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Brent W. Roberts |
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Research Interests
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Research Interests
Research Overview Highlights of Recent Findings
Establish the overall pattern of consistency and change in personality traits across the life course. We have published 3
major meta-analyses on personality trait continuity and change. In Roberts
and DelVecchio (2000) we showed that personality traits demonstrate moderate
levels of consistency over time and increase in continuity with age. In the
second meta-analysis we examined continuity in interests and found that
interests were more stable than personality traits at a younger age (Low,
Yoon, Roberts, & Rounds, 2005). In our most recent meta-analysis,
we showed that people become more socially dominant, conscientious, and
emotionally stable through midlife. People show curvilinear patterns of
change on social vitality and openness--increasing in adolescence and
decreasing in old age. Across personality traits, most development
occurs in young adulthood (20 to 40) and not earlier in adolescence (Roberts,
Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). We are also pursuing primary research
examining personality development in longitudinal studies at various ages
across different constructs (traits, goals, PE fit). Finally, in the two Relevant Papers and Publications Caspi, A. &
Roberts, B. W. (1999). Personality change and continuity across the life
course. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John, Handbook of Personality Theory
and Research (Vol. 2, pp. 300 - 326). Low, D. K., S., Yoon, M., Roberts, B. W., & Rounds. J. (2005). The stability of interests from early adolescence to middle adulthood: A quantitative review of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 713-737. Roberts, B. W., Caspi, A, & Moffitt, T. (2001). The kids are alright: Growth and stability in personality development from adolescence to adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 670-683. Roberts, B. W., Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. (2003). Work Experiences and Personality Development in Young Adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 582-593. Roberts, B. W., &
DelVecchio, W. F. (2000). The rank-order consistency of personality from
childhood to old age: A quantitative review of longitudinal studies. Psychological
Bulletin, 126, 3-25. Roberts, B.W., Helson, R., & Klohnen, E. C. (2002). Personality development and growth in women across 30 years: Three perspectives. Journal of Personality, 70, 79-102. Roberts, B. W., Walton, K., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Personality changes in adulthood: Reply to Costa & McCrae (2006). Psychological Bulletin, 132, 29-32. Test hypotheses concerning why personality traits are consistent and why they change. Much of our research
addressing why personality traits develop has focused on the effects of life
experiences like challenging work, satisfying relationships, and health
behaviors on change in personality traits (Roberts & Bogg, 2004; Roberts,
Bogg, Walton, & Caspi, 2006; Roberts, Caspi, & Moffitt, 2003; Roberts
& Robins, 2004). In the next series of studies we are pursuing a second,
more complex set of research questions. Our current research is largely
dedicated to two ongoing longitudinal studies in the State of In a follow up to the paper relating major life goals to personality traits (Roberts & Robins, 2000), we recently tested how changes in major life goals relate to personality trait change (Roberts, O’Donnell, & Robins, 2004). We found that investing in goals related to social investment (work, marriage, and community goals) was related to increases in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. This finding implies that direct experiences are not necessary for personality trait development to occur. Rather, a person’s preconceptions about their future identity may trigger changes in personality traits in anticipation of entering that future set of roles. In Roberts and Robins (2004) we showed that person-environment fit predicted both continuity and change in personality traits over time. Specifically, people who fit with their college environment showed fewer individual differences in personality trait change over time. These same individuals, when they did change, tended to become more like the environment—less agreeable, and more emotionally stable. We are also following up this study with a second longitudinal study of Harvard men in which we have replicated many of the same effects (Harms, Roberts, & Winter, 2006). We are pursing a line of studies investigating the nature of role expectations and whether they may be one of the mechanisms facilitating personality trait change in adulthood (Wood & Roberts, 2006). Role expectations are the expectations for how people should behave in age-graded roles. Initial findings show that people’s expectations for different age groups, in terms of the Big Five, conform almost perfectly to the actual patterns of change we find in longitudinal research. This implies that people hold relatively universal opinions about how people should behave at different ages across the life course that correlate quite strongly to the actual changes that are demonstrated. Relevant Papers and Publications Harms, P. D., Roberts, B. W., & Winter, D. (2006). Becoming the Harvard man: Person-environment fit, personality development, and academic success. