Individual Differences in Event-Related Personality Changes: A Systematic Review and Coordinated Data Analysis

Life events have been theorized to cause personality trait changes. However, people differ in their personality trait trajectories after experiencing important life events. Although several studies have examined the sources of these individual differences, a replicable set of variables explaining individual differences in the reaction to major life events has yet to be identified. In a systematic literature review (Study 1), we integrated existing evidence on potentially important moderators of event-related changes in the Big Five personality traits (23 studies, Ntotal = 82,374). This review showed that (1) only a limited set of moderators has been linked to individual differences in event-related personality trait changes so far, and (2) that there are vast differences in the methods used to examine these effects across studies, complicating meta-analytical integration. To overcome these limitations, we conducted a coordinated data analysis (Study 2), generating novel and robust evidence for associations between a broad set of psychological, demographic, event-related, and contextual characteristics and event-related personality trait changes. Across eight large-scale panel studies (Ntotal = 90,934, Nobs = 391,024), we found several replicable moderators of event-related personality changes. For example, age and psychological variables such as life satisfaction moderated personality trait changes across datasets. Even though the effect sizes of the moderators were (very) small (bMedian = 0.007, ΔR2Median = 0.16%), the findings of the coordinated data analysis contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of event-related personality change, critical for the advancement of contemporary personality development theories.