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Journal ArticleDOI

Personality Development: Continuity and Change Over the Life Course

Dan P. McAdams, +1 more
- 01 Jan 2010 - 
- Vol. 61, Iss: 1, pp 517-542
TLDR
The review traces the development of traits, goals, and life stories from infancy through late adulthood and ends by considering their interplay at five developmental milestones: age 2, the transition to adolescence, emerging adulthood, midlife, and old age.
Abstract
The development of personality across the human life course may be observed from three different standpoints: the person as actor (behaving), agent (striving), and author (narrating). Evident even in infancy, broad differences in social action patterns foreshadow the long-term developmental elaboration of early temperament into adult dispositional traits. Research on personal strivings and other motivational constructs provides a second perspective on personality, one that becomes psychologically salient in childhood with the consolidation of an agentic self and the articulation of more-or-less stable goals. Layered over traits and goals, internalized life stories begin to emerge in adolescence and young adulthood, as the person authors a narrative identity to make meaning out of life. The review traces the development of traits, goals, and life stories from infancy through late adulthood and ends by considering their interplay at five developmental milestones: age 2, the transition to adolescence, emerging adulthood, midlife, and old age.

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Citations
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Personality and Coping

TL;DR: Relations of traits to specific coping responses reveal a more nuanced picture and recommendations are presented for ways future research can expand on the growing understanding of how personality and coping shape adjustment to stress.
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Life Design: A Paradigm for Career Intervention in the 21st Century

TL;DR: A new paradigm is implicit within the constructivist and narrative methods for career intervention that have emerged in the 21st century, and as mentioned in this paper makes that general pattern explicit by abstracting its key elements from the specific instances that substantiate the new conceptual model.
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Whole Trait Theory

TL;DR: Whole Trait Theory proposes that the explanatory side of traits consists of social-cognitive mechanisms that produce Big-5 states that are recognized as separate entities that are joined into whole traits.
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The Psychological Self as Actor, Agent, and Author.

TL;DR: An integrative theory that envisions the psychological self as a developing I–Me configuration of actor, agent, and author helps to synthesize a wide range of conceptions and findings on the self from social, personality, cognitive, cultural, and developmental psychology and from sociology and other social sciences.
Journal ArticleDOI

Living Into the Story: Agency and Coherence in a Longitudinal Study of Narrative Identity Development and Mental Health Over the Course of Psychotherapy

TL;DR: This is the first prospective, multiwave longitudinal investigation to examine short-term personality change via an emphasis on narrative identity as it relates to mental health, and found robust trends of individual differences in narrative changes as they related to improvements in mental health.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.

TL;DR: Theories of the self from both psychology and anthropology are integrated to define in detail the difference between a construal of self as independent and a construpal of the Self as interdependent as discussed by the authors, and these divergent construals should have specific consequences for cognition, emotion, and motivation.
Book

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TL;DR: Erikson's Childhood and Society as discussed by the authors deals with the relationship between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation.
Journal ArticleDOI

Emerging adulthood. A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties.

TL;DR: Evidence is provided to support the idea that emerging adulthood is a distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations that exists only in cultures that allow young people a prolonged period of independent role exploration during the late teens and twenties.

A Theory of Development From the Late Teens Through the Twenties

TL;DR: In this paper, emerging adulthood is proposed as a new conception of development for the period from the late teens through the twenties, with a focus on ages 18-25, and evidence is provided to support the idea that emerging adults are a distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations.
Journal ArticleDOI

Influence of Life Stress on Depression: Moderation by a Polymorphism in the 5-HTT Gene

TL;DR: Evidence of a gene-by-environment interaction is provided, in which an individual's response to environmental insults is moderated by his or her genetic makeup.
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When does personality develop?

Personality development begins in infancy and continues throughout the human life course, with significant changes and elaborations occurring in late adolescence and young adulthood.