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 851-865. Roberts, B. W., & Bogg, T. (2004). A 30-year longitudinal study of the relationships between conscientiousness-related traits, and the family structure and health-behavior factors that affect health. Journal of Personality, 72, 325-354. Roberts, B. W., Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. (2003). Work Experiences and Personality Development in Young Adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 582-593. Roberts, B. W., & Robins, R. W. (2000). Broad dispositions, broad aspirations: The intersection of the Big Five dimensions and major life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1284-1296. Roberts, B. W., & Robins, R. W. (2004). A longitudinal study of person-environment fit and personality development. Journal of Personality, 72, 89-110. Roberts, B. W., O’Donnell, & Robins, R. W. (2004). Goal and Personality Development. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 541-550. Wood, D., & Roberts, B. W. (2006). The effect of age and role information on expectations for Big Five personality traits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 1482-1496. The one consistent assessment issue that we have pursued is the utility of assessing personality within role contexts, otherwise known as role identities (e.g. Roberts & Donahue, 1994). We have several projects on this topic. The first project is a short-term longitudinal study of consistency and change in role identities over a six-month period (Wood & Roberts, 2006). In this study we found that role identities were more strongly related to role-specific outcomes than general personality traits and that role identities mediated the relationship between role-specific outcomes and personality traits. The second study by Tim Bogg, Dustin Wood, and Michelle Webb (in press) tested a hierarchical model of personality that includes health-role identities and motivational constructs in an attempt to test the mediating mechanisms that might explain the relationship between conscientiousness and health factors. Currently, I am editing a special issue on contextualized identities (Roberts, in press) that will include many of the most significant researchers in this area. The Big Five trait taxonomy is relatively new and the traits underlying the larger categories are not well specified. The trait of conscientiousness is especially interesting as it is relevant to many important outcomes in work and health. In a third assessment program of research we have identified the facets of conscientiousness using personality inventories (Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark, & Goldberg, 2005) and trait adjectives (Roberts, Walton, Bogg, Chernyshenko, & Stark, 2004). Across these two studies we find five replicable facets (Industriousness, Orderliness, Impulse control, Reliability, and Conventionality) and four unique facets (Virtue, Decisiveness, Punctuality, and Formalness). In our current research, we are attempting to rebuild conscientiousness from the bottom up by identifying the characteristic behaviors, feelings, and beliefs that go along with the trait domain. We have developed an act frequency measure of conscientiousness that taps the behavioral domain and we are currently developing the emotional and affect related markers of conscientiousness. The role of conscientiousness in the health process has not been a primary focus of health researchers. We are currently pursuing a series of studies that establish the relationship between conscientiousness and the social environmental factors (divorce, number of children, social organizations) and health-behaviors (smoking, drinking, violence, exercise, diet) that affect health. The first study in this line of research (Roberts & Bogg, 2004) showed that responsibility, a facet of conscientiousness, predicted having more children and more stable marital patterns (both factors that contribute to healthy behavior patterns) and consuming less tobacco and marijuana (both health risk factors). The second study in this line of research is a meta-analysis of the existing literature linking conscientiousness-related traits to the primary behavioral risks that affect health outcomes (Bogg & Roberts, 2004). In this study, we found that conscientiousness-related traits predict all of the major behavioral factors related to premature mortality (physical activity, good diet, tobacco consumption, alcohol consumption, risky driving, risky sexual activities, violence, and suicide). In our future research in this domain, we will investigate whether these relationships are affected by age and method. Relevant Papers and Publications Bogg, T. & Roberts, B. W. (2004). Conscientiousness and health behaviors: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 887-919. Roberts, B. W. (in press). Contextualizing personality psychology. Journal of Personality. Roberts, B. W., & Bogg, T. (2004). A 30-year longitudinal study of the relationships between conscientiousness-related traits, and the family structure and health-behavior factors that affect health. Journal of Personality, 72, 325-354. Roberts, B. W., Bogg, T., Walton, K., Chernyshenko, O., & Stark, S. (2004). A lexical approach to identifying the lower-order structure of conscientiousness. Journal of Research in Personality, 38, 164-178. Roberts, B. W., Chernyshenko, O., Stark, S. & Goldberg, L. (2005). The structure of conscientiousness: An empirical investigation based on seven major personality questionnaires. Personnel Psychology, 58, 103-139. Walton, K., & Roberts, B. W. (2004). On the Relationship between Substance Use and Personality Traits: Abstainers are not Maladjusted. Journal of Research in Personality, 38, 515-535. Wood, D., & Roberts, B. W. (2006). Cross-sectional and longitudinal tests of the personality and role identity structural model (PRISM). Journal of Personality, 74, 779- 809.
