Mapping the Landscape of Personality in Childhood and Adolescence

Mapping the Landscape of Personality in Childhood andAdolescence

Rebecca L. Shiner*Colgate University

Abstract

From infancy, children vary in their typical emotions and behaviors, and by the middle of child-hood, children have richly differentiated personalities. In this paper, I review the personality dif-ferences that youths exhibit from early childhood through adolescence, using a three-parttaxonomy developed by (McAdams, D. P., & Pals, J. L. American Psychologist, 2006; 61, 204–217).First, children exhibit a dispositional signature, including first temperament traits and later the BigFive personality traits, which show some consistency across situations and over time. Second,youths display characteristic adaptations that are more specific to particular life contexts; these includemental representations, strategies, and goals. Third, adolescents form personal narratives, storiesabout their lives that reflect and shape their identities. I describe the differences youths exhibit inthese three domains and situate these differences in the context of overall development in child-hood and adolescence. New work on youths’ personalities can serve as the foundation for futurelifespan perspectives on personality development.

From the earliest days of life, children vary from one another in their typical emotionsand behaviors. Parents often marvel at these early-emerging differences in their children.Some young children cry loudly, and often, some children squeal with delight at the sightof friendly faces or exciting toys, and some children focus intently on interesting newitems and activities. As infants move into later childhood, their repertoire of behaviorsgrows increasingly complex, as they develop physically, cognitively, socially, and emo-tionally. As children’s behavioral repertoire expands, so, too, do their individual differ-ences. By the elementary school years and continuing into adolescence, youths varymarkedly from one another in many different ways: their typical emotions; their capaci-ties for empathy, self-control, and imagination; their goals and expectations; their viewsof relationships and themselves; their ways of coping with stress and adversity; theiremerging stories about who they are; and more. In short, by the middle of childhood,children have richly differentiated personalities.

Parents, teachers, mental health clinicians, and policy makers all have a vested interestin understanding children’s personalities. Adults who care about children want to knowwhether children’s personalities portend and shape their life outcomes. Are children withcertain personalities at risk for educational failure or for criminal behavior? What charac-ter traits and capacities are especially important for enabling children to become happy,productive, resilient people? Can children with challenging personalities be helped todevelop in a positive manner? The answers to these questions are important for adultswho are invested in helping children to flourish. To make good progress in answeringthese questions, however, it is important to begin with a clear understanding of whatform children’s personalities take at various points in development. Given the dizzying

Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/11 (2010): 1084–1097, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00315.x

ª 2010 The AuthorSocial and Personality Psychology Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

array of personality features children and adolescents manifest, a crucial starting point forunderstanding personality development is a clear map of the terrain. What are the mostimportant individual differences among youths, and how are they structured?

In this paper, I review what is known about the kinds of personality differences thatyouths exhibit from early childhood through adolescence. To bring order to this complexlandscape, I organize the personality differences according to a model developed byMcAdams and Pals (McAdams, 1995; McAdams & Pals, 2006). This model divides person-ality into three broad domains. First, the dispositional signature includes the traits that peopleexpress in their behaviors, thoughts, and emotions with some consistency across situationsand over time. Second, characteristic adaptations include ‘a wide range of motivational,social-cognitive, and developmental adaptations’ that are specific to a particular time,place, or role (McAdams & Pals, 2006, p. 208). These characteristic adaptations differ fromtraits in that their instantiation is more specific to particular life contexts. Third, by adoles-cence people begin to form personal narratives, stories about their lives that help them tomake sense out of their identities over time. Children clearly manifest both dispositionalsignatures (or traits) and a wide range of characteristic adaptations, and many youths beginto develop personal narratives in adolescence. In what follows, I describe the differenceschildren and adolescents exhibit in these three domains, situate these differences in thecontext of overall development in childhood and adolescence, and point to areas wheremore research is needed to understand these important differences better.

