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There is growing evidence that personality traits are affected by many genes, all of which have very small effects. As an alternative to the largely unsuccessful search for individual polymorphisms associated with personality traits, the authors identified large sets of potentially related single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and summed them to form molecular personality scales (MPSs) with from 4 to 2,497 SNPs. Scales were derived from two thirds of a large (N = 3,972) sample of individuals from Sardinia who completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa, Jr., & R. R. McCrae, 1992) and were assessed in a genomewide association scan. When MPSs were correlated with the phenotype in the remaining one third of the sample, very small but significant associations were found for 4 of the 5e personality factors when the longest scales were examined. These data suggest that MPSs for Neuroticism, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (but not Extraversion) contain genetic information that can be refined in future studies, and the procedures described here should be applicable to other quantitative traits. Keywords: genome-wide association study, personality assessment, founder effect, five-factor model, NEO-PI-R DOI: 10.1037/a0020964

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00634.x Byline: Robert R. McCrae (1), Antonio Terracciano (1), Filip De Fruyt (2), Marleen De Bolle (2), Michele J. Gelfand (3), Paul T. Costa Jr. (1) Abstract: ABSTRACT We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N=5,109) ages 12 to 17 in 24 cultures. Aggregate scores were generalizable across gender, age, and relationship groups and showed convergence with culture-level scores from previous studies of self-reports and observer ratings of adults, but they were unrelated to national character stereotypes. Trait profiles also showed cross-study agreement within most cultures, 8 of which had not previously been studied. Multidimensional scaling showed that Western and non-Western cultures clustered along a dimension related to Extraversion. A culture-level factor analysis replicated earlier findings of a broad Extraversion factor but generally resembled the factor structure found in individuals. Continued analysis of aggregate personality scores is warranted. Author Affiliation: (1)National Institute on Aging (2)Ghent University (3)University of Maryland Article note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert R. McCrae, 809 Evesham Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21212. E-mail: RRMcCrae@gmail.com.

We analyzed language use to examine age differences in people's representations of their own emotions as compared with those of others. Participants (N = 365, aged 18-85 years, M = 42.8, SD = 19.2) read hypothetical emotion-eliciting scenarios and described how they themselves and the social partners involved in the scenarios would feel. Compared with those of younger adults, older adults' descriptions involved a higher frequency of positive and a lower frequency of negative emotions. Older adults were also more likely to describe a co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions, but less likely to describe the simultaneous experience of multiple negative emotions. Age effects showed similar patterns for participants' descriptions of their own emotions as compared with those of others. We discuss the implications for theoretical accounts of emotional aging. Key Words: Age-related differences Emotional aging--emotional experience.

Rank-order consistency of personality traits increases from childhood to age 30. After that, different summaries of the literature predict a plateau at age 30, or at age 50, or a curvilinear peak in consistency at age 50. These predictions were evaluated at group and individual levels using longitudinal data from the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory for periods of up to 42 years. Consistency declined toward a nonzero asymptote with increasing time interval. Although some scales showed increasing stability after age 30, the rank-order consistencies of the major dimensions and most facets of the Five-Factor Model were unrelated to age. Ipsative stability, assessed with the California Adult Q-Set, also was unrelated to age. These data strengthen claims of predominant personality stability after age 30. Keywords: Five-Factor Model; personality development; long-term stability; individual differences; life span; older adults

We examined developmental trends in personality traits over a 42-year time period by using data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging (N = 2,359: individuals aged 17-98k collected from 1958 to 2002. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed cumulative mean-level changes averaging about 0.5 SD across adulthood. Scales related to extraversion showed distinct developmental patterns: General Activity declined from age 60 to 90; Restraint increased; Ascendance peaked around age 60; and Sociability declined slightly. Scales related to neuroticism showed curvilinear declines up to age 70 and increases thereafter. Scales related to agreeableness and openness changed little: Masculinity declined linearly. We found significant individual variability in change. Although intercepts differed, trajectories were similar for men and women. Attrition and death had no effect on slopes. This study highlights the use of lower order trails in providing a more nuanced picture of developmental change.

