A post by Peter Haehner, Wiebke Bleidorn and Christopher Hopwood
Our personality traits are relevant for virtually all aspects of our life including our work satisfaction, our relationship success, and health (Bleidorn et al., 2019). Although our personality is relatively stable, personality traits can and do change across the entire life span (Bleidorn et al., 2022). On average, people become, for example, more emotionally stable when they age. However, individuals differ in their personality trajectories. That is, while on average people may become more emotionally stable over time, some individuals do not change in their emotional stability, and others may even decrease in their emotional stability over time. Why doesn’t everyone change in the same way?
In our study, we wanted to better understand whether the way people respond to negative life events, such as job loss, a relationship breakup, or the death of a loved one, helps explain why people change in different ways. Why were we interested in these negative events? Because going through these kinds of events usually require people to cope with new life situations, and thus studying them could provide insights about associated personality changes. We already know from previous studies that life events can induce personality changes for some people, and that people have different reactions to the same life event (Bleidorn et al., 2018). We were interested in the factors that explain these different reactions. Drawing on prior research, we hypothesized that one possible factor contributing to the effects of negative events could be how individuals perceive such events (Haehner et al., 2022). Furthermore, personal strengths or impairments as well as other alterations in one’s life circumstances that may arise following a negative experience could explain why people react differently to such negative events (Asselmann et al., 2021; Luhmann et al., 2014).
We recruited approximately 1,000 adult German participants who had recently experienced a negative life event such as losing a job or a relationship breakup. We then assessed their personality traits five times over six months to examine personality changes. Furthermore, we assessed the following variables to explain possible differences in their personality changes:
- Variables related to the experienced negative life event: people’s perception of the event (e.g., how impactful was the relationship breakup perceived) and objective characteristics of the event (e.g., the relationship duration).
- Person variables: people’s overall ability to deal with their emotions, relationships, and strivings (i.e., personality functioning).
- Environmental variables: changes in the environment that can occur in the months after experiencing important life events such as a relocation, financial changes, or changes in one’s social relationships such as friendships.
In line with previous studies, our results showed that people’s personalities did not change in the same ways following the negative life events. However, surprisingly, the variables we examined generally explained less than 2% of individual differences in personality changes. Exploratory analyses revealed a few specific effects that might be considered in future research. For example, perceiving the experienced negative life events as more social status threatening was associated with a decrease in participants’ agreeableness. But overall, despite our rigorous design, we were not able to identify variables that can substantially explain why people differ in their personality changes after negative life events.
So, what should you take away from our study? To understand why and how people differ in their personality changes after negative life events is not easy. Building on our findings, future research should…
- … be conducted with very large samples (i.e., several 10,000 participants) to be able to detect small effects
- … examine an even larger set of event-related, personal, and environmental variables (e.g., social support, genetic factors)
- … assess personality traits more frequently and over a longer time period to better understand the time course of personality changes after negative events.
References
Asselmann, E., Klimstra, T. A., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2021). Unraveling resilience: Personality predicts exposure and reaction to stressful life events. Personality Science, 2, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6055
Bleidorn, W., Hill, P. L., Back, M. D., Denissen, J. J. A., Hennecke, M., Hopwood, C. J., Jokela, M., Kandler, C., Lucas, R. E., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Wagner, J., Wrzus, C., Zimmermann, J., & Roberts, B. (2019). The policy relevance of personality traits. The American Psychologist, 74(9), 1056–1067. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000503
Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, C. J., & Lucas, R. E. (2018). Life events and personality trait change. Journal of Personality, 86(1), 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12286
Bleidorn, W., Schwaba, T., Zheng, A., Hopwood, C. J., Sosa, S. S., Roberts, B. W., & Briley, D. A. (2022). Personality stability and change: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000365
Haehner, P., Rakhshani, A., Fassbender, I., Lucas, R. E., Donnellan, M. B., & Luhmann, M. (2022). Perception of major life events and personality trait change. European Journal of Personality. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070221107973
Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Specht, J., Kandler, C., & Lucas, R. E. (2014). Studying changes in life circumstances and personality: It’s about time. European Journal of Personality, 28(3), 256–266. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.1951