Develop a general theory of personality development in adulthood We have found that existing theories of adult and personality development fail to capture or account for the body of empirical data that we and others have been developing in the last decade. Traditional theories of adult development have focused on the social structures of life, such as careers, marriages, families, and their changing meaning as people age (Erikson, 1968; Levinson 1978). New theories of adult development have focused on cognitive factors and the motivational strategies used to cope with the inevitable decline in functioning that comes with age (Baltes, 1997; Heckhausen, 1997). Personality theories, like the Five Factor model, have set aside personality traits from the remaining aspects of personality as specialized units that do not develop through experience, but only through genetically determined means (Costa & McCrae, 1999). Thus, there are no theories that capture the empirical reality represented by longitudinal research. Given the lack of an overarching theory that can capture the patterns of continuity and change found in existing longitudinal studies, we have begun to sketch out a theory of personality development in adulthood. Initially, in collaboration with Avshalom Caspi, we identified the primary mechanisms of continuity and change in personality (Caspi & Roberts, 1999), such as selection, reactance, and evocation. Subsequently, we have elaborated on this initial work using the idea that identity development provides the primary fulcrum around which mechanisms of continuity and change can be organized (Roberts & Caspi, 2003). We have also reviewed the general patterns of continuity and change, coming to the conclusion that people become more mature in terms of personality traits across adulthood (Roberts, Robins, Caspi, & Trzesniewski, 2003). We have also our perspective to bear on the sticky issues of person-situation interactions and the person-situation debates of old and new (Roberts & Caspi, 2001; Roberts & Pomerantz, 2004). Finally, we have recently expanded the scope of our theory, spelling out a more general theory of personality and general principles of personality development in adulthood (Roberts, 2005, 2006; Roberts & Wood, 2006). These general principles are described below: Principles of Personality Development Plasticity Principle: Personality traits are open systems that can be influenced by the environment at any age. Cumulative Continuity Principle: Personality traits increase in rank-order consistency throughout the lifespan. Maturity Principle: People become more socially dominant, agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable with age. Corresponsive Principle: The effect of life experience on personality development is to deepen the characteristics that lead people to those experiences in the first place. Identity Development Principle: With age, the process of developing, committing to, and maintaining an identity leads to greater personality consistency. Role Continuity Principle: Consistent roles rather than consistent environments are the cause of continuity in personality over time. Social Investment Principle: Investing in social institutions, such as age-graded social roles, outside of the self is one of the driving mechanisms of personality development in general and greater maturity in particular Relevant Papers and Publications Hogan, R., & Roberts, B. W. (2004). A socioanalytic model of maturity. Journal of Career Assessment, 12, 207-217. Roberts, B. W. (2005). Blessings, banes, and possibilities in the study of childhood personality. Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 51, 367-378. Roberts, B. W. (2006). Personality development and organizational behavior (Chapter 1, pp 1-41). In B. M. Staw (Ed.). Research on Organizational Behavior. Elsevier Science/JAI Press. Roberts, B. W., & Caspi, A. (2001). Personality development and the person-situation debate: It’s déjà vu all over again. Psychological Inquiry, 12, 104-109. Roberts, B. W., &
Caspi, A. (2003). The cumulative continuity model of personality development:
Striking a balance between continuity and change in personality traits across
the life course. R. M. Staudinger & U. Lindenberger (Eds.), Understanding
Human Development: Lifespan Psychology in Exchange with Other Disciplines
(pp. 183-214). Roberts, B. W., & Pomerantz, E. M. (2004). On traits, situations, and their integration: A developmental perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 402-416. Roberts, B. W.,
Robins, R. W., Caspi, A., Trzesniewski. K. (2003). Personality trait development in adulthood. In
J. Mortimer & M. Shanahan (Ed.). Handbook of the Life Course
(pp. 579-598). Roberts, B. W., & Wood, D. (2006). Personality
development in the context of the Neo-Socioanalytic Model of personality
(Chapter 2, pp. 11-39). In D. Mroczek & T. Little (Eds.), Handbook
of Personality Development.
If you have questions about any of these projects or any of the ideas above, please contact me: broberts AT cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu
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