Lewis R. Goldberg’s research while affiliated with Oregon Research Institute and other places

Personality traits are defined as patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that endure across time. Yet personality changes across the lifespan, and there is less stability in childhood and old age than in adulthood. These two contrasting views, personality stability versus personality change, are reconciled by two forces. As people mature, their personality traits tend to change in a more socially desirable or normative direction. In addition to this developmental trend, people also remain somewhat stable in terms of their standing on a trait relative to others. The influences that produce stability and change include genetics and experience working together in complex ways that are far from being understood.

John M. (Jack) Digman was an influential American personality psychologist who achieved fame in the 1970s through the 1990s with his analyses of child personality structure, thereby helping to develop the present scientific consensus on a five‐factor model, as well as a two‐factor higher‐level structure. In addition, he penned some widely‐cited historical accounts on personality structure. Finally, the rich body of data he obtained about elementary school students from their teachers later led to their location and recruitment as middle‐aged adults, and thus to our present knowledge of personality‐trait stability over a 40‐year period and to the many links between child personality traits and adult health behaviors and outcomes.

Personality traits are defined as patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that endure across time. Yet personality changes across the lifespan, and there is less stability in childhood and old age than in adulthood. These two contrasting views, personality stability versus personality change, are reconciled by two forces. As people mature, their personality traits tend to change in a more socially desirable or normative direction. In addition to this developmental trend, people also remain somewhat stable in terms of their standing on a trait relative to others. The influences that produce stability and change include genetics and experience working together in complex ways that are far from being understood.

John M. (Jack) Digman was an influential American personality psychologist who achieved fame in the 1970s through the 1990s with his analyses of child personality structure, thereby helping to develop the present scientific consensus on a five‐factor model, as well as a two‐factor higher‐level structure. In addition, he penned some widely‐cited historical accounts on personality structure. Finally, the rich body of data he obtained about elementary school students from their teachers later led to their location and recruitment as middle‐aged adults, and thus to our present knowledge of personality‐trait stability over a 40‐year period and to the many links between child personality traits and adult health behaviors and outcomes.

There is longstanding interest in the generalizability of personality across diverse cultures. To investigate the generalizability of personality concepts, we examined the English translations of individual‐difference entries from the dictionaries of 12 small‐scale societies previously studied for ubiquity of individual differences plus the dictionary of an additional society not previously studied in this manner. These 13 societies are highly diverse in geographical location, culture, and language family; their languages developed in isolation from modern‐world languages. The goal of our exploratory research was to discover ubiquitous personality concepts in these 13 independent societies and their languages, providing a window into personality concepts across a broad range of cultures and languages. This study used clusters of empirically related terms (e.g. brave, courageous, and daring), based on a taxonomy of English‐language personality concepts that consisted of 100 personality‐trait clusters. English‐language definitions of dictionary entries from the 13 languages were matched to the meanings of the synonym clusters. The cluster–classification method uncovered nine ubiquitous personality concepts, plus six that were present in at least 12 of the 13 languages. The nine ubiquitous personality concepts include some not previously identified and suggest a core of possibly universal concepts. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology

Two studies were conducted to investigate redundancy between the character strengths found in the VIA model of character and familiar personality facets. Study 1 used a community sample (N = 606) that completed a measure of character strengths, four personality inventories, and 17 criterion measures. The second study used Mechanical Turk workers (N = 498) who completed measures of the HEXACO and VIA models and 111 criterion variables. Analyses were conducted using both observed scores and true score estimates, evaluating both predictive and conceptual overlap. Eight of 24 VIA scales proved to be largely redundant with one HEXACO personality facet, but only one VIA scale (Appreciation of Beauty) was largely redundant with Five Factor facets. All strength scales except Spirituality overlapped substantially with at least one personality facet. The results suggest the VIA Classification variables are strongly related to commonly measured personality facets, but the two models are not redundant.

