Brent W Roberts

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Psychology

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...

The disruptions to community functioning caused by the COVID‐19 pandemic spurred individuals to action. This empirical study investigated the social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skill antecedents to college students' volunteering during the COVID‐19 pandemic (N = 248, Mage = 20.6). We assessed eight SEB skills at the onset of a volunteering pro...

The disruptions to community functioning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic spurred individuals to action. This empirical study investigated the social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skill antecedents to college students’ volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic (N =248, Mage = 20.6). We assessed eight SEB skills at the onset of a volunteering prog...

Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills comprise a broad set of abilities that are essential for building and maintaining relationships, regulating emotions, selecting and pursuing goals, or exploring novel stimuli. Toward an improved SEB skill assessment, Soto and colleagues recently introduced the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills I...

The present research addresses three key questions about social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills. First, how do SEB skills relate with the Big Five traits and CASEL core competencies? Second, how do SEB skills relate with consequential outcomes in adolescence? Third, do SEB skills provide incremental validity beyond personality traits? Resul...

The present study was designed to test the CONscientiousness × Interest Compensation (CONIC) model in a longitudinal setting (four time points; N = 3,880 students). For this purpose, we first examined the power of conscientiousness (measured with student and parent reports) and interest in predicting perceived academic effort in three school subjec...

Why does conscientiousness matter for education? How is conscientiousness conceptualized in the field of research on education? How do socio-emotional (SE) skills relate to conscientiousness? In an effort to help answer these questions, we review the current research on conscientiousness in education. Specifically, we examine (1) how conscientiousn...

Past research syntheses provided evidence that personality traits are both stable and changeable throughout the life span. However, early meta-analytic estimates were constrained by a relatively small universe of longitudinal studies, many of which tracked personality traits in small samples over moderate time periods using measures that were only...

The current study presented the first meta-analytic review on the associations between the Big Five personality traits and stress measured under different conceptualizations (stressor exposure, psychological and physiological stress responses) using a total of 1,575 effect sizes drawn from 298 samples. Overall, neuroticism was found to be positivel...

Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills comprise a broad set of inter- and intrapersonal abilities that are essential for building and maintaining relationships, regulating one's emotions, selecting and pursuing goals, or exploring new learning opportunities. Toward an improved assessment of SEB skills for educational, clinicial, and other p...

The data presented in this article— originally reported by Soto and colleagues [1]— assess social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills, indexed by the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI), across seven independent samples (N = 6,309). Four of the datasets (N = 5000) were collected using an online survey housed on Personalit...

The present research addresses three key questions about social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills. First, how do SEB skills relate with the Big Five traits and Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) core competencies? Second, how do SEB skills relate with consequential outcomes in adolescence? Third, do SEB skills...

Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests the existence of a general perceived stress factor overarching different life domains. The present study investigated the general perceived stress relative to domain-specific perceived stress as predictors of 26 diverse health outcomes, including mental and physical health, health behaviors, cognitive fun...

The goal of this research was to explore the relationships between four parenting dimensions (academic involvement, structure, cultural stimulation, and goals) and child personality development. Many theories, such as social learning, attachment theory, and the psychological resources principle assume that parenting practices influence child person...

Personality is not the most popular subfield of psychology. But, in one way or another, personality psychologists have played an outsized role in the ongoing “credibility revolution” in psychology. Not only have individual personality psychologists taken on visible roles in the movement, but our field’s practices and norms have now become models fo...

Objectives Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests the existence of a general perceived stress factor overarching different life domains. The present study investigated the general perceived stress relative to domain-specific perceived stress as predictors of 26 diverse health outcomes, including mental and physical health, health behaviors, co...

Personality traits continue to change throughout the lifespan. However, we still know little about when, why, and how personality traits change. In this paper, we review the current state of scientific evidence regarding the nature, sources, and processes of personality trait stability and change. We revisit past disputes over the relative importan...

The association between personality traits and motivational units, such as life goals, has been a long-standing interest of personality scientists. However, little research has investigated the longitudinal associations between traits and life goals beyond young adulthood. In the present study ( N = 251), we examined the rank-order stability of, an...

With a recent surge of research on narcissism, narcissism questionnaires are increasingly being translated and applied in various countries. The measurement invariance of an instrument across countries is a precondition for being able to compare scores across countries. We investigated the cross-cultural measurement invariance of three narcissism q...

The importance of personality for predicting life outcomes in the domains of love, work, and health is well established, as is evidence that personality traits, while relatively stable, can change. However, little is known about the sources and processes that drive changes in personality traits and how such changes might impact important life outco...