The ‘Dispositional Signature’: Temperament and Personality Traits

Temperament and personality traits in developmental context

In McAdams and Pals’ model, the dispositional signature consists of people’s general ten-dencies to behave, think, and feel in relatively consistent ways across situations and acrosstime (McAdams & Pals, 2006). In other words, these are the general tendencies knownby experts and laypeople alike as ‘personality traits.’ These traits may reflect individualdifferences in biologic systems that have been selected through evolution and are shapedby individuals’ life experiences (Nettle, 2006). There are a number of biologic systemsthat are relevant for personality functioning and that are crucial for human survival – forexample, systems supporting the detection of rewards and threats, achievement of socialdominance, striving after long-term goals, nurturance of the young, aggression, andexploration of new environments. According to some evolutionary theories (MacDonald,1995; Nettle, 2006), although such biologic systems are part of the human make-up, peo-ple vary in the strength and expression of such systems. Individuals’ life experiences createfurther variations in the expression of these systems, which eventually become manifest inpersonality traits. In addition to evolution’s potential role in shaping personality traits,evolution may have equipped people to be able to detect others’ standing on these traitsfairly quickly (Goldberg, 1981; McAdams & Pals, 2006). Because these traits manifestsome consistency across situations and time, they exert an important impact on day-to-day life and therefore are assessed with relative ease by other people. Humans needto predict others’ behavior, and personality traits give clues enabling such prediction.

From a developmental point of view, traits are the earliest appearing aspect of personal-ity. Developmental psychologists primarily have studied children’s traits under the rubricof ‘temperament’ rather than personality. As is true for the adult personality literature,there are numerous models of temperament in childhood, encompassing varied definitionsof temperament and diverse lists of traits (Shiner & DeYoung, forthcoming; Zentner &

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Bates, 2008). Rothbart and Bates (2006) have offered a definition of temperament thatexpresses the shared components of most models: Temperament consists of ‘constitution-ally based individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation, in the domains of affect,activity, and attention’ (p. 100). This definition notes that biologic factors contribute tothe expressed differences in temperament, and it highlights the importance of children’stypical patterns of emotions, as well as their abilities to regulate their emotions andbehavior.

Temperament researchers have made considerable progress in identifying a basictaxonomy of temperamental traits. In particular, Mary Rothbart and colleagues have pin-pointed three overarching temperament trait dimensions that capture many of children’simportant individual differences from infancy (Garstein & Rothbart, 2003) through child-hood (Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001). Surgency taps children’s tendenciestoward sociability, positive emotions, and the eager approach of potentially pleasurableactivities. Negative Affectivity measures children’s general tendencies toward a wide rangeof negative emotions. Already in infancy, however, this trait can be separated into tworelated but distinct components: more internalizing negative emotions (fear, withdrawal,sadness) and more externalizing negative emotions (anger, irritability, frustration) (Caspi& Shiner, 2006; Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Effortful Control reflects children’s emergingbehavioral constraint and regulation, including the ability to sustain attention and persistat tasks. A recent joint factor analysis of several preschool temperament measures and apersonality measure demonstrated that these are the three major traits that emerge acrossmultiple measures of temperament (De Pauw, Mervielde, & Van Leeuwen, 2009).

Historically, temperament and personality have been studied as distinct sets of individ-ual differences, with temperament consisting of more narrowly defined consistencies thatappear earlier in life and with personality consisting of a broader range of consistenciesthat emerge later in life. However, if we restrict our consideration of personality to sim-ply personality traits, then temperament and personality traits in reality appear to havemuch in common (see Clark & Watson, 2008 and McCrae et al., 2000 for similar argu-ments that personality traits in adulthood are, in essence, temperamental traits). First, bothsets of individual differences are shaped by heredity and by the environment (Krueger &Johnson, 2008; Saudino, 2005). Sometimes laypeople and psychologists assume that traitsstart out as largely heritable in origin and gradually come to be influenced more so bythe environment, as children have more life experiences. This model has turned out tobe incorrect. In fact, temperament traits sometimes become more rather than less influ-enced by genetics as children grow from infancy to childhood (Saudino, 2005). Bothtemperament traits in childhood and personality traits in adulthood follow another inter-esting pattern: Genetic influences promote the stability of traits over time, whereas bothgenetic and environmental factors contribute to changes in traits (Ganiban, Saudino,Ulbricht, Neiderhiser, & Reiss, 2008; Krueger & Johnson, 2008; Saudino, 2005). Inshort, current behavior genetic research makes clear that temperament and personalitytraits arise from similar sources.

