational Perspecti e Life-span developmental approaches, because they are rooted in adaptation, lead naturally to consideration of the ways that goals and goal attainment may change throughout the life course (Baltes and Baltes 1990, Brandtstadter et al. 1999, Carstensen et al. 1999) (see $ also Adulthood: De elopmental Tasks and Critical Life E ents). Motivational psychologists presume that there is continuity in basic human needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy across the life course. There is every reason to expect, for example, that regardless of age, people seek to control their worlds (see also Control Beha ior: Psychological Perspecti es). Researchers who take a goal-focused approach have brought a dierent set of ndings to bear on discussions of personality and aging, showing that goals and preferences do change with age and inuence behavior. Carstensen and co-workers, for example, have shown that the perception of time left in life importantly inuences social goals. Because aging is inextricably and positively associated with limitations on future time, older people and younger people dier in the goals they pursue (Carstensen et al. 1999). Older people are more likely to pursue emotionally meaningful goals whereas younger people are more likely to pursue goals that expand their horizons or generate new social contacts. Brandtstadter et al. (1999) argue $ that people adjust goal strivings to accommodate external and internal constraints placed on goal achievement at dierent points in the life cycle; a central nding coming out of this line of work, for example, is that older people respond to the loss of resources in advanced age by downgrading the importance of some previously desirable goals. 5.2 Emotion and Personality

Another way of conceptualizing personality, which is particularly conducive to life-span approaches, places emotional experience and emotional regulation at the core. In this view, emotions are not related simply to personality, they are the essence of personality (Carstensen et al. in press, Rothbart and Derryberry 1981) (see also Adulthood: Emotional De elopment). The emotions people feel when they face challenges, and the eectiveness with which they learn to regulate their emotions, are the cardinal components of personality development, forming the basis of individual dierences in persistent tendencies to behave, think and feel in day-to-day life. Individual dierences in the propensity to experience specic emotions inuence not only the psychological and biological reactivity of the person in the moment, but come to inuence conscious choices about preferred environments, behavioral styles, and also determine the social partners to which people are drawn. Ry (1995) has taken a dierentiated approach to understanding emotions and well-being across the life-span. Rather than calculating global positive and negative aect as indicators of psychological wellbeing, Ry conceptualizes well-being in terms of self-acceptance, environmental mastery, purpose in life, personal growth, positives relations with others, and autonomy. The dimensions appear to have differential relationships with age, with older adults scoring higher than younger adults on Environmental Mastery and Autonomy, but lower on Purpose in Life and Personal Growth. There also appear to be lifespan developmental trajectories concerning the relationship between peoples conception of their present status and their ideal selves along these dimensions. Older people tend to have less distance between their actual and ideal selves than do younger adults. An emotion approach to personality has particularly intriguing implications for adult development because in adulthood emotions appear to grow more complex (Carstensen et al. in press) and emotion regulation appears to improve (Gross et al. 1997). With advancing age, the emotion-cognitionpersonality system also appears to become moredierentiated, with emotions becoming linked to an ever-increasing array of cognitions. To the extent that such changes inuence motivation (e.g., Izard and Ackerman 1998), modify thinking and reasoning (Labouvie-Vief et al. 1989), or result in qualitative changes in subjective well-being (Ry 1995), personality is importantly inuenced. 5.3 Wisdom and Resilience As noted above, the focus on adaptative development inherent in life-span approaches generates questions about the ways in which aging people adjust to changing resources and changing contexts. There is a 11293