To date, there have been no long-term longitudinal studies of continuity and change in narcissism. This study investigated rank-order consistency and mean-level changes in overall narcissism and 3 of its facets (leadership, vanity, and entitlement) over a 23-year period spanning young adulthood (Mage = 18, N = 486) to midlife (Mage = 41, N = 237)....

The construct of fame in self-determination theory is very similar to the construct of social status in Anderson, Hildreth, and Howland’s (2015) status-as-fundamental-motive perspective. Both fame and social status are characterized by admiration and (admiring) respect by other people. Yet, while desiring fame is believed to distract or interfere w...

Much research has examined the interplay of depression and self-esteem in an effort to determine whether depression causes self-esteem (scar model), or vice versa (vulnerability model). In the current longitudinal study (N = 2,318), we tested whether neuroticism served as a confounding variable that accounted for the association of depression and s...

Behavior genetic findings figure in debates ranging from urgent public policy matters to perennial questions about the nature of human agency. Despite a common set of methodological tools, behavior genetic studies approach scientific questions with potentially divergent goals. Some studies may be interested in identifying a complete model of how in...

Academic effort is a key construct in research on motivational variables such as interest and in research on conscientiousness, one of the Big Five domains of human personality. Surprisingly, the two lines of research have rarely been brought together. In this chapter, we describe the differences and similarities in the theoretical foundation of th...

This chapter reviews five empirically supported principles of personality development: cumulative continuity (i.e., increasing trait stability across development), maturity (i.e., persons grow more socially adapted across development), social investment (i.e., commitment to socially conventional roles promotes maturity), corresponsiveness (i.e., pe...

Personality pathology—which is characterized by a pervasive, maladaptive, and inflexible pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—has long been defined as a set of categories that are distinct from each other a “normal” personality. Research over the past three decades has challenged that assumed separation and instead suggested that abnormal p...

According to the social-investment principle, entering new environments is associated with new social roles that influence people's behaviors. In this study, we examined whether young adults' personality development is differentially related to their choice of either an academic or a vocational pathway (i.e., entering an academic-track school or be...

Profile approaches to operationalizing person-organization (P-O) fit as the within-person correlation between an individual’s ideal organization characteristics and their actual organization characteristics regularly find strong associations between P-O fit and an individual’s work attitudes. However, profile correlation indices and other overall i...

We examined life-course effects of attending selective schools using a longitudinal study of U.S. high school students begun in 1960 (Ns ranging from 1,952 to 377,015). The effects, measured 11 and 50 years after the initial assessment, differed significantly across the two indicators of school selectivity that were used. School average socioeconom...

Objective: In the present research, we examined the effect of getting a new teacher on consistency in students' personality measures, including trait and social cognitive constructs. Method: To test the effect of this kind of situational transition, we analyzed two large longitudinal samples (N = 5,628; N = 2,458) with quasi-experimental study d...

How much do people’s personalities change or remain stable from high school to retirement? To address these questions, we used a large U.S. sample ( N = 1,795) that assessed people’s personality traits in adolescence and 50 years later. We also used 2 independent samples, 1 cross-sectional and 1 short-term longitudinal ( N = 3,934 and N = 38, respe...

How much do people’s personalities change or remain stable from high-school to retirement? To address these questions, we used a large US sample (N = 1,795) that assessed people’s personality traits in adolescence and 50 years later. We also used two independent samples, one cross-sectional and one short-term longitudinal (N = 3,934 and N = 38, res...

Objective: Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP) has demonstrated efficacy in alleviating substance use, stress, and craving but how MBRP works for marginalized young adults has not been investigated. The current study used a novel rolling group format for MBRP as an additional intervention for young adults in residential treatment. We tested...

Across 2 studies and 4 samples (Ns = 8,332, 2,136, 4,963, and 753, respectively), we tested whether the relation between conscientiousness and variables associated with important aspects of individuals’ lives were curvilinear such that being high on conscientiousness was manifestly negative. Across multiple outcomes including measures of health, we...

In this study, we investigated the role of student characteristics and behaviors in a longitudinal study over a 50-year timespan (using a large U.S. representative sample of high school students). We addressed the question of whether behaviors in school have any long-lasting effects for one`s later life. Specifically, we investigated the role of be...

As part of the resurgence of interest in personality development, we wrote several theoretical pieces outlining the Neo-Socioanalytic Model of Personality Development. In this chapter, we clarify why we developed this framework and how it differs from other personality frameworks. We also discuss how well components of the framework, such as the pr...

