Personality Reconsidered:

A New Agenda for Aging Research

 Personality in adulthood is often seen as stable

 This conception made it difficult to approach personality in adulthood from

developmental and dynamic perspective

 The Six Foci of Personality

o Grounded in developmental systems theory: emphasis on plasticity,

multidirectionality and organizing properties of a person

o Level 1: TRAITS focus 1

 Account for broad consistencies in behavior across situations

 Research suggests that changes from adulthood to late adulthood are

more negative (e.g., less extraversion) than changes from early
adulthood to adulthood

 By what mechanisms do traits change throughout life?

 Historical events

 Life events

 How do traits shape person-context interactions?

 Parallel process: STATES focus 2

 Transient, short-term, within-person changes

 Lability as the defining quality (changing)

 When does a trait structure influence state process?

o Level 2: PACs (personal action constructs) focus 3

 Goals, developmental tasks, motivations

 ‘doing’ side of personality

 Forward-looking features of personality

 Vary in level of abstraction and temporal frame

  Growth and development are possible in this domain of personality
even in late adulthood

 Contextualized in time, place, and social role

 Less broad than traits and more contingent

 Parallel process: SELF-REGULATORY focus 4

 Self-efficacy and outcome expectancy

 Domain specific (e.g., work- or family-domain)

 Allow for the sense of continuity in self at the global level

 People need to recalibrate their goals in life in order to maintain

satisfaction

 How does one go from tenacious goal pursuit to flexible goal

adjustment without a sense of failure?

o Level 3: LIFE STORY focus 5

 Person’s narrative understanding of the self

 Selective reconstruction of the past and imagining the future to provide

meaning

 Provide lives with a sense of meaning and purpose

 Internalized and continuously evolving throughout lifetime

 Grounded in culture and continuous history  affected by

sociohistorical events

 Structure of a life story can be evaluated on: coherence, linguistic

complexity, sequencing, cultural adaptability, etc.

 Parallel process: SELF-NARRATION focus 6

 E.g., remembering, reminiscence, storytelling

 Remembering is shaped by current situations and anticipated

events

 Conversational recounting: two people talking about a shared

experience

 Older adults show discriminative facility in storytelling (?)

  Parents tell stories about themselves with different themes,
depending on the gender of the child (communal for girls,
autonomous for boys)

Possible research questions: