AGING AND PERSONALITY: THE WAYS WE DO NOT CHANGE
Is our distinctive way of dealing with problems fixed too? Freud may be wrong about our becoming more rigid, but isn't he right about our essential character? Aren't we basically the same people at seventy as we were at twenty-five?
The answer is a qualified yes; we can see many seeds of that old person in the youth on the brink of life. National Institute on Aging psychologist Paul Costa and his colleagues have marshaled compelling evidence that our personalities remain remarkably stable over large chunks of adult life by examining how the personality test scores of Baltimore study volunteers change as they return over the years. Costa finds that getting older does not bring more conservatism, or more self-absorption, or more immersion in the past. The best prediction about how the years will change us is that they will not.
Costa's research shows that certain broad aspects of personality are quite stable throughout adult life: introversion versus extraversion (Do you love going out and meeting new people, or do you often feel more comfortable being alone?); cautiousness versus openness to new things (Do you adore new experiences, or are you uneasy deviating from the tried and true?); and unfortunately, the tendency to be emotionally disturbed. People who are extremely depressed, hostile, anxious, and poorly adjusted in their twenties and thirties are likely to have emotional problems in middle and old age.
These findings refer to our inner dispositions, not necessarily to how our actions appear. So the many of us who describe ourselves as shy may look extraverted to our friends or even say we have grown out of our shyness as the years advance. But we don't turn into real extraverts, because we still have a flutter of anxiety before going to a party. We can't get over those ordinary people on the street who can open their mouths and say something coherent when the camera zooms in for the nightly news. These events are feats for us. Shyness - or severe emotional problems, or reluctance to try new things - is a part of our personality we fight against, sometimes well, but tend never to fully conquer.
Many of us would agree with Freud in blaming our parents, feeling that during our childhood they taught us these fears that now keep us from fully enjoying life. We would be partly wrong. Psychologists now think that genetics, not upbringing, can have a significant effect even on such surprising aspects of who we are as our gestures, the people we like best, or our moral values. Just as we inherit the shape of eyes and face, we are born with different temperaments that determine the general outlines of our behavior. And by comparing adopted children with their biological and adoptive parents and looking at the personalities of identical twins raised together and apart; researchers have shown that the tendency to be shy or to have severe psychological problems is indeed somewhat hereditary. It's not that we are fated to be introverted or schizophrenic by our genetic makeup. It may be that a loving environment can still go a long way toward changing the negative predispositions we have. It's just that seeing Mom and Dad as the cause of every deficiency isn't fair either.
These facts do not bring encouragement to people who believe that getting a job, or winning the lottery, or living more years will bring happiness. Happiness is not determined by what happens to us. Optimists find happiness in a dungeon; pessimists see sadness in the most heavenly life. In his most recent research (involving a national sample of thousands of men and women), Costa and his coworkers find that growing older may mute the intensity of our highs and lows (we may become less emotional as the years pass); but it has absolutely no effect on overall happiness.15 Happy thirty-year-olds are likely to be happy at eighty - though at eighty, thirty-year-old joie de vivre looks more like quiet contentment.
But Costa is looking at averages and so, as with any view of the whole forest, he misses some interesting trees. Even he admits the clarity of the crystal ball varies from person to person. While most people may not change in some very basic ways as the years advance, some of us change a good deal. Who are the people who change the most? More important, who is likely to ripen or wither emotionally as they grow old?
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