Editorial: EJP special edition on personality change

Abstract

Personality development has become one of the most exciting fields in personality psychology. The last decade was dominated by a heavy debate between essentialists and transactionists concerning as to whether personality development unfolds by intrinsic maturation or whether it is triggered by extrinsic factors, or both. Building on the work by James (1890/1950), personality from the essentialist perspective was long regarded as ‘set like plaster’ latest by the age of 30 (McCrae & Costa, 1999). On the other hand, the transactional point of view is that personality not only remains its plasticity over the whole life span, but also that personality influences and is influenced by social experiences. Fortunately, the debate can be resolved by empirical research. We now have evidence from numerous studies showing that personality does not stop changing by any age, and that change can be understood best by taking into account such personality-environment transactions. Thus personality-environment transactions are more than just sayings, and can be empirically demonstrated (Fraley & Roberts, 2005). The articles of this special issue on personality change start in large part with the premise of a transactional perspective and, for different ages, consider how differential personality development may come about. The issue’s title ‘personality change’ seems provocative, because personality psychologists are used to think of personality development in terms of stability and consistency. And indeed, it is certainly now our established knowledge that personality development is characterized by moderate to high levels of rank-order stability, and small but still significant mean-level changes, depending on the period of time and the age in consideration. Yet there is also evidence that substantial individual differences exist in stability and change, and personality psychologists have almost recently begun to take a closer look at the antecedents and consequences of individual differences in change. The current special issue on personality change is devoted to this perspective. The contribution by Kati Heinonen, Katri Raikkonen, Michael Scheier, Anu-Katriina Pesonen, Pertti Keskivaara and Timo Strandberg focuses on how parental dispositional optimism–pessimism predicts children’s behavioural development from infancy to middle childhood, and vice versa. The authors show in an intriguing analysis, using dyadic data from both parents, that personality developments of parents and their children are at least partly intertwined and reciprocally related. Thus personality development appears as a social process. Helle Pullman, Liisa Raudsepp and Juri Allik studied a nationally representative longitudinal sample of Estonian adolescents. The authors contrast different kinds of personality stability such as mean-level, individual-level and rank-order stability. They European Journal of Personality Eur. J. Pers. 20: 419–420 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.610