Week 14 Post 1

While reading chapter 22, I found the section titled "Personality Throughout Adulthood" to be very interesting. I have never learned about personality theories before but after reading this section, I have developed an interest in this subject. Although genes, parental practices, culture, and adult circumstances all contribute to personality, genes is probably the most influential. Since genes do no t change over the life span, scientists confirm substantial coherence in personality. There are five clusters of personality traits called the big five which generally remain stable throughout adult life. The five clusters are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. They correlate with career choices, health habits, education, marriage, divorce, and intelligence. In adulthood, people choose their ecological niche which is their particular social concept. The ecological niche may explain why ages thirty to fifty are marked by more stability of personality than are other periods of life. Before age thirty, many people make various life changes while afterwards, they make fewer changes. Adult traits are not immutable. If individuals are surrounded by people who behave in a certain way for a long period of time, they may begin to act similar to those people and lose some of the qualities that they do have. In addition, new events bring out old personality patterns. A massive study found that agreeableness and conscientiousness increased while openness, extroversion, and neuroticism decreased. Many researchers who study personality find that people tend to adapt their traits to the culture in which they live, expressing them differently.