PSYC 235 Week 6 Blog 2 Example

Blog 2: Entry and Response

PSYC 235 Psychology of Adulthood, Blog 2 (entry and one response)

Thread by [Student Name]

The blog prompt, the writer's family details and the classmate's entry are composites standing in for the course's own blog; the textbook, Scripture and published study are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 235.

Blog Entry

My father likes to say that people do not change after thirty. He says it about politicians, coworkers and, occasionally, about me, usually when I promise to start getting up earlier. This week's chapter made me wonder whether he is right.

Bjorklund (2015) distinguishes between two kinds of stability in personality. Rank-order stability asks whether people keep their position relative to others, so that the most outgoing person in a group of 30-year-olds is still among the most outgoing at 60. Mean-level change asks whether the average person becomes more or less of something with age, such as more agreeable or less anxious. A person can stay the same in the first sense while changing in the second.

A large meta-analysis tested both. Bleidorn et al. (2022) synthesized longitudinal studies published since 2005, covering 178,503 participants for rank-order stability and 242,542 for mean-level change. Stability increased through childhood and adolescence and reached a plateau in young adulthood, and, unlike earlier estimates, it showed little further increase after age 25. Average traits changed in the direction of greater maturity, though the total change across the lifespan was slightly smaller than earlier studies suggested. Emotional stability was the exception: it increased consistently and more substantially across the whole lifespan than researchers had previously found.

So my father is partly right. By thirty, his relative position among his friends was probably set. But the research suggests he has also become calmer, less reactive and more even-tempered, and my mother agrees. She says he used to slam doors when the car broke down, and now he just calls a mechanic and makes coffee. The study has limits; it describes averages, not any one person, and the authors themselves point to important gaps in what is known about personality development.

Romans 12:2 tells believers not to be conformed to this world but to let God reshape them as their thinking is made new (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). That call assumes change remains possible at any age, and the research on emotional stability gives me one small sign that it does.

Readers: have you seen someone you know become noticeably calmer or kinder with age?

Response to Jordan

Jordan, your story of your grandmother taking up painting and traveling alone after 75, when she had been cautious her whole life, is a wonderful counterexample to the idea that people stop changing. It also illustrates the distinction in our chapter. The meta-analysis we read about found that the strongest consistent change across adulthood was in emotional stability, while broader traits changed less on average (Bleidorn et al., 2022). Your grandmother's new openness may reflect individual change that averages hide, since a meta-analysis can show little average movement in openness while some people change a great deal, perhaps sparked by new freedom after widowhood. It could also reflect what the chapter calls the influence of new roles, since widowhood brought choices she had never had. Do you think the change came from her personality itself or from her new circumstances?

References

Bjorklund, B. R. (2015). The journey of adulthood (8th ed.). Pearson.

Bleidorn, W., Schwaba, T., Zheng, A., Hopwood, C. J., Sosa, S. S., Roberts, B. W., & Briley, D. A. (2022). Personality stability and change: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 148(7-8), 588-619. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000365

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)