UC Riverside

After vigorous debate regarding the validity of personality traits, a growing body of research demonstrates that personality a) is quite stable across the lifespan and that b) personality matters because it predicts important outcomes of interest. One important, yet understudied area of research involves how personality traits manifest in a wide variety of behaviors both across contexts and over time. Understanding the relationship between personality and behavior yields a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms for how personality predicts important outcomes. The continuity of personality's association with directly observed behavior is demonstrated in two different studies. In Study 1, during the 1960s, elementary school teachers rated personalities of members of the ethnically diverse Hawaii Personality and Health Cohort (Hampson & Goldberg, 2006). The same individuals were interviewed in a medical clinic over 40 years later. Trained coders viewed video recordings of a subset of these interviews (N = 144, 68 F, 76 M) and assessed the behavior they observed using the Riverside Behavioral Q-sort Version 3.0 (Funder, Furr & Colvin, 2000; Furr, Wagerman & Funder, 2010). Teacher ratings of children had numerous and diverse correlations with behavior coded in the interview. Children rated by their teachers as "verbally fluent" (defined as unrestrained talkativeness) showed dominant and socially adept behavior as middle-aged adults. Early "adaptability" was associated with cheerful and intellectually curious behavior, early "impulsivity" was associated with later talkativeness and loud speech, and early rated tendencies to "self-minimize" were related to adult expressions of insecurity and humility. In Study 2, between 1999-2001, a nearly identical but slightly larger subset of the Hawaii Personality and Health Cohort (N = 155, 77 F, 78 M) provided self-reported ratings of the Big Five. Each of the Big Five personality characteristics were meaningfully associated with directly observed behavior 2 to 9 years later. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these results, along with others already in the literature, show that personality resideswithin people, and is manifest through behavior in diverse ways across the varied settings of life.