Depressive symptoms have been represented in the research and clinical literature in terms of both an episodic phenomenon and as enduring individual differences. We investigated depressive symptoms longitudinally in a sample of older adults. Participants were 737 individuals ([M.sub.Age] = 73 years initially, 39% women) in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging who provided biennial Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression data on up to five occasions over an 8-year period. We found both trait and slate-residual variability, with symptoms increasing longitudinally on all subscales and accounting for an approximately 1-point increase per decade. Trait-like variability accounted for at least two thirds of the reliable variance. Interindividual differences were consistent over time, but occasion-specific variability diminished across occasions.

Methodological arguments are usually invoked to explain variations in the structure of affect. Using self-rated affect from Italian samples (N = 600), we show that individual difference variables related to affective differentiation can moderate the observed structure. Indices of circumplexity (Browne, 1992) and congruence coefficients to the hypothesized target were used to quantify the observed structures. Results did not support the circumplex model as a universal structure. A circular structure with axes of activation and valence was approximated only among more affectively differentiated groups: students and respondents with high scores on Openness to Feelings and measures of negative emotionality. A different structure, with unipolar Positive Affect and Negative Affect factors, was observed among adults and respondents with low Openness to Feelings and negative emotionality. The observed structure of affect will depend in part on the nature of the sample studied.

The authors extended previous work on the hypothesis that borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be understood as a maladaptive variant of personality traits included within the 5-factor model (FFM) of personality. In each of 3 samples, an empirically derived prototypic FFM borderline profile was correlated with individuals' FFM profiles to yield a similarity score, an FFM borderline index. Results across all samples indicated that the FFM borderline index correlated as highly with existing borderline measures as they correlated with one another, and the FFM borderline index correlated as highly with measures of dysfunction, history of childhood abuse, and parental psychopathology as did traditional measures of BPD. Findings support the hypothesis that BPD is a maladaptive variant of FFM personality traits.

Three studies were conducted to assess mean level changes in personality traits during adolescence. Versions of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa, Jr., & R. R. McCrae, 1992a) were used to assess the 5 major personality factors. A 4-year longitudinal study of intellectually gifted students (N = 230) was supplemented by cross-sectional studies of nonselected American (N = 1,959) and Flemish (N = 789) adolescents. Personality factors were reasonably invariant across ages, although rank-order stability of individual differences was low. Neuroticism appeared to increase in gifts, and Openness to Experience increased in both boys and girls; mean levels of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness were stable. Results extend knowledge of the developmental curve of personality traits backward from adulthood and help bridge the gap with child temperament studies.

Temperaments are often regarded as biologically based psychological tendencies with intrinsic paths of development. It is argued that this definition applies to the personality traits of the five-factor model. Evidence for the endogenous nature of traits is summarized from studies of behavior genetics, parent-child relations, personality structure, animal personality, and the longitudinal stability of individual differences. New evidence for intrinsic maturation is offered from analyses of NEO Five-Factor Inventory scores for men and women age 14 and over in German, British, Spanish, Czech, and Turkish samples (N = 5,085). These data support strong conceptual links to child temperament despite modest empirical associations. The intrinsic maturation of personality is complemented by the culturally conditioned development of characteristic adaptations that express personality; interventions in human development are best addressed to these.

Life experiences for corresponding age cohorts in the United States (US) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have been dramatically different. If cohort effects account for cross-sectional age differences in mean levels of personality traits, different patterns of age differences should be seen in samples from the US and the PRC. The present study examined scores on scales from the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1987) in US (N = 348, age = 19-92 years) and PRC (N = 2,093, age = 18-67 years) samples. Very similar patterns of age correlations were seen. To compare results to other cross-cultural studies, CPI scales were interpreted in terms of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality; an FFM Age-Relatedness Index based on American data accurately predicted CPI age correlations not only in the US but also in the PRC sample. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that there are universal intrinsic maturational changes in personality.

