Personality Change With Age

Personality Change With Age

Introduction

Personalities far from behaviorist viewpoints are not an exact science. Theorists agree that personalities usually are predictable. There is a portion of predictability that not consistent because of the freedom individuals possess. It is when the response to a situation is outside of what is typical that it becomes unpredictable. For example, a person who is generally calm and does not over-react is put into a traumatic situation such as becoming a victim to a violent crime. Parts of their personality may appear such as irate and angry, which is not consistent with their normal personality.

Personality Change Research

A new study at the University of California at Berkeley has shown that people change our character throughout life and that is not true that personality traits are genetic and which crystallize at age 30. The best time of life psychological coincides with the time to create a family. It was thought that people did not experience significant psychological changes after thirty years of age, but a new study has come to prove the contrary, the character evolves throughout adult life and even some completely change their way of being over time. The study was conducted by psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley and performed with 130,000 people aged between 21 and 60 years of age. The research focused on five characteristics of human psychology such as thoroughness, openness, extraversion, pleasant character and emotional stability.

The study found that these characteristics do not depend on elements such as mood states, evolve with age and not genetic, as hitherto believed modern psychology. The personality may even change completely over human life. Women are usually more unstable as they age, unlike men. The openness of mind decreases with age in both sexes. Generally, the twenty year olds are more thorough than their parents, while the best character is found in people who spend thirty years of age, when it coincides with the creation of a family for most adults. The research was conducted through a test considered to define the basic personality traits. In much of the test study was conducted over the Internet, although psychologists corroborated timely responses in the real world.

Situational Behavior

Sometimes situational behavior is also seen in social psychology because personality usually comes second to social norms. Under certain situations behaviors may override personality completely. A study at Yale University showed a passive person can be encouraged to perform violence because of the social direction of a powerful authoritative figure (Blass, n.d.). Stanley Milgram conducted this study with random individual participants. Milgram had the participants deliver shocks to another participant upon answering questions wrong (Blass, n.d.). It seems rationale people caved and delivered the shock under the negative social pressure.

Personality may be an excellent indication to what can happen. It is usually influenced by external threats, outside factors, and even emotional trauma that may have occurred in one's past. Understanding situational behavior is usually more than understanding traits and ...