Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Personality characteristics have been found to affect the circumstances and environments and hence the life transitions individuals select into

From Personality and social relationships: As thick as thieves by Marcus Mund, Bertus F Jeronimus, and Franz J Neyer. The abstract:
This chapter shows that personality traits and social relationships are deeply entwined in a bidirectional way: Individuals select relationships partly based on their personality traits but at the same time develop across the lifespan partly in response to changes in their social environment. Life transitions are an important catalyst of changes in personality-relationship transactions. We argue that personality traits and social relationships are so closely tied that, in our view, the link between personality and health can only be understood against the backdrop of individuals’ relationships.
Elaborating a bit, from the main text,
Personality characteristics have been found to affect the circumstances and environments and hence the life transitions individuals select into... Saliently, interpersonal events that are most often perceived as negative occur up to three times more frequent among individuals from the highest quartile of neuroticism compared to the lowest quartile. Conscientiousness predicts the occurrence of fewer negative events. Positive experiences, in contrast, are predicted by extraversion, but not by neuroticism. Openness appears to be a double-edged sword in this regard since it has been found to predict the occurrence of both more positive and negative events... In such studies, it has been found that personality traits are predictive of going abroad for an academic year, living arrangements, entering a romantic relationship , and relationship breakup, among many other things... Life transitions that are experienced as positive by most individuals (e.g., entering a romantic relationship, finding a job) are followed by small but persistent decreases in neuroticism as well as small increases in extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness ... Life transitions that are perceived as negative by most individuals (e.g., unemployment, divorce), in contrast, have been found to be followed by increases in neuroticism as well as decreases in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness... Studies on parenthood—a rather normative life transition—yielded contradictory results. In some studies, parenthood did not influence personality development, while in others, it predicted development in a direction that is typically considered socially less desirable (e.g., increases in neuroticism or decreases in conscientiousness... Events that are perceived as positive by most individuals typically have stronger short-term effects on personality traits and occur more frequently in general. The effects of negative life events, in contrast, have been found to persist much longer.
If I am reading this correctly, exogenous personal system shocks are mediated via the Big Five personality traits (Openness to experience, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and extroversion), but mediated experiences in turn modestly affect in a cumulative fashion, one's five personality traits.

I.e. the human system is under constant evolution depending on the originating conditions (the big five personality traits), the nature of the exogenous shocks, and the cumulative affect of those shocks over time.

Pertinent to my Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, Motivation, Capabilities, and Personality model as predictors of life outcomes.

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