Second, animals display individual differences in behavior that mirror most of themajor temperament dimensions in childhood and personality dimensions in adults (Wein-stein, Capitanio, & Gosling, 2008). Only Conscientiousness (a trait described in the nextsection) is not widely evident in other species, although it can be assessed in Chimpan-zees. Temperament and personality traits thus may be more elaborated forms of basicbehavioral systems that appear across species. Third, a final point of convergence betweentemperament and personality is their very similar content. Research on the structure ofthe two types of traits proceeded in two distinct traditions; despite this, the two lines of

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research have converged on two similar sets of traits. Temperament and personality traitsboth include traits indexing positive emotions, high energy, and sociability (Extraversionor Surgency); traits tapping a wide variety of negative emotions, vulnerability, and stressreactivity (Neuroticism or Negative Affectivity); and traits measuring behavioral con-straint, self-regulation, and persistence (Conscientiousness or Effortful Control) (Caspi &Shiner, 2006). Thus, it may be helpful to view temperament and personality not as trulydistinct forms of individual differences, but rather as earlier and later forms of the samebasic traits.

The Big Five in childhood and adolescence: descriptions and processes

Over the last decade and a half, substantial progress has been made in identifying thestructure of children’s personality traits. There is now convincing evidence that, at leastby the school-age years (and, most likely, earlier), children’s personality traits are struc-tured much like adults’ traits. Work on the structure of adult personality has convergedon a five-trait model known variously as the Big Five Model or the Five-Factor Model(John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008). These traits include Extraversion, Neuroticism, Consci-entiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness-to-Experience ⁄ Intellect. Like adults, childrenand adolescents differ along this same basic set of traits. Table 1 presents the childhoodtemperamental traits described in Rothbart’s model and their likely manifestations as person-ality traits later in childhood (Caspi & Shiner, 2006; Shiner & DeYoung, forthcoming).

A five-factor structure of children’s traits has been found in studies with differentreporters (parents, teachers, and older children and adolescents) and in both questionnaireand Q-sort measures (Caspi & Shiner, 2006). Although some studies obtaining a five-fac-tor structure in childhood have employed measures pre-structured to reflect the Big Fivetraits, other studies have found the same structure in measures designed simply to tap abroad range of personality traits in childhood (e.g., Digman & Shmelyov, 1996; John,Caspi, Robins, Moffitt, & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1994). In fact, one of the most seminalearly papers documenting a five-factor personality trait structure included teacher reportson schoolchildren’s traits, using a broad, unselected set of descriptors (Digman & Takem-oto-Chock, 1981). Remarkably, when children as young as 5 years old rate their person-alities in the context of an interview with puppets, they can provide coherent,differentiated reports on the Big Five traits (Measelle, John, Ablow, Cowan, & Cowan,2005). Taken together, these studies provide a promising starting point for a taxonomy ofchildren’s personality traits.

Table 1 Early childhood temperament traits and their hypothesized associations with childhoodpersonality traits

Earlier Temperament Trait Later Childhood Personality Traits

Surgency ExtraversionNegative Affectivity

Internalizing negative emotions NeuroticismExternalizing negative emotions Neuroticism and disagreeableness

Effortful Control Conscientiousness

The trait typically labeled as ‘Agreeableness’ is labeled as ‘Disagreeableness’ to show its positive rela-tionship with temperamental externalizing negative emotions.



The Big Five traits provide a rich picture of children’s individuality. Extraversion mea-sures children’s tendencies to be vigorously, actively, and surgently engaged with theworld around them. Extraverted children and adolescents are described as sociable,expressive, high-spirited, lively, socially potent, physically active, and energetic, whereasmore introverted children are described as shy, reserved, and lethargic. This trait appearsto reflect individual differences in a biologically based approach system that activatesbehavior to seek rewards (DeYoung & Gray, 2009). Just as children vary in their predis-position toward positive emotions, they vary in their susceptibility to negative emotionsand general distress, a trait termed Neuroticism. Children and adolescents who are high onNeuroticism are described as anxious, vulnerable, tense, easily frightened, ‘falling apart’under stress, guilt-prone, moody, low in frustration tolerance, and insecure in relation-ships with others. In contrast, children low on this trait are self-assured, emotionallystable, and calm. Neuroticism appears to index individual differences in biologic systemsthat promote behavioral responses to threats (DeYoung & Gray, 2009).

