Research Feed

The Authors tracked about 4,000 U.S. adults from 2019 to 2024 and found that neuroticism was the main personality trait linked to lasting mental distress after COVID-19 began. People high in neuroticism saw the largest and most persistent symptom increases, held higher perceived risks, and coped less adaptively, with less relaxation and exercise and more drinking. Extraversion, openness, and agreeableness showed little effect, and conscientiousness was only modestly protective, mainly among older adults. The study is correlational, and the authors stress that high neuroticism is a risk factor rather than a determinant.

Researchers in China gave 1,052 adults two personality questionnaires: the Big Five Inventory-2 and a newer scale based on the I Ching, the Quantum-8-Personality Scale. They found modest links between the two. The Q8P trait "Contradiction" (indecisiveness, inner conflict) tracked with Big Five neuroticism, Q8P extraversion tracked with Big Five extraversion, and Q8P "Yanggang" (persistence, responsibility) tracked with conscientiousness. The new scale's structure failed to hold up in testing, so the authors call the results exploratory.

Following 1,110 low-income, mostly first-generation Mexican-origin adults for 16 years, researchers found that job loss disrupted the usual maturing of personality. Afterward, people became less agreeable, less conscientious, and less open to experience, and the normal decline in neuroticism stalled. When a spouse lost a job, partners also grew less agreeable and open, but showed an immediate rise in conscientiousness. Declines in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness were steeper when the husband was the one who lost work. People who lost jobs also showed less stable overall personality profiles, though effects were small and relative standing on each trait stayed stable.

In a survey of 256 Turkish employees, mostly in private-sector manufacturing, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism predicted how easily people "catch" others' emotions, both positive and negative. The Dark Triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) did not. Openness and conscientiousness also didn't predict it. Employees who readily caught positive emotions reported better job performance, while catching negative emotions was unrelated to performance. Conscientiousness was the strongest predictor of performance itself.

This study followed 80 Polish female education students (68 remained) across four years of a teacher program that included training in psychological strengths like hope and resilience. Students' friendly feelings about time rose overall, while hostile feelings stayed about the same. Higher openness, extraversion, and agreeableness went with friendlier time attitudes, and higher neuroticism and conscientiousness went with more hostile ones. Students who scored high on directiveness (a tendency to control others) showed bigger drops in both friendly and hostile attitudes.

This systematic review of 16 studies (2020–2025) examines how the Big Five traits relate to online shopping and related digital behavior. Conscientiousness protects against impulsive and compulsive buying, while neuroticism is the strongest driver of both, including panic buying. Extraversion shows the broadest influence, notably on sharing information on social media. Openness encourages exploratory behavior, such as using online reviews. Agreeableness is the most context-dependent trait. Findings vary across cultures, and impulsive buying dominates the research.

In this experiment, 1,904 U.S. adults imagined being pulled over by an officer who behaved in one of five ways, from fully respectful to openly rude. Higher vulnerable narcissism (shame-prone, sensitive to criticism) went with less favorable reactions, including satisfaction, seeing the officer as legitimate, and willingness to obey, unless the officer was rude. Higher grandiose narcissism (entitled, self-important) went with more favorable reactions when the officer was respectful or gave no ticket. A rude officer drew uniformly negative reactions.

This study of 400 Pakistani adolescents (ages 13 to 16) found that authoritative parenting, meaning warm but firm and consistent, was linked to higher emotional intelligence, both directly and through personality. Teens who described their parents this way scored higher in agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness, and lower in neuroticism. Each of these traits in turn predicted emotional intelligence. Agreeableness was the strongest pathway and conscientiousness the weakest.

Which childhood behaviors reflect the genes tied to adult personality, before adult personality even fully forms? Using polygenic scores in over 5,500 children tracked from ages 9–13, this study found genetic propensity to neuroticism was the strongest and broadest signal (showing up as anxiety, depressed mood, sleep problems, more screen time, and even lower parental education and more family conflict). Genetic openness linked to better verbal reasoning and daydreaming (and interestingly, to later self-identifying as gay or bisexual). Genetic conscientiousness predicted being organized and persistent, agreeableness predicted fewer aggressive or rule-breaking behaviors, and extraversion predicted sociability and lower shyness. Notably, some links (like prosocial behavior and sensation-seeking) only emerged at the older age band, suggesting certain genetic "personality signatures" don't show up behaviorally until a bit later in development, indicating that the traits are latent in the genome well before they're visible in behavior.

In an online survey of 15,120 adults in Canada, the USA, and Japan, researchers examined whether personality relates to how many biological children people have. More extraverted and more agreeable people reported more children, while more neurotic people reported fewer. Openness and conscientiousness showed no clear link. Being married, female, older, and heterosexual also went with having more children, and Americans and Canadians reported more than Japanese participants. The personality-children connection varied by country, suggesting culture shapes these patterns, though the personality effects were small and based on a brief self-report questionnaire.

Do people become more alike, or more different, as they age? A meta-analysis of 362 longitudinal studies (nearly 400,000 people) says: mostly neither. The spread of individual differences in the Big Five stays remarkably stable across the entire lifespan. Two exceptions stood out: neuroticism became more variable in late childhood and early adolescence (ages 5–14), likely reflecting kids diverging in how they handle school transitions and puberty, while extraversion became slightly less variable in middle and older adulthood, perhaps as social roles nudge people toward similar levels of assertiveness. Both effects were small. The takeaway: personality traits keep their predictive power for life outcomes at every age, since that power depends on people actually differing from each other.

