Changes in Personality Traits Predict Early Career Outcomes

Post by Shireen Parimoo

What's the science?

Are conscientious people more likely to be satisfied with their career? Several studies show that career outcomes are associated with personality traits. For example, traits like emotional stability and conscientiousness are related to higher income and occupational attainment. Although these traits are largely stable aspects of our personality, they also tend to vary across different life stages, suggesting that our personality undergoes changes over the course of our lifetime. It is particularly important to understand the nature of personality growth in early adulthood because it is a critical period in career development. This week in Psychological Science, Hoff and colleagues investigated how personality changes from late adolescence to early adulthood are related to various career outcomes.

How did they do it?

The authors followed two large, nationally representative samples of adolescents in Iceland (Sample 1 N = 485, Sample 2 N = 1290), beginning when participants were students (15-17 years old) to when they were young adults (27-29 years old). During this period, they measured participants’ personality traits at three (Sample 1) and five time points (Sample 2) using the NEO Five-Factor Inventory, a personality test that provides scores on the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. They used linear growth-curve analysis to assess participants’ baseline scores in adolescence on each personality trait and the rate at which their scores changed over time.

After approximately 12 years, the authors recorded subjective career outcomes such as job and career satisfaction, as well as objective measures like monthly income, highest degree obtained, and occupational prestige. Occupational prestige was based on the most recent job held by the participants. To rate occupations on status and prestige, they used the online tool O*NET that classified jobs into different titles (e.g., surgeon) and assigned each title a rating on various work-value dimensions like Achievement and Recognition. To investigate the relationship between personality changes and career outcomes, the authors specified a separate path model (a statistical approach) for each outcome, including personality traits as predictors and controlling for the effect of gender.

What did they find?

Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness increased with age, whereas emotional stability did not change, and extraversion scores decreased. Higher conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness in adolescence were associated with higher degree attainment in the future. Similarly, baseline levels of emotional stability and conscientiousness (Sample 1) as well as openness and extraversion (Sample 2) were related to greater future occupational prestige. In fact, emotional stability and conscientiousness in adolescence were positively related to nearly all career outcomes, highlighting their importance in future career development. Moreover, changes in personality traits were also predictive of career outcomes. For example, higher income and career satisfaction were associated with increases in emotional stability from adolescence to young adulthood. Similarly, although extraversion decreased in general, increases in extraversion were related to higher career and job satisfaction. Overall, these results show that personality traits in adolescence predict objective measures of career success whereas certain changes in personality traits over time are linked to subjective career outcomes.

What's the impact?

These results are exciting because they highlight both enduring and mutable aspects of personality development in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In addition, this is the first longitudinal study to demonstrate how personality traits in adolescence and young adulthood predict objective and subjective career outcomes, respectively. Future research can further examine the direction of the relationship between personality changes and career success.

Hoff et al. Personality Changes Predict Early Career Outcomes: Discovery and Replication in 12-Year Longitudinal Studies. Psychological Science (2020). Access the original scientific publication here.

Political Views Bias Information Processing in the Brain

Post by Deborah Joye

What's the science?

With an important election fast approaching in the United States, it is clearer than ever that political polarization exists in our society. A powerful contributor to political polarization is motivated reasoning; when we make decisions based on emotional bias rather than evidence or facts. Motivated reasoning is made especially obvious when people with opposing beliefs are presented with identical information and their biased interpretation leads them to become even more entrenched in their original positions.

But how might identical information trigger such different outcomes, and can we see these different responses in the brain? It’s possible that our previously held beliefs change what we pay attention to when we absorb new information. For example, someone might view a political ad and only pay attention to information that supports their beliefs. It’s also possible that previously held beliefs change how people interpret incoming information. For example, one person may interpret actions as threatening, risky, or offensive where someone with different beliefs might not. This week in PNAS, Leong and colleagues demonstrate that when viewing political content,  conservative- and liberal-leaning people displayed differential activation of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex which was intensified by moral-emotional and risk-related language.

How did they do it?

