Does losing your job change your personality? Findings from a 16-year longitudinal study of Mexican-origin adults

Prior research examining the impact of job loss on personality change has yielded inconsistent findings. The present preregistered study extends prior research by analyzing longitudinal data from 1,111 predominantly 1st generation Mexican-origin adults, who reported on their employment status and Big Five personality traits up to eight times over 16 years. We explored the influence of both individual and spousal unemployment on three forms of personality trait stability and change: rank-order stability, Big Five profile stability, and mean-level changes. Job loss had no significant effects on rank-order stability, whether experienced by self or spousal. However, job loss was associated with lower profile stability; those who experienced unemployment showed lower stability in their personality profiles than those who remained employed. Job loss was associated with a wide range of mean-level personality changes; collectively, the findings suggest that the experience of unemployment can disrupt the normative process of maturation, leading to decreases in conscientiousness and agreeableness and impeding the typical decline in neuroticism. Our study is the first to establish a spillover effect of spousal job loss on partners' personality dynamics, demonstrating that personality changes can occur in response to a partner's job loss. In some cases these changes paralleled those found for one’s own job loss (declines in agreeableness and openness), whereas in other cases we found evidence of a compensatory effect (where individuals whose partner lost their job increased in conscientiousness). These findings highlight the importance of studying the effects of major life transitions on personality change in diverse samples.