PDF please repeat for this article Among 647 Chinese university students, neuroticism was the strongest predictor of nightmares, bad dreams, and nightmare distress, while extraversion showed a modest protective effect against milder, non-waking bad dreams. But the study went further, grouping students into three personality "types" based on Big Five patterns: overcontrolled (high neuroticism, low everything else), undercontrolled (impulsive, low agreeableness/conscientiousness), and resilient (emotionally stable, high conscientiousness). Both overcontrolled and undercontrolled types reported more frequent and distressing nightmares than resilient types, but for different reasons: one group seemed to internalize distress, the other struggled with impulse control. Distress was worst when overcontrolled individuals faced real-life stress and relied on avoidance coping, suggesting nightmare vulnerability isn't just about traits in isolation, but how personality, stress, and coping style combine.

Can resting brain activity predict your personality? Researchers recorded 5 minutes of resting-state EEG from 115 Chinese university students and tried to predict Big Five scores from patterns of brain connectivity. The results were modest: conscientiousness showed the strongest link, tied to alpha-band connectivity (r = .30); extraversion linked to beta-band connectivity (r = .25); and neuroticism linked to theta-band phase synchronization (r = .25) — the only one that survived strict statistical correction. Agreeableness showed no detectable brain signature at all. The authors are notably cautious themselves, framing these as small, exploratory effects that need replication in bigger samples before drawing any real conclusions, a reminder that even genuine trait-related brain differences tend to be faint and hard to pin down with current methods.

Want to stay active in later life? Personality may matter more than we think. This rapid review of 19 studies on adults 40+ found extraversion consistently linked to higher physical activity across the board, while neuroticism showed the opposite pattern, especially from midlife onward. Conscientiousness's link to activity actually got stronger with age (perhaps as sustained self-discipline pays off over time) while openness mattered mainly during life transitions (like retirement) rather than as a steady predictor. Agreeableness showed no clear pattern either way. The review also found almost no interventions tailored to personality, but the two that existed were telling: a digital self-control program worked best for highly conscientious people, while an exergaming program was more motivating for less extraverted participants — suggesting future activity programs might do better by matching the approach to the person rather than using one-size-fits-all.

This large-scale genomic study meta-analyzed data from over 611,000 to 1.14 million people across 46 cohorts to identify DNA variants associated with the Big Five personality traits. The researchers found 1,260 significant genetic variants (824 new), with common variants explaining a modest 5–9% of trait variance (far less than the 40–60% suggested by twin studies, indicating environment plays a major role. Genetic effects were remarkably consistent across countries, ages, and reporting methods (self vs. other-report), and largely unconfounded by family environment or assortative mating) unlike traits such as educational attainment. Polygenic scores and Mendelian randomization analyses linked personality genetics to psychiatric disorders, health behaviors, career outcomes, and even research participation, with some evidence for causal effects (e.g., conscientiousness lowering BMI, extraversion raising COVID infection risk).

Across two studies (cross-sectional and 4-wave longitudinal), "healthy personality"—higher extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, plus lower neuroticism—consistently predicted higher well-being (mental health, life satisfaction, worthwhileness), driven mainly by overall trait elevation rather than resemblance to a specific personality "profile." Healthy personality did predict higher levels, but not stability or change, in well-being or psychological richness (novelty, challenge, perspective shifts) over time.

Using confirmatory factor analysis on 408 Chinese private university students in Chengdu, this study validated the five-factor structure of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, with acceptable-to-excellent model fit across all dimensions. The study confirms the Big Five's structural validity in this population, supporting institutional recommendations like personality development courses and data-driven student profiling systems to guide holistic growth.

Researchers compared laypeople's beliefs about personality stability to actual data. Study 1 surveyed 887 US adults; Study 2 analyzed 166,971 people across 8 longitudinal datasets tracking Big Five traits from ages 15-90. People believe personality barely changes, but empirically, neuroticism dropped 0.40 SD and extraversion 0.78 SD over the lifespan. Changes as large as those seen in income or health. Conscientiousness alone shifted a cumulative 1.91 SD across adulthood, comparable to major life-outcome variables.

In a 16-year study of 1,110 Mexican-origin adults, job loss disrupted normal personality maturation: conscientiousness and agreeableness declined, and neuroticism's typical age-related decline stalled. Openness dropped both before and after job loss. Rank-order stability was unaffected, but personality profile stability weakened. A partner's job loss also mattered (especially a husband's), which triggered lasting declines in the spouse's agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, though conscientiousness sometimes rose compensatorily.

In a study of 425 Iraqi healthcare workers, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness positively predicted innovative work behavior, while Agreeableness and Neuroticism predicted it negatively. Psychological safety mediated all five relationships, meaning employees' sense that risk-taking was safe determined whether their traits translated into innovation. Notably, Agreeableness boosted psychological safety yet still reduced innovation directly: agreeable employees felt safe but avoided the interpersonal friction innovation often requires, prioritizing harmony over disruptive idea-sharing.