Personality and Aging

This chapter focuses on the stability-change issue in personality, as well as the organization of personality variables and their utility in predicting mortality among older adults. Scholars are using personality variables to predict important outcomes in older adulthood, particularly mortality. With respect to the former, intriguing new findings have permitted a deeper and more complex understanding of personality development in older adulthood, which is especially true with respect to stability and change in personality traits over long-term periods. The Hooker-McAdams model is important for the field of personality psychology in general because it provides a broader framework than that of the big five, which is too strongly attached to structure approaches, particularly the trait approach. The effects of change in personality and health may work both ways. A change in personality may also have a protective effect on health. People who increase in conscientiousness or decrease in neuroticism may enjoy a concomitant increase in physical health or, more likely, stability in his or her good health trajectory.