The present study examined the genetic and environmental etiology underlying the Big Five personality traits and perceived stress, concurrently and longitudinally. In study 1, we used the twin sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health IV) data. The results indicated that about 70% of the association betwe...

We investigated the development of narcissistic admiration (i.e., the assertive or extraverted dimension of narcissism; Back et al., 2013) and Machiavellianism (Mach) in early adulthood. Specifically, we examined (a) mean-level changes in narcissistic admiration and Mach during early adulthood and (b) how studying economics and experiencing any of...

To date, no study has investigated the relation of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) with the developmental identification of the dimensions of emerging adulthood (IDEA; e.g., identity development, experimentation). Participants (N = 832) were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (version: ‘2014 - 08- 15'). Basic associations between ACEs and...

Vocational interests are important aspects of personality that reflect individual differences in motives, goals, and personal strivings. It is therefore plausible that these characteristics have an impact on individuals’ lives not only in terms of vocational outcomes, but also beyond the vocational domain. Yet the effects of vocational interests on...

Heterogeneity of household financial outcomes emerges from various individual and environmental factors, including personality, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic status (SES), among others. Using a genetically informative data set, we decompose the variation in financial management behavior into genetic, shared environmental and non-shared envir...

Research has shown that sustained homework effort enhances academic performance and that students’ conscientiousness is a powerful predictor of students’ homework effort. But does homework—as homework proponents claim—in turn also influence the development of conscientiousness over time? In the present study, we examined whether students’ homework...

Are recent cohorts of college students more narcissistic than their predecessors? To address debates about the so-called “narcissism epidemic,” we used data from three cohorts of students (N1990s = 1,166; N2000s = 33,647; N2010s = 25,412) to test whether narcissism levels (overall and specific facets) have increased across generations. We also test...

Personality traits and social cognitive variables are central constructs in psychological research. It is often assumed that personality traits are less changeable than social cognitive variables, and thus interventions usually tend to focus on the latter. However, these assumptions about the mutability of personality and social cognitive variables...

A vast literature has found longitudinal effects of early life stress on substance use and self-regulatory processes. These associations may vary by period-specific development among youth involved in the juvenile justice system. The current study used an accelerated longitudinal design and auto-regressive latent trajectory with structure residuals...

Conscientiousness, the propensity to be organized, responsible, self-controlled, industrious, and rule-following, is related to numerous important outcomes including many forms of psychopathology. Given the increasing awareness of the importance of conscientiousness, it is becoming common to want to understand how to foster it. In this paper we fir...

Studies have shown that cognitive ability is correlated with parental socioeconomic status (pSES). However, little is known about the correlation between personality and pSES. To better understand this relation, we conducted a meta-analysis of the correlations between pSES and personality traits and temperament dimensions. The correlations were gen...

Economists estimate that 47% of US jobs will be computerized in the future. This paper tests the prospective role of a comprehensive range personality factors on selection into more (or less) computerizable jobs. We used a US representative high school sample (N = 346 660) and a longitudinal design. At baseline, we measured social background, intel...

Recent research has shown that personality traits change as a result of clinical therapy, although evidence for this effect is derived from efficacy studies that reflect relatively controlled experimental designs. Little is known about how therapy in real world contexts affects change in personality. In two longitudinal studies (N‘s = 1,270 and 5,2...

The current meta-analysis investigated the extent to which personality traits changed as a result of intervention, with the primary focus on clinical interventions. We identified 207 studies that had tracked changes in measures of personality traits during interventions, including true experiments and prepost change designs. Interventions were asso...

It is well established that a substantial variation in personality traits can be attributed to genetic factors. However, this should not undermine the role of the environment in shaping an individual’s personality. We review research done on five important environmental predictors of personality trait development. These factors are parental socioec...

Supplemental material: Stoll, G., Rieger, S., Lüdtke, O., Nagengast, B., Trautwein, U., & Roberts, B.W. (2017). Vocational interests assessed at the end of high school predict life outcomes assessed 10 years later over and above IQ and Big Five personality traits. [Supplemental material integral]. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1...

For decades, researchers have noted the importance of understanding how individual differences influence health and well-being. Toward this end, studies have consistently supported the role of personality variables, such as traits, motives, and goals, as informative for predicting current and future health outcomes. While initial work along this fr...

Many treatments for eating disorders (ED) have demonstrated success. However, not all patients respond the same to interventions nor achieve full recovery, and obvious candidates like ED diagnosis and symptoms have generally failed to explain this variability. The current study investigated the predictive utility of personality for outcome in ED tr...

