An Existential-Humanistic View of Personality Change: Co-Occurring Changes with Psychological Well-Being in a 10 Year Cohort Study

Increasingly, psychological research has indicated that an individual’s personality changes across the lifespan. We aim to better understand personality change by examining if personality change is linked to striving towards fulfilment, as suggested by existential–humanistic theories of personality dynamics. Using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a cohort of 4,733 mid-life individuals across 10years, we show that personality change was significantly associated with change in existential well-being, represented by psychological well-being (PWB). Moreover, personality change was more strongly related to change in PWB than changes in other well-being indicators such as depression, hostility and life satisfaction. Personality changed to a similar degree and explained greater variation in our well-being measures than changes in socioeconomic variables. The findings indicate personality change is necessary for the holistic development of an individual, supporting a greater need to understand personality change and increasing room for use of personality measures as indicators of well-being and policy making

Comparing indices of relative deprivation using behavioural evidence

What measure of relative deprivation best predicts health? While numerous indices of relative deprivation exist, few studies have compared how well different measures account for empirical data. Hounkpatin et al. (2016) demonstrated that the relative ranked position of an individual i's income within a comparison group (their relative rank) was a better predictor of i's health than i's relative deprivation as assessed by the widely-used Yitzhaki index. In their commentary, Stark and Jakubek (2020) argue that both relative rank and relative deprivation may matter, and they develop a composite index. Here we identify some issues with their composite index, develop an alternative based on behavioural evidence, and test the various indices against data. Although almost all existing indices assume that the significance of an income y to an individual with income y (y >y ) will be some increasing function of the difference between y and y , we find that the influence of j's income on i's health is actually a reducing function of (y -y ). This finding - that less significance is assigned to distant higher incomes than to near higher incomes - is consistent with the well-established idea that we compare ourselves primarily to similar others. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Why does income relate to depressive symptoms? Testing the income rank hypothesis longitudinally

This paper reports a test of the relative income rank hypothesis of depression, according to which it is the rank position of an individual’s income amongst a comparison group, rather than the individual’s absolute income, that will be associated with depressive symptoms. A new methodology is developed to test between psychosocial and material explanations of why income relates to well-being. This method was used to test the income rank hypothesis as applied to depressive symptoms. We used data from a cohort of 10,317 individuals living in Wisconsin who completed surveys in 1992 and 2003. The utility assumed to arise from income was represented with a constant relative risk aversion function to overcome limitations of previous work in which inadequate specification of the relationship between absolute income and well-being may have inappropriately favoured relative income specifications. We compared models in which current and future depressive symptoms were predicted from: (a) income utility alone, (b) income rank alone, (c) the transformed difference between the individual’s income and the mean income of a comparison group and (d) income utility, income rank and distance from the mean jointly. Model comparison overcomes problems involving multi-collinearity amongst the predictors. A rank-only model was consistently supported. Similar results were obtained for the association between depressive symptoms and wealth and rank of wealth in a cohort of 32,900 British individuals who completed surveys in 2002 and 2008. We conclude that it is the rank of a person’s income or wealth within a social comparison group, rather than income or wealth themselves or their deviations from the mean within a reference group, that is more strongly associated with depressive symptoms