Individuals are expected to mature with increasing age, but it is not yet fully understood which factors contribute to this maturation process. Using data of a representative sample of Germans (N = 14,718) who gave information about their Big Five personality traits twice over a period of 4...

Personality predicts how we interact with others, what partners we have, and how happy and lasting our romantic relationships are. At the same time, our experiences in these relationships may affect our personality. Who experiences specific major relationship events and how do these events...

Compulsory military service is a uniformed life event disrupting the lives of young men (and sometimes women) in countries with conscription. Consequently, the development of personality and subjective well-being during service was investigated using representative population data from the...

Several studies have suggested that the rank-order stability of personality increases until midlife and declines later in old age. However, this inverted U-shaped pattern has not consistently emerged in previous research; in particular, a recent investigation implementing several methodological...

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...

Personality predicts how we interact with others, what partners we have, and how happy and lasting our romantic relationships are. At the same time, our experiences in these relationships may affect our personality. Who experiences specific major relationship events and how do these events...

In line with the Social Investment Principle, becoming a parent should lead to more mature behavior and an increase in conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability. However, previous research provided mixed results that do not support this idea. Here, we used data from a nationally...