Personality development is the relatively enduring pattern of the thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors that distinguish individuals from one another.[1] The dominant view in the field of
personality psychology today holds that personality emerges early and continues to change in
meaningful ways throughout the lifespan.[2]
Adult personality traits are believed to have a basis in infant temperament, meaning that
individual differences in disposition and behavior appear early in life, possibly even before
language or conscious self-representation develop.[3] The Five Factor Model of personality has
been found to map onto dimensions of childhood temperament,[4] suggesting that individual
differences in levels of the “big five” personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to
experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) are present from young ages.
Influencing factors
Personality traits demonstrate moderate levels of continuity, smaller but still significant
normative or mean-level changes, and individual differences in change, often late into the life
course. This pattern is influenced by genetic, environmental, transactional, and stochastic factors.
Genetics
Twin and adoption studies have demonstrated that the heritability of personality traits ranges
from .3-.6, with a mean of .5. Heritability of .5 means that 50% of variation in observable
personality traits is attributable to genetic influences. But a given genotype will lead to a certain
phenotype only under the right environmental circumstances. In other words, the heritability of a
trait may change depending on an individual’s environment and/or life events. An example of the
way environment can moderate the expression of a gene is the finding by Heath, Eaves, and
Martin (1998) that marriage was a protective factor against depression in genetically identical
twins, such that the heritability of depression was as low as 29% in a married twin and as high as
51% in an unmarried twin. Ultimately, emerging evidence suggests that genetic and
environmental influences on personality differ depending on other circumstances in a person’s
life.
Environmental
With the effects of genetic similarity removed, children from the same family often appear no
more alike than randomly selected strangers; yet identical twins raised apart are nearly as similar
in personality as identical twins raised together. What these findings suggest is that shared family
environment has virtually no effect on personality development, and that similarity between
relatives is almost entirely due to shared genetics. Although the shared environment (including
features like the personality, parenting styles, and beliefs of parents; socioeconomic status;
neighborhood; nutrition; schools attended; number of books in the home; etc.) may have a lasting
impact at the extremes of parenting practice, such as outright abuse, most personality researchers
have concluded that the majority of “average expectable environments” do not have an effect on
personality development.
The weakness of shared environmental effects in shaping personality came as a surprise to many
psychologists, and spurred research into nonshared environment, or the environmental influences
that make siblings different from one another instead of similar. Non shared environmental
effects encompass the variability in behavioral outcomes that is not explained by genetic and
family environmental influences. The non shared environment may include differential treatment
by parents, individually distinct reactions to the shared family environment, peer influences, and
experiences that occur outside the family, as well as test error in measurement. In adults,
nonshared environment also encompasses the unique roles and environments experienced after
leaving the family of origin. Further effects of environment in adulthood are demonstrated by
findings that different work, marital, and family experiences are associated with personality
change,[22] and by the impact of major positive and negative life events on personality.
Gene-environment interactions
Van Gestel and Van Broeckhoven (2003) write, “Almost by definition, complex traits originate
from interplay between (multiple) genetic factors and environment.” Interactions between
genetic predisposition and the environment are a major factor in personality development. The
corresponsive principle of personality development states that “life experiences may accentuate
and reinforce the personality characteristics that were partially responsible for the particular
environmental elicitations in the first place.” This principle summarizes how gene-environment
interactions (also called person-situation transactions) maintain and reinforce the continuity of
personality throughout the lifespan. Three main types of gene-environment interactions are
active (the process by which individuals with certain genotypes select and create environments
that facilitate the expression of those genotypes), passive (the process by which genetic parents
provide both the genes and the early environmental influences that contribute to the development
of a characteristic in their children), and reactive (the process by which non-family individuals
respond to the behavior produced by a genotype in characteristic ways)