The traditional focus of work on personality and behavior has tended toward “major outcomes” such as health or antisocial behavior, or small sets of behaviors observable over short periods in laboratories or in convenience samples. In a community sample, we examined a wide set (400) of mundane, incidental or “every day” behavioral acts, the frequencies of which were reported over the past year. Using an exploratory methodology similar to genomic approaches (relying on the False Discovery Rate) revealed 26 prototypical acts for Intellect, 24 acts for Extraversion, 13 for Emotional Stability, nine for Conscientiousness, and six for Agreeableness. Many links were consistent with general intuition—for instance, low Conscientiousness with work and procrastination. Some of the most robust associations, however, were for acts too specific for a priori hypothesis. For instance, Extraversion was strongly associated with telling dirty jokes, Intellect with “loung[ing] around [the] house without clothes on”, and Agreeableness with singing in the shower. Frequency categories for these acts changed with markedly non-linearity across Big Five Z-scores. Findings may help ground trait scores in emblematic acts, and enrich understanding of mundane or common behavioral signatures of the Big Five.

This study examined the factor structure and predictive validity of the commonly used multidimensional Health Behavior Checklist. A three-factor structure was found in two community samples that included men and women. The new 16-item Good Health Practices scale and the original Wellness Maintenance scale were the only Health Behavior Checklist scales to be related to cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors. While the other Health Behavior Checklist scales require further validation, the Good Health Practices scale could be used where more objective or longer measures are not feasible.

Objective: This study investigated whether lifetime experience of trauma is related to personality through instrumental and reactive trait processes, and whether lifetime trauma is a mechanism underlying the association between childhood conscientiousness and objectively assessed adult physical health. Method: Participants (N = 831) were 442 women and 389 men from the Hawaii longitudinal study of personality and health. Teacher assessments of personality were obtained when the participants were in elementary school. Self-reported adult personality assessments, lifetime histories of trauma experience, and objectively assessed physiological dysregulation were obtained between ages 45-55. Results: Women tended to report more high-betrayal trauma than men, whereas men reported more low-betrayal trauma than women. Women who were judged by their teachers to be less agreeable and less conscientious in childhood reported more lifetime trauma, suggesting instrumental trait processes. For both genders, neuroticism and openness/intellect/imagination in adulthood, but not in childhood, were associated with lifetime trauma, suggesting reactive trait processes. For both genders, trauma experience was correlated with dysregulation and with Body Mass Index (BMI). The indirect paths from childhood conscientiousness to adult dysregulation and BMI through total teen and adult trauma were significant for women, but not for men (indirect effect for women's dysregulation = -.025, p = .040, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -.048, -.001; indirect effect for women's BMI = -.037, p = .009, 95% CI = -.067, -.008). Conclusion: Teen and adult trauma experience appears to be a hitherto unidentified mechanism in women underlying the association between conscientiousness and health. (PsycINFO Database Record

Self-regulatory processes influencing health outcomes may have their origins in childhood personality traits. The Big Five approach to personality was used here to investigate the associations between childhood traits, trait-related regulatory processes and changes in health across middle age. Participants (N = 1176) were members of the Hawaii longitudinal study of personality and health. Teacher assessments of the participants' traits when they were in elementary school were related to trajectories of self-rated health measured on 6 occasions over 14 years in middle age. Five trajectories of self-rated health were identified by latent class growth analysis: Stable Excellent, Stable Very Good, Good, Decreasing and Poor. Childhood Conscientiousness was the only childhood trait to predict membership in the Decreasing class vs. the combined healthy classes (Stable Excellent, Stable Very Good and Good), even after controlling for adult Conscientiousness and the other adult Big Five traits. The Decreasing class had poorer objectively assessed clinical health measured on one occasion in middle age, was less well-educated, and had a history of more lifespan health-damaging behaviors compared to the combined healthy classes. These findings suggest that higher levels of childhood Conscientiousness (i.e. greater self-discipline and goal-directedness) may prevent subsequent health decline decades later through self-regulatory processes involving the acquisition of lifelong healthful behavior patterns and higher educational attainment.