Mind-Personality Relations from Childhood to Early Adulthood

Abstract

We present three studies which investigated the relations between cognition and personality from 7 to 20 years of age. All three studies showed that general cognitive ability and the general factor of personality are significantly related throughout this age span. This relation was expressed in several ways across studies. The first investigated developmental relations between three reasoning domains (inductive, deductive, and scientific) and Eysenck’s four personality dimensions in a longitudinal-sequential design where 260 participants received the cognitive tests three times, and the personality test two times, covering the span from 9 to 16 years. It was found that initial social likeability significantly shapes developmental momentum in cognition and vice versa, especially in the 9- to 11-year period. The second study involved 438 participants from 7 to 17 years, tested twice on attention control, working memory, reasoning in different domains, and once by a Big Five Factors inventory. Extending the findings of the first, this study showed that progression in reasoning is affected negatively by conscientiousness and positively by openness, on top of attention control and working memory influences. The third study tested the relations between reasoning in several domains, the ability to evaluate one’s own cognitive performance, self-representation about the reasoning, the Big Five, and several aspects of emotional intelligence, from 9 to 20 years of age (N = 247). Network, hierarchical network, and structural equation modeling showed that cognition and personality are mediated by the ability of self-knowing. Emotional intelligence was not an autonomous dimension. All dimensions except emotional intelligence influenced academic performance. A developmental model for mind-personality relations is proposed.