Personality changes

Abstract: Does personality change across the entire life course, and are those changes due to intrinsic maturation or major life experiences? This longitudinal study investigated changes in the mean levels and rank order of the Big Five personality traits in a heterogeneous sample of 14,718 Germans across all of adulthood. Latent change and latent moderated regression models provided four main findings: First, age had a complex curvilinear influence on mean levels of personality. Second, the rank-order stability of Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness, and Agreeableness all followed an inverted U-shaped function, reaching a peak between the ages of 40 and 60, and decreasing afterwards, whereas Conscientiousness showed a continuously increasing rank-order stability across adulthood. Third, personality predicted the occurrence of several objective major life events (selection effects) and changed in reaction to experiencing these events (socialization effects), suggesting that personality can change due to factors other than intrinsic maturation.. - Fourth, when events were clustered according to their valence, as is commonly done,. - effects of the environment on changes in personality were either overlooked or. - overgeneralized. In sum, our analyses show that personality changes throughout the life. - span, but with more pronounced changes in young and old ages, and that this change is. - partly attributable to social demands and experiences.

Abstract: The appearance of chronic psychotic states, clinically closely resembling schizophrenia, in epileptic patients has been recorded from time to time by many authors. The more significant of these papers are here reviewed. Most recently Pond has associated chronic paranoid psychoses resembling schizophrenia with temporal lobe epilepsy. Patients of this type have been collected, as systematically as circumstances permitted, at the National Hospital, Queen Square, and at the Maudsley Hospital; 69 such patients were found, and have been investigated. 1. The question is examined whether the purely coincidental combination of epilepsy and schizophrenia, each of them relatively common disorders, would be sufficiently frequent to make such a collection possible. It is concluded that this is not so, and that in the bulk of cases the combination cannot be randomly determined. 2. As the appearance of a schizophrenic-like psychosis in an epileptic might be aided by a schizoid predisposition, the past personalities of these patients were examined. It was concluded that the premorbid personality was of normal type, but that when the onset of epilepsy was early, epileptic personality changes could be found in the prepsychotic personality. There was no evidence of schizoid traits in excess. 3. The mean age of onset of the psychosis was 29.8 years, after the epilepsy had lasted for a mean duration of 14.1 years. There was a significant correlation coefficient between the ages of onset of epilepsy and of schizophrenia of +0.6, indicating that the duration of the epilepsy was likely to be one of the causative factors. There was no close relationship between the frequency of fits and the onset of psychosis; but in some instances there was a suggestion of an inverse relationship, e.g. psychotic symptoms first appearing when the fit frequency was falling. 4. The modes of onset of the psychosis could be classified into acute, episodic, subacute and insidious. The last of these was the commonest (29 patients), with onset of an episodic kind the next most frequent (20 patients). The course of the psychosis was similarly classified into one with tendency to improve, a fluctuating course, and a course tending to chronicity. Of these the last was the most frequent (31 patients). 5. A phenomenological analysis of the schizophrenic symptoms shown by our patients showed delusion-formation of a typically schizophrenic kind in all but two of the patients. Typically schizophrenic hallucinatory experiences in clear consciousness occurred in 52 patients, auditory hallucinations predominating. Affective disturbances of a great variety of kinds were experienced by these patients, depressions and ecstasies being not infrequent. The most typically schizophrenic affective symptom of flatness of emotional response was observed, at least to some degree, in 28 patients. Disturbances of volition and catatonic phenomena were shown by 40 patients. The commonest form of thought disorder shown was of a type compatible with organic states, e.g. deficiency of conceptual thinking, circumstantiality, etc. Thought disorder of a specifically schizophrenic kind was shown to some degree by 31 patients. It is concluded that there is not one of the cardinal symptoms of schizophrenia which has not been exhibited at some time by these patients. It would not be possible to diagnose these patients, on psychological symptomatology alone, as suffering from anything other than a schizophrenic psychosis; the recognition of the psychosis as essentially epileptic in origin requires consideration of all the available information.

Abstract: This longitudinal study provides a comprehensive analysis of continuity and change in personality functioning from age 18 to age 26 in a birth cohort (N = 921) using the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (A Tellegen, 1982) Data were analyzed using 4 different methods: differential continuity, mean-level change, individual differences in change, and ipsative change Convergent evidence pointing toward personality continuity, as opposed to change, was found The personality changes that did take place from adolescence to adulthood reflected growth in the direction of greater maturity; many adolescents became more controlled and socially more confident and less angry and alienated Consistent with this, greater initial levels of maturity were associated with less personality change over time The results indicate that the transition from adolescence to young adulthood is marked by continuity of personality and growth toward greater maturity

Abstract: Damage to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in humans has been associated with disinhibited or socially inappropriate behaviour and emotional changes. Some of the changes may be related to difficulty in responding correctly to rewards and punishers, in that these patients have difficulty in learning to correct their choice of a visual stimulus when it is no longer associated with reward. We extend this fundamental approach by investigating the relationship between frontal dysfunction and impulsive behaviour, the behavioural, emotional and personality changes seen in patients with prefrontal cortex damage, and thus in addition illuminate the cognitive and biological processes that are impaired in impulsive people. OFC patients (n = 23) performed more impulsively on both self-report and cognitive/behavioural tests of impulsivity, reported more inappropriate 'frontal' behaviours, and performed worse on a stimulus-reinforcement association reversal task, than non-OFC prefrontal cortex lesion control (n = 20) and normal control (n = 39) participants. Further, OFC patients experienced more subjective anger than non-OFC and normal participants, and less subjective happiness than normals; and had a faster subjective sense of time (overestimated and underproduced time intervals) than normal controls, while non-OFC patients did not differ from normals. Finally, both OFC and non-OFC patients were less open to experience than normal participants. There were no differences between OFC patients, non-OFC lesion patients and normal controls on all other personality traits, most notably extraversion. In a spatial working memory task, the non-OFC group, most of whom had dorsolateral prefrontal cortex lesions, were impaired in that they repeatedly returned to previously chosen empty locations ('within errors'), whereas OFC patients were not impaired on this measure. Thus there is a dissociation between the effects of OFC damage which does not affect this measure of spatial working memory but does affect impulsive and inappropriate behaviour, reversal, personality, time perception and emotion; and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex damage which does affect this measure of spatial working memory, but not impulsive and inappropriate behaviour, reversal, personality, time perception and emotion. The effects of OFC damage on impulsive and related behaviours described here have implications for understanding impulsive behaviour.