Both Conscientiousness and Agreeableness tap important aspects of self-regulation.Conscientiousness reflects children’s individual differences in self-control in large part ascontrol is used in service of completing tasks and striving to meet standards. Highly Con-scientious children and adolescents are described as responsible, attentive, persistent,orderly and neat, planful, possessing high standards, and thinking before acting, whereaslow Conscientiousness manifests itself in more careless, impulsive, and distractible behav-ior. The self-regulatory traits that are part of Conscientiousness are related to children’smaturing attentional skills and abilities to focus on long-term goals over immediateimpulses and are likely to be related to developments in the lateral prefrontal cortex(DeYoung & Gray, 2009) and anterior cingulate gyrus (Posner, Rothbart, Sheese, &Tang, 2007). Like Conscientiousness, Agreeableness reflects differences in self-regulation;however, Agreeableness relates more clearly to self-regulation in service of maintainingpositive relationships with others (Graziano, Habashi, Sheese, & Tobin, 2007). Agreeable-ness describes individual differences in empathy and inhibition of hostile and aggressiveimpulses. Highly Agreeable children are characterized as warm, considerate, empathic,generous, gentle, protective of others, and kind, whereas highly Disagreeable children arecharacterized as aggressive, rude, spiteful, stubborn, bossy, cynical, and manipulative.Agreeableness also includes children’s willingness to accommodate others’ wishes; moreAgreeable children are more compliant and more manageable for the adults in their lives.Agreeableness is likely to involve brain circuits related to empathy and social informationprocessing (DeYoung & Gray, 2009).

The final Big Five trait – Openness-to-Experience or Intellect – has more limited supportas a trait in childhood than the other Big Five traits (Caspi & Shiner, 2006). But, there issome evidence that this trait is an important aspect of children’s individuality when it ismeasured carefully, even as early as preschool age (De Pauw et al., 2009). Furthermore,parents from many countries spontaneously and frequently use words from the Opennesstrait domain when asked to describe their children (Mervielde, De Fruyt, & Jarmuz,1998). Children high on this trait are described as eager and quick to learn, clever,knowledgeable, perceptive, imaginative, curious, and original, whereas children low onthis trait exhibit lower levels of fantasy, creativity, and interests. This trait appears toindex individual differences in the motivation to seek, attend to, and explore internal andexternal sensory stimulation (Caspi & Shiner, 2006). Although this trait is moderatelycorrelated with IQ in childhood (Shiner, 2000) and adulthood (DeYoung, Shamosh,Green, Braver, & Gray, 2009), the trait indexes individual differences in creativity,curiosity, and intellect that go beyond just cognitive ability (DeYoung et al., 2009).



The Big Five traits have much to offer as a taxonomy of children’s personality traits.The Big Five traits encompass many of the single traits that have received research atten-tion in childhood – such as children’s dominance, shyness, stress reactivity, achievementmotivation, aggression, and empathy (Shiner, 1998). In addition, the traits provide excel-lent coverage of traits that parents from many countries consider important in describingtheir children. As part of an international project, parents from the United States, China,Poland, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Greece were asked to describe their 2- to 13-year-old children (Kohnstamm, Halverson, Mervielde, & Havill, 1998). The vast majorityof the phrases parents used to characterize their children could be easily classified as fittinginto one of the Big Five trait domains. As the McAdams and Pals’ model would suggest,traits from the Big Five taxonomy show moderate stability by at least preschool age(Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000). Finally, children’s personalities predict many different lifeoutcomes in coherent patterns (Caspi & Shiner, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, &Goldberg, 2007). For example, positive changes in youths’ academic achievement andrule-abiding behavior are predicted by their childhood Conscientiousness and Agreeable-ness, and positive changes in their close relationships are predicted by their childhoodExtraversion (Shiner & Masten, 2008). Thus, the Big Five model offers a broad, compel-ling look at children’s traits and points to aspects of individuality that have long-termimplications for children’s lives.