Self-reports and spouse ratings of personality traits typically show less-than-perfect agreement, but powerful moderators of agreement have not yet been identified. In Study 1, 47 married couples completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory to describe themselves and their spouses. Extent of agreement was not consistently moderated by response sets; the age, intelligence, or education of the respondent; or the length or quality of the relationship. In Study 2 these couples were interviewed about reasons for substantial disagreements, and an audiotape was content-analyzed. Sixteen reasons were reliably coded, including idiosyncratic understanding of items, reference to different time frames or roles, and unavailability of covert experience to the spouse. Faking good, assumed similarity, and other variables prominent in the psychometric literature were relatively unimportant. Findings (1) suggest that attempts to improve the validity of self-reports and ratings may need to be refocused and (2) underscore the desirability of routinely obtaining multiple sources of information on personality.

Patterns of covariation among personality traits in English-speaking populations can be summarized by the five-factor model (FFM). To assess the cross-cultural generalizability of the FFM, data from studies using 6 translations of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, 1992) were compared with the American factor structure. German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese samples (N - 7,134) showed similar structures after varimax rotation of 5 factors. When targeted rotations were used, the American factor structure was closely reproduced, even at the level of secondary loadings. Because the samples studied represented highly diverse cultures with languages from 5 distinct language families, these data strongly suggest that personality trait structure is universal.

Despite the empirical robustness of the 5-factor model of personality, recent confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) of NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) data suggest they do not fit the hypothesized model. In a replication study of 229 adults, a series of CFAs showed that Revised NEO-PI scales are not simple-structured but do approximate the normative 5-factor structure. CFA goodness-of-fit indices, however, were not high. Comparability analyses showed that no more than 5 factors were replicable, which calls into question some assumptions underlying the use of CFA. An alternative method that uses targeted rotation was presented and illustrated with data from Chinese and Japanese versions of the Revised NEO-PI that clearly replicated the 5-factor structure.

The relationship between the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5), the NEO Personality Inventory and NEO Personality Inventory-Revised is compared using two sets of data drawn from a clinical sample of psychiatric outpatients and from a community-based nonclinical sample. The results of the comparative study show meaningful correlations between PSY-5 and NEO-PI/NEO-PI-R in both samples.

The Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP), a set of 21 scales measuring primary traits hypothesized to be definers of Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Psychoticism factors, was administered to 229 adults together with the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire - Revised (H. J. Eysenck & S. B. G. Eysenck, 1991) and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; P. T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, 1992b). Correlations of EPP scales with NEO-PI-R facet scales provided preliminary evidence supporting the convergent and discriminant validity of the EPP scales. However, varimax and targeted validimax factor analyses suggested that some EPP scales were misclassified and that EPP scales could better be understood in terms of the 5-factor model than the intended 3-factor model.

A study of 1,721 17-to-102-year-olds of both sexes revealed that aging is directly correlated to depletion in visual memory and verbal intelligence skills in the subjects. Deficiencies in cognitive skills start to creep in and accelerate rapidly in the 65 to 75 age period.

The five-factor model (FFM) of personality offers a structural organization of personality traits in terms of 5 broad factors. J. Block's (1995) critique of the FFM failed to recognize the utility of a trait taxonomy and the intent of research designed to test the 5-factor hypothesis. In a number of instances he omitted reference to empirical evidence that addresses concerns he raised; this evidence shows strong support for the FFM beyond the lexical and questionnaire traditions he reviews. Many of his suggestions for improving the quality of personality research are valuable, but are likely to be more fruitful when used in conjunction with established knowledge about the structure of personality traits: the FFM.

Personality disorders must be clearly defined and distinguished from normal personality, though personality disorders arise due to deviation in certain traits of normal personality. A five-factor model is useful in explaining the conceptual issues that associate normal and abnormal personality traits. Further research is essential to ascertain if ostensibly normal persons lack maladaptive personality traits.

