The psychological development of young adults may have taken a hit, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Normally, people tend to become more conscientious and agreeable and less neurotic with age, a process known as psychological maturation. But in the United States, the pandemic seems to have reversed that personality trajectoryparticularly in adults under the age of 30, researchers report on September 28 at PLOS ONE. If these patterns persist, it could mean long-term problems for this cohort, the researchers say.
“Over time, you get better at being responsible, managing your emotions, and getting along with others,” says personality psychologist Rodica Damian of the University of Houston, who was not involved in this study. “The fact that in these young adults you see the opposite pattern shows developmental delay.”
Personalities shape the way people think, feel and behave. Researchers often rate a person’s personality profile based on five basic traits: neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion and openness to experience (SN: 01/09/21). Over time, these traits change slightly in individuals; neuroticism tends to decrease, for example, while agreeableness generally improves.
The pandemic, however, could upset these typical trendlines. Even after accounting for expected changes, researchers in the new study observed about a decade of personality change, on average for all study participants, in just three years – but going in the opposite direction of the expected direction. Young adults showed the greatest change in certain traits. Middle-aged adults – ages 30 to 64 – showed more change in all traits. The personality of the elderly, meanwhile, remained largely unchanged.
Such age differences make intuitive sense to personality psychologist Wiebke Bleidorn of the University of Zurich. “The density of experiences in adolescence and early adulthood is so much higher” than later in life, says Bleidorn, who was not involved in the study. “If you miss your senior year of high school, you can’t get that back.”
To examine personality change in the United States before and during the pandemic, personality psychologist Angelina Sutin and her colleagues analyzed data from the Understanding America Study.
This survey examines how attitudes and behaviors in the country are changing in response to major events, such as the 2020 presidential election and the ongoing pandemic. Of those surveyed, about 7,000 people — ages 18 to 109 — had taken a personality inventory at least once in the six years before the pandemic and once during the pandemic.
Based on these responses, overall neuroticism in the United States declined slightly in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. This finding mirrors what the researchers found with a different data set two years ago, when they reported that neuroticism decreased in adults during the first six weeks of the pandemic. But the new findings include data from 2021 and 2022, which show the decline was fleeting.
This initial dip was likely due to the sense of togetherness that emerged in the early months of the health crisis, as well as people attributing their worries to the crisis rather than their own internal state, says Sutin, of Florida State University. in Tallahassee. “The second year, all that support crumbled.”
Average neuroticism scores have since rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. But the picture is nuanced, the researchers found. The 2020 drop was driven almost entirely by middle-aged participants and older adults. For both of these groups, neuroticism scores continued to decline over the following years, albeit more slowly than before the pandemic. Neuroticism scores among young adults in 2021 and beyond, however, have exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
Similarly, conscientiousness and agreeableness scores also declined among middle-aged adults in 2021 and early 2022, but the decline was not as steep as seen among younger adults.
The results are disturbing, says Sutin. “We know these traits predict all kinds of long-term outcomes.”
For example, high neuroticism is linked to mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, and feelings of loneliness. And low conscience is linked to poor outcomes in education, work, health, and relationships.
Whether these personality changes persist remains to be seen. It could be that young adults “missed the boat” during a critical developmental period, says Damian. Perhaps they would have graduated from college or pursued more lucrative careers had it not been for the pandemic. Or maybe those people can still reach their designated stop, just late.
“There are critical developmental periods, and then there is plasticity,” says Damian. “We don’t know how it’s going to pan out.”