Characteristic Adaptations

Characteristic adaptations in developmental context

Clearly, children’s developing personality traits are important for their development.However, traits are only one aspect of children’s emerging personalities. Another crucialaspect of children’s individuality is what McAdams and Pals (2006) call ‘characteristicadaptations’: ‘a wide range of motivational, social-cognitive, and developmental adapta-tions, contextualized in time, place, and ⁄ or social role’ (p. 208). Rather than beinggeneral tendencies expressed across a wide variety of situations and over time, theseaspects of personality are more specific to particular life contexts, including the domainin question, the role the person is in, and the person’s specific developmental phase inlife. To illustrate the context-dependent nature of characteristic adaptations, considerthe case of an elementary school-age girl and the goals she is pursuing. She may haveone set of goals for her academic work (e.g., to master the material and to get goodgrades) and another set of goals for her relationships with peers (e.g., to find closefriendships and to be well-liked by peers). Even within the domain of intimate rela-tionships, she may have different goals, depending on her role as friend, child, orstudent. Her goals are likely to shift as she moves into adolescence, when she maybegin to pursue the goals of preparing for college or establishing a first romantic rela-tionship. McAdams and Pals argue that characteristic adaptations are likely to be moreinfluenced by culture and to change more over time than personality traits, because oftheir context-dependent nature. McAdams and Pals also suggest that characteristicadaptations may be good targets for intervention, given that they are likely to be moreeasily amenable to change.

Characteristic adaptations encompass a broad range of individual differences and tendto focus on the processes underlying variations in personality. Traits also tap consistenciesin psychological processes, but characteristic adaptations typically consist of more nar-rowly defined processes. This broad domain of personality lacks a clear-cut taxonomy; in



other words, at this point, it is not possible to carve up the various adaptations into neatlydefined dimensions. However, it is still possible to delineate important general categoriesof characteristic adaptations, including perception, thinking, motivation, strategies, andemotions (Funder, 2007). People differ in their perceptions of the world, meaning the waysthat they take in information from the environment. People also vary in their ways ofthinking about various aspects of their lives, e.g., their values, mental representations,interpretive biases, and views of the self. People differ in their typical motivation – whatthey desire and strive for and what they avoid – in different domains of life. People alsoemploy different strategies for handling daily events and more long-term challenges. And,finally, people experience and express emotions in varied ways across many areas of theirlives. These psychological processes have been explored in a number of different tradi-tions in the study of personality, including Freudian and neo-Freudian perspectives, thehumanistic and existential traditions, and social-cognitive frameworks (Funder, 2007;McAdams & Pals, 2006).

Because these aspects of personality are so varied and complex, different characteris-tic adaptations are likely to emerge as aspects of personality at different points in devel-opment. For children to display individual differences in these domains, they need avariety of different capacities, depending on the specific characteristic adaptation underconsideration. Some of the characteristic adaptations derive particularly from children’semotional experiences and from their characteristic means of handling those emotions.Other related characteristic adaptations arise from children’s experiences in importantrelationships. Personality constructs offered by the psychoanalytic tradition tend toemphasize these emotion- and relationship-based individual differences (Westen, Gab-bard, & Ortigo, 2008). Some of these tendencies, such as attachment styles, emergeearly in life. For example, there is some evidence that infants’ attachment security pre-dicts their abstract mental representations of maternal behavior (Johnson, Dweck, &Chen, 2007).

Many other characteristic adaptations depend on the development of more complexcognitive skills. For example, children’s goals and strategies are likely to become morecomplex and important as children enter middle childhood. At that point, children canbetter engage in planning, because they think more flexibly and imagine future scenarios(Lightfoot, Cole, & Cole, 2009). They can also think increasingly about how to think,i.e., engage in meta-cognition, which enables them to solve problems in more complexways (Flavell, 2007). As young adolescents begin to think more abstractly, they candevelop their own values, and their goals can become more long term and future ori-ented. Thus, just as traits become more broad and complex over development, so, too,do the types of characteristic adaptations youths exhibit.

Characteristic adaptations: some examples in childhood and adolescence

A variety of characteristic adaptations have received research attention in childhood andadolescence; youths vary significantly in their styles of cognition, emotion, and motiva-tion across many arenas of their lives (Pomerantz & Thompson, 2008). Because it is notpossible to provide a comprehensive summary of this personality domain, I will insteaddescribe several particularly interesting areas of research on youths’ characteristic adapta-tions: their mental representations, coping strategies, and goals.

