Personality Psychology - how consistent are our personalities throughout life?

[Judy2]

This winter term, one of the lecture courses I am looking forward to the most is personality psychology. I read up on it a little and one of the central questions - that also happens to be one of the key reasons for why I am interested in psychology - is if personality is consistent/ unchangeable throughout someone's life. From what I gather so far, it is, for the most part, although neuroticism may decrease with age while conscientiousness will increase. However, your "peer ranking" will stay the same...so if you meet with some old friends 60 years from now, chances are that despite a general increase in conscientiousness, the most conscientious one of you at age 20 will still be the most conscientious one at 80, and so forth...

 

Now, as this is a community with the specific goal of personal development, I wonder if any of you would be interested in sharing how you believe your personality has or hasn't changed throughout the years (the exact period of time this commentary may cover depends on your age, but technically, from childhood until the present). I believe changes in introversion/extraversion are probably going to be the most obvious ones, but the other dimensions you could comment on are conscientiousness, openness to experience, neuroticism and agreeableness (or anything else you may have to add).

I also wonder what the implications are for someone like me who ranks high on the neuroticism (=negative affect) dimension if personality is not as fluid or changeable as we may think....in my experience, I can put a lot of effort into therapising and changing this aspect of my personality, I can make efforts to be mentally healthy...but the predisposition to negative affect very much stays the same. 

...anyway, i'd love to hear your thoughts on all this:)

Edited 2 hours ago by Judy2

[Leo Gura]

In my experience, personality does not change but the mind can change a lot in all the other ways.

You don't know what you can change until you try it.