We examined how self-reported and teacher-rated student characteristics in primary school were associated with adult self-reported health. A representative sample of Luxembourgish students was assessed in 1968 (Mage = 11.9, SD = 0.6) and 2008 (N = 745; Mage = 51.8, SD = 0.6). Self-reported sense of inferiority and pessimism in childhood were negati...

Most previous research has focused on the relationships between specific personality traits and specific facets of mental health. However, in reality most of the Big Five are associated at non-trivial levels with mental health. To account for this broad correlation, we proposed the ‘barometer hypothesis’, positing that behind both ratings of mental...

The present study attempted to closely replicate Roberts, Smith, Jackson, and Edmonds (2009) who found, in part, a compensatory effect such that individuals with spouses higher in conscientiousness reported higher self-rated health and fewer physical limitations in the Health and Retirement Study. Using similarly structured data from the National S...

The current article presents a theoretical framework of the short- and long-term processes underlying personality development throughout adulthood. The newly developed TESSERA framework posits that long-term personality development occurs due to repeated short-term, situational processes. These short-term processes can be generalized as recursive s...

The last two decades have seen a rapid acceleration of research on personality development focusing on the periods of late adolescence and young adulthood. The findings paint a picture of surprising quiescence in adolescence followed by a period of tremendous growth and change in personality traits in young adulthood. The patterns and potential rea...

Background: People who are perceived as good looking or as having a pleasant personality enjoy many advantages, including higher educational attainment. This study examines (1) whether associations between physical/personality attractiveness and educational attainment vary by parental socioeconomic resources and (2) whether parental socioeconomic...

Persönlichkeitsentwicklung, Schülerverhalten und Schulerfolg - Selbst- und Lehrereinschätzung als mögliche Prädiktoren.

Objective: The present study investigated Big Five personality trait development in the transition to early adolescence (from the fifth to eighth grade). Method: Personality traits were assessed in 2,761 (47% female) students over a 3-year period of time. Youths' self-reports and parent ratings were used to test for cross-informant agreement. Ac...

The prevalent scoring practice for the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) ignores the forced-choice nature of the items. The aim of this study was to investigate whether findings based on NPI scores reported in previous research can be confirmed when the forced-choice nature of the NPI’s original response format is appropriately modeled, and...

What do personality traits predict best? A longitudinal study of the link between personality traits and key life outcomes.

There is a “greying” of the population of persons with multiple sclerosis (MS) that coincides with both increased life expectancy and the shifting demographic landscape worldwide. This growing cohort of older adults with MS undergoes normal age-related declines in physical and psychologic functioning that may be compounded by the disease and its pr...

The personality trait of conscientiousness is related to a great number of important life outcomes. To better understand why the influence of conscientiousness is so pervasive, the current article provides a broad overview of the trait. First, the lower-order facet structure of conscientiousness is described, including a description of some of the...

Birth order is one of the most pervasive human experiences, which is universally thought to determine how intelligent, nice, responsible, sociable, emotionally stable, and open to new experiences we are (1). The debate over the effects of birth order on personality has spawned continuous interest for more than 100 y, both from the general public an...

Clear associations have emerged between conscientiousness and health behaviours, such that higher levels of conscientiousness are predictive of beneficial health behaviours. This study investigated the conscientiousness-fruit and vegetable consumption relationship and whether behavioural intention mediated this relationship. A large sample of adult...

The present study was a close replication of Hudson, Roberts, and Lodi-Smith (2012). Participants' personality traits and social investment in work were measured twice over three years. Latent change models were used to examine the associations among the intercepts (levels) and slopes (changes) for these variables. Results revealed that levels of a...

In the present study we tested the inoculation hypothesis of the effect of conscientiousness on health. We tested the inoculation hypothesis using both cross-sectional and longitudinal methods. We used a representative sample of US citizens (N=. 2136 for Wave 1 and N=. 1170 for Wave 2), which completed the Chernyshenko Conscientiousness Scales, Per...

Drawing on a 2-wave longitudinal sample spanning 40 years from childhood (age 12) to middle adulthood (age 52), the present study was designed to examine how student characteristics and behaviors in late childhood (assessed in Wave 1 in 1968) predict career success in adulthood (assessed in Wave 2 in 2008). We examined the influence of parental soc...

We tested birth order associations with personality traits and intelligence using Project Talent, a representative sample (N = 377,000) of U.S. high school students. Using a between-family design and several background factors (i.e., age, sex, sibship size, parental socio-economic status, and family structure), we were able to control for potential...