First, mental representations consist of the many ways that children and adolescents per-ceive and think about their experiences of themselves, other people, life events, and theirmore general environment. Mental representations may be consistently accompanied by



particular sets of emotions that are evoked when the mental representation operates(Greenberg, Elliott, & Lietaer, 2003). These mental representations are a primary meansthrough which children’s earlier experiences are brought forward into the present(Dweck & London, 2004). Children and adolescents display a very wide range of mentalrepresentations, particularly as they get older and develop more complex cognitive skills.For example, children vary in their attributional styles for life events (Mezulis, Hyde, &Abramson, 2006); attachment representations (Fraley & Shaver, 2008; Johnson et al.,2007); feelings of alienation from others and assumptions about whether peers have hos-tile intentions (Leff et al., 2006); beliefs about what they can offer to others (Rudolph,Hammen, & Burge, 1995); and beliefs about the malleability of their own behavior(Molden & Dweck, 2006). In fact, mental representations are one of the most thoroughlystudied aspects of children’s developing personalities.

Second, children develop different coping strategies for handling the stresses that theyface. Like adults, children and adolescents use both engagement strategies (approach-ori-ented, active strategies for handling stressors, such as problem-solving, support-seeking,and distraction) and disengagement strategies (avoidance-oriented attempts at distancingthemselves from the stressors, e.g., withdrawal, denial, substance abuse (Connor-Smith,Compas, Wadsworth, Thomsen, & Saltzman, 2000; Compas, Connor-Smith, Saltzman,Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001). Youths’ repertoires of coping strategies develop overtime. Among preschool- and school-age children, the predominant forms of coping aresupport-seeking, problem-solving, escape, and distraction (Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck,2007). As children move into adolescence, their coping strategies become more complexand cognitively advanced. Although some of these new strategies enable better coping(e.g., cognitive restructuring), other strategies are self-defeating (e.g., rumination, aggres-sion, blaming others). Children’s coping also includes a variety of nonconscious strategies,such as defense mechanisms, which serve to protect them from negative emotions (Cra-mer, 2008).

Third, children adopt different goals for what they would like to achieve in differentlife domains. Temperament and personality traits are associated with different sets ofmotivations, for example, extraversion with a motivation to approach and seek rewards.Youths’ goals are different from this kind of motivation, however; by the school-ageyears, children can articulate explicitly what goals they are trying to accomplish in partic-ular domains of life. An especially robust area of research focuses on children’s achieve-ment motivation (Wigfield, Eccles, Schiefele, Roeser, & Davis-Kean, 2006). Forexample, youths who are motivated to gain knowledge and skills show stronger achieve-ment over time than youths who strive to validate their intelligence through their perfor-mance (Dweck & Grant, 2008). Children likewise vary in their social goals, for example,their strivings for dominance, intimacy, and popularity with their peers (Kiefer & Ryan,2008), and their more specific goals within close friendships (Rose & Asher, 2004). Byadolescence, youths can articulate more long-term goals and hopes for themselves, suchas their goals for academic and occupational attainment and their hopes and aspirationsfor who they will be in the future (Massey, Gebhardt, & Garnefski, 2008). Althoughthere are potential costs to youths’ investment in their goals, the pursuit of goals has thepotential to direct youths’ energies and efforts toward worthy ends (Pomerantz & Shim,2008).

Taken together, the research on youths’ mental representations, coping strategies, andgoals demonstrates how wide-ranging and important these aspects of youths’ personalitiesare. The characteristic adaptations that emerge in childhood and adolescence have thepower to shape many different life outcomes.



Life Narratives and Identity: Developmental Context and Current Research

The final domain included in McAdams and Pals’ personality taxonomy is one thatbecomes increasingly salient as youths move into adolescence and early adulthood –namely personal narratives. Personal narratives help young people to articulate anddevelop a clear identity. As Erikson (1950) pointed out more than half a century ago, animportant developmental task for adolescents in modern Western cultures is the develop-ment of a coherent sense of identity. This sense of identity emerges from adolescents’attempts to understand and define who they are as people: their overarching sense oftheir goals, values, meaning, and direction. Erikson argued that modern Western societiesdo not offer youths a pre-made sense of identity that may have come in earlier centuriesfrom a culture’s religious or civic beliefs. Rather, individuals are faced with the task ofdeveloping a personal identity that brings together their own individual experiences,goals, and meanings. Beyond personal identity, other important aspects of identity involveindividuals’ sense of who they are in a broader context – their cultural, ethnic, and groupidentity (Schwartz, Zamboanga, & Weisskirch, 2008).