Personality De elopment in Adulthood delicate balance between gains and losses that occurs in the second half of life that have important implications for personality. As people enter advanced ages, nearly inevitably they encounter increasingly dicult challenges, including the deaths of friends and loved ones, assaults on physical health, and threats to social status (see also Coping across the Lifespan). At the same time as experience in life increases, perspectives change. In some ironic way, the familiarity of losses may even make losses easier to take. Considerable focus in lifespan psychology, thus, has been on the ways that people eectively adjust in later adulthood. Resilience (Staudinger et al. 1995) and wisdom (Staudinger 1999) have been particular targets of interest because they involve the use of age-based experience to compensate for losses in circumscribed domains. Studies of wisdom, for example, show that contrary to popular lore, wisdom is unrelated to age in adulthood (Staudinger 1999). Even though experience-based knowledge does increase with age, wisdom requires a complex array of abilities that draw on multiple functions, some of which decline. Under optimal conditions, old age may be the time in life for wisdom to best emerge, but it does not do so normatively. dimensions characterized as basic traits, people change very little in the second half of life. Approaches that focus on motivation and emotion are newer, but initial ndings suggest that they may shed considerable light on ways that individuals change in middle and old age. Finally, at the time of this writing, the human genome project very recently was declared complete. Few, if any, scientists expect that genetic ndings alone will shed much light on personality. However, they may well help to do away with customary language and algorithms (such as heritability coecients) that have given credence tacitly to the idea that environmental and biological inuences can be cleanly separated. Whereas in past decades, substantial discussion has centered around whether biology or environment was most inuential in personality development, personality researchers will now begin to address the more interesting and more important puzzle which lies in the interaction between the two. See also: Adult Development, Psychology of; Ego Development in Adulthood; Personality Development and Temperament; Personality Development in Childhood; Personality Psychology; Personality Theories

6. Integration of Approaches and Findings about Adult Personality De elopment

Does continuity or change in personality best characterize adulthood? The answer is a qualied yes to both continuity and change. Along some basic descriptive dimensions, such as openness to experience and extraversion, people remain remarkably consistent in adulthood. However, in other domains just as central to personality, such as motivation and adaption, there is evidence for systematic change across adulthood. Goals change predictably with age, emotion regulation appears to improve, and wellbeing takes on dierent qualities.

Bibliography
Baltes P B 1987 Theoretical propositions of life-span developmental psychology: On the dynamics between growth and decline. De elopmental Psychology 23: 61126 Baltes P B, Baltes M M 1990 Psychological perspectives on successful aging: The model of selective optimization with compensation. In: Baltes P B, Baltes M M (eds.) Successful Aging: Perspecti es from the Beha ioral Sciences. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 134 Baltes P B, Goulet L R 1970 Status and issues of life-span developmental psychology. In: Goulet L R, Baltes P B (eds.) Life-span De elopmental Psychology: Research and Theory. Academic Press, New York, pp. 421 Bandura A 1986 Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cogniti e Theory. Prentice Hall, Englewood Clis, NJ Bandura A 1989 Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist 44: 117584 Brandtstadter J, Wentura D, Rothermond K 1999 Intentional $ self-development through adulthood and later life: Tenacious pursuit and exible adjustment of goals. In: Brandtstadter J, $ Lerner R (eds.) Action and Self De elopment. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA Carstensen L L, Charles S T, Isaacowitz D, Kennedy Q (in press) Emotion and life-span personality development. In: Davidson R, Scherer K (eds.) Handbook of Aecti e Science. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Carstensen L L, Isaacowitz D M, Charles S T 1999 Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity. American Psychologist 54: 16581 Carstensen L L, Pasupathi M, Mayr U, Nesselroade J 2000 Emotional experience in everyday life across the adult life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79: 64455

7. Future Directions
The fundamental challenge that confronted personality researchers a century ago remains largely the same today: predicting and understanding individual dierences in behavior. Students of adult personality development face the additional challenge of understanding how the dierences that distinguish one person from another may change systematically over time. Although considerable progress has been made, the bulk of empirical ndings generated simply show that prevalent assumptions about adult personality development in the twentieth century were wrong. For example, people do not appear to pass normatively through a xed series of stages; and along broadband 11294

