[Twitter] Objective: Few environments reliably influence mean-level and rank-order changes in personality—perhaps because personality development needs to be examined through an individualized, person-centered lens.

Method: The current study used Bayesian multilevel linear models to examine the association between 16 life events and changes in person-centered, Big Five personality consistency across 4–10 waves of data using 4 datasets (n = 24,491).

Results: Selection effects were found for events such as marriage, (un)employment, retirement, and volunteering, whereas between-person effects for slopes were found for events such as beginning formal education, employment, and retirement. Within-person changes were often small and emerged inconsistently across datasets but, when present, were brief and negative in direction, suggesting life events can serve as a short-term disruption to the personality system. However, there were many individual differences around event-related trajectories.

Conclusion: Our results highlight that the effects of life events depend on how personality and its changes are quantified—with these findings underscoring the utility of a person-centered approach as it can capture the full range of these idiosyncrasies. Overall, these findings suggest that life events are associated with a range of idiosyncratic effects and can serve as a short-term, destabilizing shock to one’s personality system.

[Keywords: environmental factors, ipsative consistency, life events, personality development, person-centered, profile correlations]

…3.2 Selection effects: Experiencing an event versus not: For the between-person effects of going onto experiencing a life event versus not experiencing it (ie. the differences in intercepts), results did not always emerge across all datasets, but when they did, they were always in the same direction (Table 4). Seeing a mental health professional (−0.04 to −0.06), unemployment (−0.03 to −0.05), and being a recipient of government financial assistance (ie. welfare; −0.04 to −0.09) were all consistently associated with lower values of person-centered personality consistency. In comparison, marriage (0.03–0.06), employment (0.03–0.05), and volunteering (0.03–0.06) were always associated with larger values of personality consistency. Interestingly, when present, the effects of finishing education (0.06) were opposite of those for starting to attend some form of school (−0.09).

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