Personality Development Across the Lifespan

Personality Development across the Lifespan examines the development of personality characteristics from childhood, adolescence, emerging adulthood, adulthood, and old age. It provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives, methods, and empirical findings of personality and developmental psychology, also detailing insights on how individuals differ from each other, how they change during life, and how these changes relate to biological and environmental factors, including major life events, social relationships, and health.

The book begins with chapters on personality development in different life phases before moving on to theoretical perspectives, the development of specific personality characteristics, and personality development in relation to different contexts, like close others, health, and culture.

Final sections cover methods in research on the topic and the future directions of research in personality development.

• Introduces and reviews the most important personality characteristics
• Examines personality in relation to different contexts and how it is related to important life outcomes
• Discusses patterns and sources of personality development

Jule Specht is a professor for assessment and personality psychology at Universität zu Lübeck, Germany. She studied psychology at University of Münster from 2005 to 2010 and received her doctorate at the same place in 2011 for her research on "Causes and characteristics of changes in personality: Differences in the Big Five and perceived control across the life course." Afterwards, Jule Specht worked as a postdoc at Leipzig University and was a junior professor at Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2016.

Her research focuses on personality development in adulthood and on how major life events and health impact trajectories of change in personality. She is particularly interested in changes that take place in old age, because this is a period in life she figured out to be surprisingly susceptible to changes in personality and that has been studied far less than other periods of life like young adulthood.

Despite her research on personality development, Jule Specht aims at interdisciplinarity collaborations, for example in the context of her research fellowship at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and her membership at the German Young Academy. Furthermore, she was a principle investigator of a scientific network on personality development in adulthood granted by the German Research Foundation from 2012 to 2016.

Jule Specht is an associate editor for the Journal of Research in Personality and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Social Psychological and Personality Science. She was awarded the Berlin Science Prize for Junior Scientists by the Governing Mayor of Berlin in 2014 and the Best Junior Publication Prize 2013 by the Society of Friends of the German Institute of Economic Research in 2013. To communicate psychological research to the general public, Jule Specht blogs on her personal blog (http://jule-schreibt.de) and for Psychologie Heute, a German popular science magazine (http://blog.psychologie-heute.de/author/jule-specht/).