Personality refers to the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguish individuals from one another. Studies have found that certain personality traits are associated with higher levels of life satisfaction. For example, people who are high in extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction than those who are low in these traits.
According to research published by the American Psychological Association, certain personality traits are associated with life satisfaction, and that association remains stable regardless of age, despite changes in social roles and responsibilities that people may experience throughout their adult lives.
“Many studies have found that people with certain personality profiles are happier in life than others. However, whether this holds true across the lifespan has not been thoroughly researched. Extraverted people, for example, who are sociable and talkative, may be particularly happy in young adulthood, when they are typically forming new social relationships” Gabriel Olaru, PhD, an assistant professor at Tilburg University, is one of the study’s co-authors. “We thus wanted to examine if some personality traits are more or less relevant to life, social and work satisfaction in specific life phases.”
The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Our findings show that, despite differences in life challenges and social roles, personality traits are important for our satisfaction with life, work, and social contacts across young, middle, and older adulthood.
Manon van Scheppingen
Researchers examined data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel survey, a nationally representative survey of Dutch households, from 2008 to 2019 to see how the relationship between personality traits and life satisfaction changes over time.
Over the course of 11 years, 9,110 Dutch participants ranging in age from 16 to 95 at the time of the first survey completed multiple questionnaires to assess their Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability/neuroticism – as well as their overall satisfaction with their social connections and life. Only the 5,928 survey participants who were working at the time of the survey responded to questions about their job satisfaction.
The researchers found that most of the relationships between personality traits and satisfaction remained the same across the adult lifespan, and that emotional stability was the trait most strongly associated with people’s satisfaction with their life, social connections and career.
“Our findings show that, despite differences in life challenges and social roles, personality traits are important for our satisfaction with life, work, and social contacts across young, middle, and older adulthood,” said Manon van Scheppingen, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Tilburg University and another study co-author. “The personality traits remained equally relevant throughout the adult lifespan, or in some cases became even more interconnected for work satisfaction.”
The researchers also found that different personality traits were related to people’s satisfaction with their social lives and careers – most notably conscientiousness for work satisfaction, and extraversion and agreeableness for social satisfaction. People who saw increases in these traits across time also reported increases in their life, social and work satisfaction.
Age differences had the greatest impact on people’s job satisfaction. The relationship between career satisfaction and emotional stability grew moderately stronger as study participants aged.
Despite a weaker overall correlation between openness and life satisfaction, the researchers discovered that people who increased their openness also increased their life satisfaction over the course of the LISS survey’s 11 years. According to the researchers, this relationship could be explained by indirect processes.
“Emotional stability is likely to have a strong link with global and domain-specific satisfaction because it colors people’s overall perception of the world,” Olaru said.
“The work context is a good example of how personality interacts with the environment. One of our findings was that the relationship between emotional stability and job satisfaction grows stronger with age. This could be explained by the fact that emotionally stable people are less afraid to leave unsatisfactory jobs and are more likely to apply for jobs that are more challenging and, in the long run, more fulfilling and enjoyable “van Scheppingen elaborated.
According to the researchers, future research should look into how variables that change with age, such as income, employment status, marital status, and health, affect the relationship between personality traits and overall life satisfaction.
