A post by Sointu Leikas
Personality development across age and major life events are fascinating topics. Do people become less stress-prone when they age? Does parenthood make you more assertive? Does winning the lottery make you more prone to feel positive emotions? Such questions have piqued the interest of both scientists and the public.
Longitudinal studies have given us a pretty good idea of how major personality traits change as a function of age (e.g. Roberts & Mroczek, 2008) – for instance, on average, people tend to become more emotionally stable, conscientious, and socially dominant between adolescence and middle age. However, somewhat surprisingly, major life events seem to be largely unrelated to personality trait development in the long term. For instance, becoming a parent – arguable the most important life event for most parents – does not seem to have any reliable, lasting effects on major personality traits (van Scheppingen et al., 2016; Specht et al., 2011).
However, short-term changes that occur close to a major life event may be interesting in their own right. For instance, short-term changes in personality occurring around childbirth may inform us about early parenting experiences and the ways they may affect new parents’ self-image.
In our study in EJP (Leikas et al., 2022), we looked into such short-term personality trait changes in women around the birth of their child. We had access to the Finnish longitudinal PREDO study cohort. Pregnant women (N = 2,445) completed questionnaires measuring Neuroticism and Extraversion in early pregnancy and again 6 months after they had their child. We used full-length measures of these traits, so we were able to look into facet-level changes – changes in different aspects of the traits. We also looked into several moderators of change, but as their effects were weak and scattered, the focus here will be on the simple changes.
The affective facets of Neuroticism – tendencies toward Anxiety, Depression, Vulnerability, and Hostility all decreased from pregnancy to postpartum. However, the remaining two Neuroticism facets, Self-Consciousness and Impulsivity, increased. Extraversion levels remained largely similar from pregnancy to post-partum, only the facet Excitability decreased.
Thus, during early postpartum, mothers tended to see themselves as less prone to feeling most negative emotions than before. However, they were more likely to feel self-conscious and impulsive than before. By contrast, mothers’ perceptions of their Extraversion – tendencies toward assertiveness, sociability, and positive emotions – did not change much.
These results were somewhat surprising. Intuitively, one might expect both the tendency to experience positive and negative affect to increase, given that the newborn phase is an emotional time in life and brings new types of situations into parents’ lives. However, this is not how mothers saw themselves; they saw themselves as equally prone to positive emotions, but less prone to most negative emotions than during pregnancy. Increases in Impulsivity and Self-Consciousness, by contrast, make sense in terms of what we know of postpartum time. Sleep deprivation, common among new parents, makes it more difficult to override impulsive desires, such as eating unhealthy snacks. Furthermore, new contextual demands place mothers into situations that may feel awkward such as having difficulties soothing one’s baby in public, leading to more frequent experiences of feeling self-conscious.
Apart from uncovering some aspects of mothers’ early parenting experiences’ effects on personality, our study may be relevant to personality trait research in general due to the focus on facets. That is, most longitudinal personality studies which have generally shown that life events are not related to personality change have focused on broad personality traits. This is understandable given that longitudinal studies are resource-consuming and a limited number of items can be fitted in. However, this has produced a situation where the majority of longitudinal personality trait studies are conducted at the factor level with brief measures. Changes in different facets have not been investigated much. Because our study used full-length measures of Neuroticism and Extraversion, we were able to look into change at the level of smaller traits using the facet scores. Underlining the importance of this, our results on Neuroticism showed that different facets of Neuroticism may change in different directions.
In line with the considerations above, we cautiously suggest that one reason for the lack of life-event-related change in Neuroticism observed in the previous literature could be that different facets (or aspects) change in different directions, cancelling out the change at the broad trait level.
With the current design, it was not possible to explore the psychological mechanism behind these changes (or lack of them), as no measures of potential mechanisms were included. It is possible that mothers, on average, simply experienced fewer negative emotions during postpartum than during pregnancy. Another possibility is that they felt they were better at coping with negative emotions than before. As noted, new mothers’ personality traits did not change with regard to tendencies related to Extraversion. Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean they did not experience more positive emotions – just that they felt their tendency to experience positive emotions had remained the same.
In sum, having a child is among the most profound life experiences. It is a very complex and ever-changing experience that may be difficult to put into words. In our study, short-term changes in the facets of well-established personality trait measures were used as a window to this experience. Contrasting studies that find that parenthood is not related to personality change in the long term, our results suggested changes in Neuroticism from during pregnancy to postpartum. In particular, during early postpartum time mothers see themselves as more prone to give in to their impulses and to feel self-conscious, and less prone to negative affectivity.
References
Leikas, S., Lahti-Pulkkinen, M., & Räikkönen, K. (2022). Facet-level changes in mothers’ neuroticism and extraversion from early pregnancy to 6 months post-partum. European Journal of Personality, 08902070221098908.
Roberts, B. W., & Mroczek, D. (2008). Personality trait change in adulthood. Current directions in psychological science, 17(1), 31-35.
Specht, J., Egloff, B., Schmukle, S. C. (2011). Stability and change of personality across the life course: The impact of age and major life events on mean-level and rank-order stability of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 862–882. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024950
van Scheppingen, M. A., Jackson, J. J., Specht, J., Hutteman, R., Denissen, J. J., Bleidorn, W. (2016). Personality trait development during the transition to parenthood: A test of social investment theory. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(5), 452–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616630032