Personality De elopment in Childhood

Caspi A, Herbener E S 1990 Continuity and change: Assortative marriage and the consistency of personality in adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 2508 Costa P T Jr., McCrae R R 1990 Personality in Adulthood. Guilford Press, New York Gatz M, Pederson N, Plomin R, Nesselroade J 1992 Importance of shared genes and shared environments for symptoms of depression in older adults. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 101: 7018 Gross J, Carstensen L L, Pasupathi M, Tsai J, Gotestam $ Skorpen C, Hsu A 1997 Emotion and aging: Experience, expression and control. Psychology and Aging 12: 5909 Izard C, Ackerman B P 1998 Emotions and self-concept across the life span. In: Schaie K W, Lawton M P (eds.) Annual Re iew of Gerontology and Geriatrics: Focus on Emotion and Adult De elopment. Springer, New York, Vol. 17, pp. 126 John O 1990 The big-ve factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and questionnaires. In: Pervin L A (ed.) Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. Guilford Press, New York, pp. 66100 Labouvie-Vief G, DeVoe M, Bulka D 1989 Speaking about feelings: Conceptions of emotion across the life span. Psychology and Aging 4: 42537 Levinson D 1978 The Seasons of a Mans Life. Knopf, New York McCrae R R, Costa P T Jr., de Lima M P, Simoes A, Ostendorf F, Angleitner A, Marusic I, Bratko D, Caprara G V, Barbaranelli C, Chae J-H, Piedmont R L 1999 Age dierences in personality across the adult life-span. De elopmental Psychology 35: 46677 Rothbart M, Derryberry D 1981 Development of individual dierences in temperament. In: Lamb M E, Brown A L (eds.) Ad ances in De elopmental Psychology Vol. 1, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 3786 Ry C 1995 Psychological well-being in adult life. Current Directions in Psychological Science 4: 99104 Staudinger U M 1999 Older and wiser? Integrating results from a psychological approach to the study of wisdom. International Journal of Beha ioral De elopment 23: 6414 Staudinger U M, Marsiske M, Baltes P B 1995 Resilience and reserve capacity in later adulthood: Potentials and limits of development across the life span. In: Cicchetti D, Cohen D (eds.) De elopmental Psychopathology. Vol. 2: Risk, Disorder, and Adaptation. Wiley, New York, pp. 80147 Vaillant G E 1977 Adaptation to Life 1st edn. Little, Brown, Boston

1. Personality De elopment as the Organization of Indi idual Dierences

First, perhaps the most basic question is what is personality? Common personality characteristics can be shared by groups of peoplesay, women, Russians, three-year-old boysbut usually we think of personality in terms of dening aspects of individual persons. In modern theory, personality is concerned with the organization of each persons unique conguration of individual dierences. When personality is dened this way, rather than one dierence at a time (e.g., introversion), it is possible to recognize that over time conict within a person may occur due to competing and sometimes incompatible needs (see Personality Structure). The self-organization of the diverse elements that live under a common skin is motivated by the need to resolve intrapersonal conicts and to adapt, or adjust, to the world beyond the individual. For example, we would expect an intelligent, introverted child to make compromises in the service of social adjustment dierent from those made by a similar child who is intelligent and extraverted. Personality is concerned with the accommodations and compromises each individual must make among the competing demands of these dierences. The adjustment processes occur over time, and involve genetics, maturation, and learning. In this light, personality development in childhood can be seen as one segment in a life-long process that leads to the formation of a stable adult personality structure (see Personality De elopment in Adulthood ). Common but untested assumptions are that processes of personality development are more dynamic in childhood than in adulthood, and that personality structure is more uid and open to change in the former than in the latter. Personality development does not necessarily stop after childhood, but that period is regarded as a time of special sensitivity for the formation of the broad structure. Second, we need to recognize how the denition of personality is typically translated into research. There are historical traditions and precedents in the personality development literature that inuence the way professionals engage in research in the area. For example, the personality literature does not usually regard individual dierences in ability in general, and intelligence in particular, as part of its domain, despite the illustration given in the preceding paragraph and the obvious importance of intelligence to adaptation. Similarly, dierences in attachment are not well integrated into the rest of the personality development literature, despite the importance of attachment processes for adaptation. For another (but related) example, readers will sometimes encounter a distinction between personality development and emotional development. Some early writers used the term emotional development to focus on attachment and the psychodynamic approach to personality devel11295

L. L. Carstensen Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Personality Development in Childhood

To understand personality development in childhood, we rst dene personality, and how it is structured. Then we discuss how the denition is typically translated into research, noting some curious omissions and quirks in the literature. Next, we consider the raw materials of personality and how they are changed over time. Once this is completed, we discuss outcomes of research on personality development in children.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7