In New Scientist, research that shows that, hey, people really *do* mellow with age... and that implies that some of that stuff the magick/NLP crowd go on about can really, like, work.
Because we keep changing.
Sanjay Srivastava and colleagues surveyed over 130,000 people on key personality traits known as the "Big Five": conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion. These traits are not dependent on factors like mood, says Srivastava, now a psychologist at Stanford University, California.
Many psychologists believe these five key characteristics are fundamentally genetic and do not change or change only slowly after 30. But the research suggests that not only do people continue to change after this milestone, but in some ways they change more.
"We found a mixture of different patterns of how people change," Srivastava told New Scientist. "On average people were getting better at dealing with the ups and downs of life. In particular they were more responsive and more caring [with age]."
...The team found that neuroticism decreased with age for women but not men. Openness also declined slightly with age for both sexes.
They also found that people tended to show a spurt in conscientiousness - which involves the ability to deal with tasks and organisation - in their twenties. Agreeability, which encompasses affection and warmth, improved on average in most people's thirties.
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