Abstract
The present study examined how personality traits manifest in daily life of older adults and distinguished between the manifestations of experiences and behaviors. We used data from an ambulatory assessment study over 10 days with assessments of trait-related experiences and behaviors obtained from 136 older adults aged between 60 and 91 years (41.2% male; M = 70.45 years). Multilevel models revealed that on average, 61.2% of variance in trait-related experiences and 39.6% of variance in behaviors were due to consistent differences between persons. Older adults were rather variable and diverse in their trait manifestations, while they also showed relative stability in trait manifestations. Across older age, some age effects for trait manifestations were found. Moreover, within-person variation of experiences and behaviors showed, with one exception, joint fluctuations in daily life. The findings portray a nuanced picture of trait manifestations in older adulthood. The findings complement the literature on within-person variability in older adulthood and might encourage further studies from a within-person perspective to better understand how older adults navigate through daily life.
Highlights
Aging researchers have noted the importance of studying psychological aging processes in daily life of older adults
The present study offers a fine-grained perspective on how personality traits are expressed in daily life
By distinguishing between trait-related experiences and behaviors, results indicate that trait manifestations were characterized by both relative stability and variability in older age
Summary
Aging researchers have noted the importance of studying psychological aging processes in daily life of older adults. One line of research examined cognitive processes in naturalistic settings and found that greater variability in daily activities was related to greater variability in daily cognitive performance (Bielak et al 2019). Another line of research investigated daily stressors and found that higher stressor diversity was associated with better wellbeing across adulthood (Koffer et al 2016). Building some ground for future work, we aimed to investigate the basic characteristics and links of trait-related experiences and behaviors in a sample of adults aged between 60 and 91 years using data from an ambulatory assessment study.
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