ابعاد کنترل روانشناختی والدین: ارتباطات با پرخاشگری فیزیکی و رابطه پیش دبستانی در روسیه

Research has not previously examined whether higher-order traits of the Big Five are related to characteristics of life story narratives. The current study explored possible links between the broad dispositions of Stability (comprising the shared aspects of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability) and Plasticity (comprising the shared aspects of Extraversion and Openness) with narrative accounts of threat and exploration in the life-stories of 128 adults. Stability was inversely related to construals of threat in narratives, and Plasticity was positively related to exploration in narratives after controlling for the suppressor effects of demographic variables. These findings add to the research linking higher-order factors of the Big-Five to important domains as well as research linking dispositional traits to narrative identity.

A longstanding goal in personality psychology is to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of traits (Allport, 1937, Cattell, 1943 and Eysenck and Himmelweit, 1947). A growing number of personality theorists currently favor a hierarchical structure in which orthogonal higher-order traits are composed of several correlated lower-order traits (Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005). Over the last two decades, a general consensus has emerged that the highest level in the personality hierarchy is occupied by traits included in the Five-Factor Model (Costa and McCrae, 1992a and McCrae and Costa, 2008), or the Big-Five (Goldberg, 1990 and John et al., 2008): Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness. A recent challenge to the this viewpoint is that the Big-Five, which were originally conceived as orthogonal, have shown a consistent pattern of intercorrelations (DeYoung, 2006, DeYoung et al., 2002 and Digman, 1997). The intercorrelations among factors result in two higher-order factors that exist above the Big-Five in the personality hierarchy. The first factor is marked by Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability, and the second factor is marked by Extraversion and Openness. Digman (1997) originally gave the factors the provisional labels α and β, but the factors have since been renamed Stability and Plasticity, respectively, due to their putative biological origins ( DeYoung et al., 2002). Given that the higher-order factors represent a very broad level of description, they should predict a wide range of phenomena. Supporting this notion, a number of studies have established the predictive utility of Stability and Plasticity by showing their relationships to behavioral engagement and restraint (Hirsh, DeYoung, & Peterson, 2009), conformity (DeYoung et al., 2002), externalizing psychopathology (DeYoung, Peterson, Seguin, & Tremblay, 2008), and even circadian rhythms (DeYoung, Hasher, Djikic, Criger, & Peterson, 2007). A straightforward conclusion from this research is that individuals with different levels of Stability and Plasticity live their lives in very different ways. It might therefore be expected that individuals with different levels of Stability and Plasticity might interpret and make meaning out of their lives in very different ways. However, no research has examined this possibility. The purpose of this study is to explore whether Stability and Plasticity are related to how people make sense of their lives. We do this by testing whether the higher-order traits are related to thematic characteristics of life-stories. Life-stories are self-authored and integrative reconstructions of the past, interpretations of the present, and projections of one’s self into the future (McAdams, 2008 and Singer, 2004). In Western societies, life-stories begin to emerge in adolescence in response to the psychosocial challenge of constructing a coherent identity (Habermas and Bluck, 2000 and McAdams and Olson, 2010). The challenge of identity demands is the task of organizing one’s many experiences, inhabited roles, and personal values into a unified and purposeful whole (Erikson, 1963 and McAdams, 1993). Many scholars have come to believe that it is laterly through the psychological construction of life-stories that people come to understand who they are and how they relate to others and the world (e.g., Bruner, 2004, McLean et al., 2007 and Singer, 2004). In other words, identity is partly formed through one’s internalized narrative of the self. As the construction of life stories into a coherent narrative identity is one way that people may potentially give unity, meaning, and purpose to their lives, the investigation of life stories is one way to study self and identity. This study specifically aims to determine whether Stability and Plasticity are related to life-story construals of novel opportunities that life presents in terms of threat and exploration. This research is important for at least two reasons: First, it has the potential to advance personality theory and further elucidate the psychological meaning of higher-order factors of personality by establishing links between different levels of personality; second, it has the potential to validate a new method for analyzing life-stories. Below, we review research on Plasticity and Stability in order to provide a rationale and develop specific hypotheses for why the higher-order traits may be differentially related to construals of threat and exploration in life-stories.