Depressive symptoms indicate potential psychiatric disorders because they provide information on chronic vulnerability such as neuroticism. Data from a 16-year research on 6,913 adults with depressive symptoms provides psychiatric diagnoses. Higher levels of depressive symptoms lead to a higher risk of psychiatric disorders. These diagnoses result in medication, and have personal, social and economic consequences.

Previous research has indicated that extraversion and neuroticism are substantially affected both by genotype and environment. This study assesses genetic and environmental influences on the other three components of the five-factor model of personality: Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. An abbreviated version of the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) was administered to 82 pairs of identical twins and 171 pairs of fraternal twins reared apart and 132 pairs of identical twins and 167 pairs of fraternal twins reared together. Estimates of genetic and environmental effects for Openness and Conscientiousness were similar to those found in other studies of personality: Genetic influence was substantial and there was little evidence of shared rearing environment. Results for Agreeableness were different: Genetic influence accounted for only 12% of the variance and shared rearing environment accounted for 21% of the variance. Few significant gender or age differences for genetic and environmental parameters were found in model-fitting analyses.

Both the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1987) and the five-factor model of personality have roots in folk concepts of personality. The present article offers a conceptual analysis of CPI scales in terms of the five-factor model. In the first study, judges rated the item content of CPI scales in terms of the five factors. In the second, CPI scales were correlated with the factors as measured by the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985b) in a sample of 348 men and women ages 19 to 92. Both studies showed meaningful links between CPI scales and four of the factors; Agreeableness appeared to be underrepresented in CPI scales. The utility of systematic rational item analysis in terms of the five factors and the evolving relation of folk concepts to psychological constructs are discussed.

Correlations of Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough & Heilbrun, 1965, 1983) scales with measures of the five-factor model of personality provide a basis for reinterpreting earlier studies and construing new ACL scales in terms of a common conceptual framework. In Study 1, 414 undergraduate students (264 women, 150 men) completed the ACL, and scales were factored together with John's (1990) ACL markers of the five factors. In Study 2,445 (198 women, 247 men) adult volunteers from the Augmented Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging completed the ACL. Self-report, spouse, and peer ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory, which measures the five factors, were available for subsets of these Ss. When appropriate markers are used, the five factors can be recovered from the ACL, although most ACL scales are themselves multifactorial.

Neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience have been shown to have systematic effects on psychological well-being. The remaining dimensions in the five-factor model of personality--agreeableness and conscientiousness--may also contribute to increased life satisfaction and happiness. Self-reports and spouse ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory, a measure of the five factors, were correlated with three measures of psychological well-being in a sample of 429 adult men and women. Consistent with previous research, neuroticism was negatively, and extraversion was positively, related to well-being. Both agreeableness and conscientiousness were also significant independent predictors. Personality dispositions appear to have temperamental, experiential, and instrumental effects on psychological well-being.

Personality psychologists have recently concluded that five major dimensions account for most individual differences in personality traits. The NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) is a concise measure of this Five-Factor Model and of some of the important traits that define the factors. Characteristics of the test, features for administration and scoring, and studies of reliability, stability, and validity are summarized. The NEO-PI may be particularly appropriate for use in counseling because it is brief, nonpsychopathological in content, and sensitive to client strengths as well as weaknesses. We suggest several ways in which the counselor can learn how to use the NEO-PI effectively.

Although B. W. Roberts, K. W. Walton, and W. Viechtbauer (2006) depicted the present authors as proponents of the immutability of traits, in fact we have always acknowledged the possibility of change, and we are pleased that the results of their meta-analysis are consistent with our conclusions about modest change after age 30. We agree with B.W. Roberts et al. that analyses should be conducted at the level of more specific traits, but prefer the 30 facets of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory to the Social Dominance-Social Vitality distinction. The origins of age changes might be found either in environmental influences common to all cultures or in biologically based intrinsic maturation; we offer some reasons for preferring the latter interpretation. Meta-analyses are useful but not definitive, and the resolution of the origin question lies in further research. Keywords: traits, maturation, meta-analysis, culture, biology