Personality Development

In the field of personality psychology, there appears to be an emerging consensus that the structure of late-adolescent and adult personality can be comprehensively described by five broad factors, which are known as the "Big Five." These five factors are typically characterized as: Extroversion/Surgency, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism/Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience/Intellect. Using language-based instruments cross-culturally, the Big Five has been successfully identified in American English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Such findings support the idea that the Big Five is a universally applicable taxonomy of late-adolescent and adult personality.

In similar studies of infant and childhood individual difference dimensions, usually using parental or teacher ratings of temperament, five to seven dimensions are normally identified. Five of the dimensions are particularly robust and have been labeled Activity Level, Negative Emotionality, Task Persistence, Adaptability/Agreeableness, and Inhibition. The two other dimensions are less certain and have been labeled Rhythmicity and Threshold. Developmentally, the process of change from these earlier infant and childhood dimensions to the Big Five dimensions of late adolescence and adulthood appears to involve multiple early dimensions being subsumed under single Big Five dimensions. In other words, during the course of development, the organizational structure of individual difference dimensions changes, with FIGURE 1 each of the Big Five dimensions being comprised of features from more than one of the earlier dimensions.

Figure 1 shows hypothesized relations between five of the individual difference dimensions of infancy and childhood and the different dimensions of the Big Five. The general relations outlined in Figure 1 are based on empirical evidence; more detailed research is required, however, before more specific conclusions can be drawn about the role of these early individual difference dimensions in the development of the Big Five. In Figure 1, the lines connecting specific dimensions of infancy and childhood to specific dimensions of the Big Five represent correlations between the earlier and later dimensions. The solid lines represent positive correlations, while the dashed lines represent negative correlations.

Apparent from Figure 1 should be the lack of one-to-one correspondence between early and later individual difference dimensions. Evidence suggests that this dimensional reorganization is more biologically determined than environmentally determined; meaning, as described earlier, that specific environmental conditions are not required for this reorganization to occur. Exactly how and when this dimensional reorganization takes place, however, is not understood. Future research will examine more closely the age-related changes that take place in the organization of individual difference dimensions.