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.

Research shows birth order has almost no lasting impact on adult personality: middle children score only about 1% higher in honesty–humility and agreeableness, and younger siblings’ greater risk‑taking between ages 10–14 disappears by adulthood. Personality itself evolves across life: neuroticism typically declines, emotional stability improves after 60, and major events like marriage, divorce, or retirement can shift traits in measurable ways. Studies also show intentional change is possible: structured interventions, therapy, and repeated daily behaviors can produce lasting improvements in traits such as extraversion and emotional regulation.

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.

This essay speculates about why some surveys find American liberals, especially young women, generally report more depression and anxiety than conservatives. It draws on a handful of studies, media coverage, and expert quotes. On personality, it notes that liberals tend to score higher in openness and neuroticism, while conservatives score higher in conscientiousness, which the author suggests might make them less willing to acknowledge stigmatized issues like mental illness. Other ideas include liberals labeling milder struggles as illness, social media use, and physical health differences. The author admits that since mental health diagnosis relies largely on self-report; which makes it interesting, but not a validated finding.

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.

IIn a pilot study at a debating summer school, 17 psychology students gave speeches and then rated each other's arguments for strength. The researchers tested whether Big Five traits, speaking style (the emotional tone of a speech over time), or a match between speaker and listener affected those ratings. None did. Personality didn't predict style, and neither personality nor style predicted how strong arguments seemed. Matching also made no difference. Individual listeners reacted very differently, and the authors see that variation as the key finding.

This small survey of 102 college students found that curiosity, meaning the drive to seek out and become absorbed in new experiences, was linked to three Big Five traits. Students higher in openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness reported more curiosity. Agreeableness and neuroticism showed no significant relationship with it. The authors tie curiosity to traits involving engaging with the world, goal-directed effort, and openness to new ideas.

In this vignette study, 392 German music teachers rated a fictional student who had won either a top national or a mid-level regional competition prize. Students the teachers judged musically gifted were rated higher on intelligence, motivation, and musical ability, but not on social or behavioral traits. Teacher personality mattered only a little. More agreeable teachers rated average-ability students as more socially skilled, and more conscientious teachers rated gifted students as more intelligent. Openness, extraversion, and neuroticism showed no effects.

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.

This Newsweek piece reports on the large-scale genomic personality study (46 cohorts, over 1,200 gene variants), highlighting that genetic variants linked to neuroticism predicted more time spent in the hospital. Experts note this reflects association, not causation: possible explanations include neuroticism's link to more complex health presentations, difficulty coping with diagnoses, and less adaptive behaviors like smoking. The article also covers other trait-outcome links: conscientiousness with daytime activity, openness/extraversion with night-owl tendencies, and openness with moving to cosmopolitan areas (suggesting personality and environment reinforce each other). It emphasizes no single "personality gene" exists (effects come from many small variants combined) and that environment still plays a major role alongside genetics.

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.

This Nature news piece reports on the largest genetic study of personality to date, which scanned over one million people and identified roughly 1,200 genetic variants linked to the Big Five traits: more than 800 newly discovered. According to the article, neuroticism-linked variants jumped from 224 to 706 known hits, and conscientiousness went from just 3 to 131. Each variant's individual effect is tiny (the study's own example: the difference between the 50th and 50.35th percentile), but researchers say they collectively explain 5–16% of trait variation. The piece reports that using these genetic links, the study's authors connected traits to real outcomes: conscientiousness tracked with more daytime activity, lower smoking rates, and lower BMI; openness linked to night-owl tendencies and a taste for acquired flavors like coffee and pickles; extraversion correlated with COVID-19 infection risk. The article notes the genetic signal reportedly held up even after accounting for family environment and assortative mating, suggesting that these links aren't just proxies for upbringing or who marries whom.

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.

This study combined results from 203 previous studies (nearly 4,800 correlations) to see how specific, narrow personality traits, not just the broad "Big Five," predict two things: whether someone becomes seen as a leader (emergence) and whether they're actually good at leading (effectiveness). The researchers found that these two outcomes are often driven by different traits. For example, assertiveness (a piece of extraversion) explains most of why extraverts tend to become leaders in the first place, even though extraversion overall isn't a strong predictor of whether they lead well once in charge. Similarly, being hardworking, organized, and self-disciplined (all part of conscientiousness) predicted job performance as a leader, while other conscientiousness-related traits, like rule-following, did not. The study also found that what makes a good leader depends on context: optimism mattered more for top executives, while being highly organized mattered more for student leaders than for people already working in organizations. Combining these narrow traits into custom-weighted scores predicted leadership success much better than using the broad Big Five traits alone, suggesting that companies could build better, more targeted assessments for hiring and promoting leaders.

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.