In McAdams and Pals (2006) personality model, the main vehicle through which iden-tity develops is through narratives. In other words, narrative identity emerges as youths andadults reflect on their lives as evolving stories. People look back on their previousexperiences and weave these together into a narrative that connects current identity withspecific memories and recurrent themes. This task only becomes possible in adolescence,when youths develop the ability to think in a more abstract, complex way about theirlives and their futures (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008). The ability to discern and createcoherence across time and across experiences requires fairly advanced reflective skills.McAdams (2008) has argued that, more so than traits or even characteristic adaptations,narratives are influenced by individuals’ place in their cultural context. Narratives alsochange over time. Narrative identity is not something that is formed during late adoles-cence and early adulthood and then remains static across the rest of individuals’ lives;rather narrative identities are constructed and reconstructed as individuals grow throughdifferent stages of life and need to incorporate new experiences and developmental chal-lenges (McAdams, 2008).

The development of narrative identity is a process embedded in social relationshipsfrom the beginning. Although most individuals are unlikely to develop a more extensivesense of narrative identity until at least adolescence, the building blocks for narrativeidentity are created earlier in life. Already by preschool age, children work with their par-ents to coconstruct retellings of past experiences (Nelson & Fivush, 2004); parents typi-cally encourage their children to tell autobiographical stories, and together children andtheir parents discuss their diverging recollections about events. Parents differ in the waysthat they speak with their children about these memories, and parents who encouragemore elaboration have children who can tell more complex stories about their experi-ences (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). As children grow older, they continue to tellstories to their parents, but their audiences broaden to include peers as well. Adults sharethe vast majority of their most significant memories with other people, so individuals’social contexts continue to have an impact on the ways that memories become incorpo-rated into broader life narratives (McLean, 2008).

The study of life narratives is newer than the study of temperament and personalitytraits and characteristic adaptations in youths. Thus, less is known about the developmentand early forms of life narratives than is known for the other domains of individual differ-ences; the same is true for research on narratives in adulthood. Nonetheless, recent work



has begun to identify some of the important normative developmental patterns seen inadolescents’ narratives. In a recent cross-sectional study, youths ages 8, 12, 16, and 20were asked to narrate their life stories (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008). With age, theyouths’ life stories were increasingly coherent in terms of the participants’ abilities to linkexperiences across time, to trace causal associations among experiences, and to articulateoverarching themes. Indicators of coherence were relatively uncommon among the youn-gest participants and were considerably more common among the 12-year-olds. Adoles-cents may particularly draw on certain modes of storytelling as they learn to narrativetheir lives; for example, common narratives in youths include stories of change, humor-ous and entertaining stories, and stories focused on positive experiences and redeemednegative experiences (McLean, 2008). These types of stories likely serve an importantfunction for adolescents as they strive to develop a positive sense of identity as they pro-ject themselves into the future as adults.

Although researchers are gaining some clarity about normative developmentalpatterns in narratives, much remains to be learned about the development of individ-ual differences in narratives in adolescence. Work on adults’ narratives has identifiedmany different individual differences in adults’ life stories. Adult narratives vary intheir narrative coherence and complexity; reflection of growth and meaning; generalthemes; high points, low points, and turning points; expression of motives; handlingof negative experiences; and inclusion of positive and negative emotions (McAdams,2008). These individual differences have important implications for adults’ coping,well-being, and development (McAdams, 2008). It will be important for research inthis area to likewise investigate individual differences in youths’ stories and to explorethe sources of variation in youths’ emerging narratives. This work can explore whysome youths are able to develop positive life stories that promote growth and thatenable resolution of negative experiences, whereas other youths are stymied in theirnarrative development.

Conclusion and Future Directions

Although personality is often viewed as being in flux and under construction in the firsttwo decades of life, children and adolescents clearly display a broad range of personalitydifferences, and many of these bear significant resemblance to personality differences seenin adults. Youths’ individual differences range from their temperament and personalitytraits, to their typical motivations, strategies, and cognitive styles, to their life narratives.These early personality differences make a difference for youths’ life outcomes. In thepast, a true lifespan perspective on personality has proved elusive, because the study ofchildhood personality has often been divorced from the study of adulthood personalityand vice versa. The new work on children’s personalities offers greater possibilities forbringing together these two fields of study. There are several overarching questions thatwill be particularly important to address as this lifespan work moves ahead.

