Abstract
Repeated experiences and activities drive personality development. Leisure activities are among the daily routines that may elicit personality change. Yet despite the important role they play in daily life, little is known about their prospective effects on personality traits and vice versa. The objective of this study was to examine the extent to which within-person changes in leisure activities lead to prospective changes in personality traits, and whether changes in personality elicit prospective changes in leisure activities. We applied random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM) to four waves of 13-year longitudinal data (2005−2017) from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the sample as a whole (N = 55,790) and for three specific age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults). We examined between-person associations and within-person auto-regressive effects, correlated change and cross-lagged effects for Big Five personality traits (i.e., openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) with self-reported frequency of leisure activities (i.e., physical activities, socializing, volunteering, political activity, artistic and musical activity, going out) and overall participation in leisure activities. At the between-person level, leisure activities and overall participation were most strongly associated with openness to experience. At the within-person level, we found reciprocal effects of extraversion only with overall participation in leisure activities and socializing. We found unidirectional within-person cross-lagged effects between leisure activities and personality traits and vice versa. Some effects were age-group-specific only. These findings suggest that leisure activities that are associated with certain traits at the between-person level are not necessarily those that trigger change in the respective personality trait. We discuss our findings based on the TESSERA framework for personality development. We conclude that the specificity of an experience or behavior and its corresponding trait is essential for personality development and should be subjected to further research.
Highlights
Personality has very concrete implications for many life domains such as health, mortality, relationship success, educational and occupational attainment, income, and job satisfaction
Standard deviations, minimums, and maximums of all study variables across waves in Table 1 and by age groups in Supplement 1 (S1)
The strongest correlation between leisure activities was observed between physical activities and going-out activities (r = .40 at t1)
Summary
Personality has very concrete implications for many life domains such as health, mortality, relationship success, educational and occupational attainment, income, and job satisfaction (for an overview, see Soto, 2019). 2017, for an overview, see Specht et al, 2014), we hypothesized a gradually unfolding effect of leisure activities on personality and vice versa. We assumed that changes in participation in leisure activities may be a source of individual differences in personality development across the lifespan. We investigated transactions between overall participation in leisure activities and six specific leisure activities with changes in the Big Five personality traits (John & Srivastava, 1999) over time in adulthood. For this purpose, we used data from 55,790 individuals who participated in the annual SOEP study over a period of 13 years
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