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According to the social-investment principle, entering new environments is associated with new social roles that influence people's behaviors. In this study, we examined whether young adults' personality development is differentially related to their choice of either an academic or a vocational pathway (i.e., entering an academic-track school or beginning vocational training). The personality constructs of interest were Big Five personality traits and vocational-interest orientations. We used a longitudinal study design and propensity-score matching to create comparable groups before they entered one of the pathways and then tested the differences between these groups 6 years later. We expected the vocational pathway to reinforce more mature behavior and curtail investigative interest. Results indicated that choosing the vocational compared with the academic pathway was associated with higher conscientiousness and less interest in investigative, social, and enterprising activities.

We examined life-course effects of attending selective schools using a longitudinal study of U.S. high school students begun in 1960 ( Ns ranging from 1,952 to 377,015). The effects, measured 11 and 50 years after the initial assessment, differed significantly across the two indicators of school selectivity that were used. School average socioeconomic background was positively related to students' educational expectations, educational attainment, income, and occupational prestige at the 11-year follow-up (0.15 ≤ β ≤ 0.39; all ps < .001). Conversely, schools' average achievement at the 11-year follow-up was negatively related to students' expectations, attainment, income, and occupational prestige (-0.42 ≤ β ≤ -0.05; all ps < .05) when schools' socioeconomic background was controlled for. All associations were mediated by students' educational expectations. With the exception of income, these effects were consistent 50 years after high school, pointing to the long reach of beneficial learning resources and negative social comparison processes when attending selective schools.

Are recent cohorts of college students more narcissistic than their predecessors? To address debates about the so-called "narcissism epidemic," we used data from three cohorts of students (1990s: N = 1,166; 2000s: N = 33,647; 2010s: N = 25,412) to test whether narcissism levels (overall and specific facets) have increased across generations. We also tested whether our measure, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), showed measurement equivalence across the three cohorts, a critical analysis that had been overlooked in prior research. We found that several NPI items were not equivalent across cohorts. Models accounting for nonequivalence of these items indicated a small decline in overall narcissism levels from the 1990s to the 2010s ( d = -0.27). At the facet level, leadership ( d = -0.20), vanity ( d = -0.16), and entitlement ( d = -0.28) all showed decreases. Our results contradict the claim that recent cohorts of college students are more narcissistic than earlier generations of college students.

Most of us have at one point speculated about why one individual grew up to be honest and fair while another became wicked and untrustworthy. In the current review, we present the case that new directions in the empirical study of moral personality development are needed. We set the stage for this future work by presenting six propositions that should serve as the foundation for future research in the field. We conclude by providing an example of how using a more integrative and inclusive framework for studying personality can readily incorporate these propositions.

In this article, we make two points about the ongoing debate concerning the purported increase in narcissistic tendencies in college students over the last 30 years. First, we show that when new data on narcissism are folded into preexisting meta-analytic data, there is no increase in narcissism in college students over the last few decades. Second, we show, in contrast, that age changes in narcissism are both replicable and comparatively large in comparison to generational changes in narcissism. This leads to the conclusion that every generation is Generation Me, as every generation of younger people are more narcissistic than their elders., (© The Author(s) 2010.)

The present study tested the effect of conscientiousness and neuroticism on health and physical limitations in a representative sample of older couples (N= 2,203) drawn from the Health and Retirement Study. As in past research, conscientiousness predicted better health and physical functioning, whereas neuroticism predicted worse health and physical functioning. Unique to this study was the finding that conscientiousness demonstrated a compensatory effect, such that husbands' conscientiousness predicted wives' health outcomes above and beyond wives' own personality. The same pattern held true for wives' conscientiousness as a predictor of husbands' health outcomes. Furthermore, conscientiousness and neuroticism acted synergistically, such that people who scored high for both traits were healthier than others. Finally, we found that the combination of high conscientiousness and high neuroticism was also compensatory, such that the wives of men with this combination of personality traits reported better health than other women.

Recent longitudinal and cross-sectional aging research has shown that personality traits continue to change in adulthood. In this article, we review the evidence for mean-level change in personality traits, as well as for individual differences in change across the life span. In terms of mean-level change, people show increased selfconfidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability with age. These changes predominate in young adulthood (age 20-40). Moreover, mean-level change in personality traits occurs in middle and old age, showing that personality traits can change at any age. In terms of individual differences in personality change, people demonstrate unique patterns of development at all stages of the life course, and these patterns appear to be the result of specific life experiences that pertain to a person's stage of life.

The ability of personality traits to predict important life outcomes has traditionally been questioned because of the putative small effects of personality. In this article, we compare the predictive validity of personality traits with that of socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability to test the relative contribution of personality traits to predictions of three critical outcomes: mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment. Only evidence from prospective longitudinal studies was considered. In addition, an attempt was made to limit the review to studies that controlled for important background factors. Results showed that the magnitude of the effects of personality traits on mortality, divorce, and occupational attainment was indistinguishable from the effects of SES and cognitive ability on these outcomes. These results demonstrate the influence of personality traits on important life outcomes, highlight the need to more routinely incorporate measures of personality into quality of life surveys, and encourage further research about the developmental origins of personality traits and the processes by which these traits influence diverse life outcomes., (© 2007 Association for Psychological Science.)