First, there remains much to be learned about the genetic and environmental origins ofdifferences in personality. In the model put forth by McAdams and Pals (2006), personal-ity traits are expected to be the most heritable aspect of personality, whereas differencesin characteristic adaptations and narratives are hypothesized to be more influenced by theenvironment. As described previously, there is convincing evidence that both personalityand temperament traits show genetic influences (Krueger & Johnson, 2008; Saudino,2005). Youths’ environments and experiences contribute to differences in personalitytraits (Caspi & Shiner, 2008), characteristic adaptations (Pomerantz & Thompson, 2008),



and personal narratives (McAdams, 2008). As would be predicted by this model, there isinteresting evidence that some mental representations may be particularly influenced bylife experiences (Gregory et al., 2007; Mezulis et al., 2006) and may be less influenced bygenetic factors than are traits (Gregory et al., 2007). However, more empirical work willbe needed to test all of these hypotheses. Behavior genetic designs can be used to studythe origins of any type of personality difference, including characteristic adaptations andnarratives. Equally important, investigators can continue to explore the environmentalcontributors to all three domains of personality; environment can be studied at all levelsof analysis, from the particular situations that shape the expression of personality to thecultural factors wielding broad influences.

Second, although the three domains of personality are separable, it is possible that theyinfluence each other over time. For example, it seems likely that children’s temperamentsshape children’s goals or the strategies that children adopt for coping with stress. Like-wise, children’s mental representations could influence the formation of their personalitytraits; a child with a negative attachment to a primary caregiver could come to see theworld as more threatening and could thus become higher in trait neuroticism. Or, theadoption of a changed life narrative (e.g., a religious conversion) could have a profoundimpact on a person’s aspirations and interpretations of life experiences. Researchers haveinvestigated the associations between the various domains of personality in adults; yet lit-tle is known about possible transactions among these aspects of personality as theydevelop in childhood and adolescence.

A final crucial area of investigation is how personality remains stable and changes overtime. Stability and change in personality traits have received extensive study (Edmonds,Jackson, Fayard, & Roberts, 2008), but far less is known about continuity and change inother aspects of personality, especially during childhood and adolescence. Stability andchange take different forms (Edmonds et al., 2008), and these can be examined for allpersonality differences, not just traits. Specifically, there may be normative patterns ofstability and change that occur for individuals on average. For example, adolescents typi-cally may show certain goals for achievement, whereas other goals for achievement maybecome more prominent in adulthood. It is also possible to determine the extent towhich people maintain their standing on certain personality differences relative to othersover time. Again using the example of goals, it is possible to determine how stable peo-ple are in their relative valuing of intimacy goals over time; in other words, to whatextent do people maintain their relative ranking in terms of their valuing of intimacygoals? The contributors to stability and change are also important and have practicalimplications. With a better understanding of how stability and change occur, it will bepossible to find ways to encourage positive development for people with a wide varietyof personalities.

Acknowledgment

Work on this paper was supported by grants from the Colgate Research Council andfrom a Presidential Scholar award from Colgate University.

Short Biography

Rebecca L. Shiner is Associate Professor of Psychology and Presidential Scholar atColgate University in Hamilton, NY. Her research centers on temperament and personal-ity development in childhood and adolescence, including structure, stability, and change,



and the links between personality and life outcomes. She has particular interest in thepathways through which childhood and adolescent personality traits contribute to thedevelopment of resilience and psychological disorders. She served as an Associate Editorof the Journal of Personality from 2004 to 2008, serves on the editorial boards of severaljournals, and is on the executive board of the Association for Research in Personality.She obtained her B. A. in psychology from Haverford College and her Ph.D. in clinicalpsychology from the University of Minnesota, and she completed her clinical psychologyinternship at the University of Rochester.

Endnote

* Correspondence address: Department of Psychology, Colgate University, 13 Oak Dr., Hamilton, NY 13346,USA. Email: [email protected]

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Mapping the Landscape of Personality in Childhood and Adolescence