PSYC 635 Week 5 DB Forum 5 Example

Discussion Board Forum 5: Thread and Two Replies

PSYC 635 Adult Psychology, Discussion Board Forum 5 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the textbook and the journal article are real and described from their published sources; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 635.

Thread

At a reunion, Daniel's college friends told him he had become a different person: calmer, more reliable and less impulsive than at twenty. Daniel insists he has not changed at all. Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields (2018) describe the trait approach to personality, built on the five-factor model, which long held that traits are largely settled by about age thirty. The chapter also presents developmental and narrative views in which adults keep revising who they are, so the textbook itself leaves the question open.

Roberts et al. (2006) tested that view with a meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples that followed the same people over time. Across those samples, average scores for social dominance, conscientiousness and emotional stability climbed through young adulthood, most steeply between 20 and 40, while agreeableness and conscientiousness kept edging upward into middle and later life. Openness and social vitality climbed in the teenage years and dropped off in old age. Most striking, many traits changed significantly after age thirty, and some changed after fifty. Because the samples followed the same individuals, the pattern cannot be blamed on differences between generations, a weakness of studies that simply compare age groups.

So both Daniel and his friends may be right. He may still rank about where he did among his peers, which is why he feels unchanged, while his traits, like those of most adults, have moved in the direction of maturity. Personality looks less like plaster and more like a slow river. Have you noticed changes in yourself that others saw before you did?

Reply to Sofia

Sofia, you wrote that personality must be stable because the same people stay the most outgoing in your family. That is rank-order stability, and it is well supported, but it does not rule out change. Roberts et al. (2006) examined mean-level change, which asks whether a whole group's average rises or falls. Both can be true at once: if everyone becomes more conscientious by roughly the same amount, each person keeps their place while the average shifts. Your outgoing cousin may still be the most social at every holiday dinner, even if all of you are calmer and more dependable than you were at twenty. Measuring only one kind of stability would miss half the story, which is why longitudinal researchers usually report both.

Reply to Isaiah

Isaiah, you asked why change clusters between twenty and forty. One explanation is the timing of adult social roles. Those years usually bring a first full-time job, marriage and children, each of which rewards dependability and emotional control. Chapter 10 of Cavanaugh and Blanchard-Fields (2018) describes how committed relationships shape daily life, and Roberts and his colleagues have argued that investing in such roles pushes traits toward maturity. On this view, Daniel did not simply age; his job and his family asked him to become more reliable, and over a decade he did. That would also explain why adults who delay these roles may change on a later schedule. I wonder whether the curve shifts in cultures where marriage and full-time work arrive earlier or later.

References

Cavanaugh, J. C., & Blanchard-Fields, F. (2018). Adult development and aging (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1