The authors scanned thirty-eight participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed videos on immigration policies. Before scanning, participants indicated their support for each of the policies, and the authors calculated an overall “Immigration Attitude” to identify liberal- and conservative-leaning participants. Importantly, the authors controlled for age, sex, income, and education. The authors first asked if neural responses to the videos were different across participants. They calculated an intersubject correlation; a measure of how similar brain activity is across participants. This measure also allowed the authors to investigate which regions of the brain exhibited differential activity..

The authors next asked whether differential brain activity was specifically associated with certain content within the videos. The authors categorized words in the videos that were related only to emotions (e.g. fear, sad, etc.), related only to morals (e.g. ethics, etc.), or related to both morals and emotions (e.g. compassion, harm, etc.). The authors identified a total of 50 categories, including risk, religion, power, family, social, male, and female, among others. Finally, the authors asked whether brain activity that was more like either political group might predict the participant’s preference for supporting the position held by that group. To assess this, the authors averaged brain activity across both groups, creating a map of what the signal might look like for an “average” liberal or conservative. After each video, the authors asked each participant whether they’d be more or less likely to support that policy. The authors then assessed whether a particular participant’s brain activity during that video was more like that of the average conservative or the average liberal.

What did they find?

The authors found that overall neural responses to the political videos were shared across participants. Specifically, regions of the brain related to sensory processing displayed similar activity patterns regardless of the participant’s political leanings, suggesting that political attitudes do not alter sensory processing. However, activity patterns in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex diverged between liberal and conservative participants. Previous research has demonstrated that this brain region is known to be active when participants are manipulated to have different interpretations of an ambiguous story. 

The authors also found that the difference in activity patterns in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex was associated with the use of moral-emotional and risk-related language, suggesting that those categories of language are most likely to drive divergent neural responses between liberals and conservatives. The authors also found that connectivity between the ventral striatum (associated with emotional processing) and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex was more similar for participants with similar political views. Lastly, the authors found that for each video, whether a participant’s neural activity was more like the average conservative or liberal predicted their attitude change. For example, a participant with brain activity patterns more like the average conservative was more likely to display attitude change further in the conservative direction.

What's the impact?

This study found that political attitudes can drive divergent neural processing of political information. One striking implication of these findings has to do with the “echo chamber” of social media, where online videos with moral-emotional content tend to spread faster within social circles sharing similar political beliefs. These findings suggest people with already formed political biases will respond to such political content with further attitude polarization. This study also demonstrates that content that features moral-emotional and risk-related language is most likely to be processed in this biased way. These findings have important implications for our political discourse moving forward and have implications for the type of language we use in a political context, as well as the impact this may have on an increasingly polarized society.

Leong et al., Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content, PNAS (2020). Access the original scientific publication here.

Brain Training: Do Computerized Games Improve Cognitive Ability?

Post by Flora Moujaes

What's the science?

In recent years, a billion-dollar industry has emerged.  It posits that you can enhance your cognitive ability, and even your IQ, simply by completing computerized games. But does science really support this claim? A limited number of studies have shown that training on a cognitive task can improve your performance on other tasks that recruit similar cognitive mechanisms; however many studies have failed to replicate these results. Even when training involves different tasks that engage multiple cognitive systems, research has shown that participants just get better at completing the specific tasks, rather than improving their general cognitive ability. This week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Stojanoski and colleagues conducted a large-scale online study, investigating whether brain-training tasks improve cognitive ability.

How did they do it?

The authors recruited 11,000 individuals online from a total of 145 countries. Over 1000 participants were active users of commercially available brain training programs including Luminosity, Peak, Elevate, Brian HQ and Neural Nation. The brain-training participants had used such programs for an average of 8.5 months. The authors assessed the participants’ general cognitive function using the Cambridge Brian Sciences online assessment battery, which measures cognitive skills such as working memory, verbal ability, reasoning, decision-making, and inhibitory control.

What did they find?

To see if brain training produces generalizable improvements in high-level cognition, the authors compared whether on average the 1009 participants with an active history of active brain training performed better than a demographically matched group who had no such history. The authors found that there was no difference in performance between active brain trainers and non-brain trainers, even when they compared non-brain trainers to those brain trainers who had been training for longest. They also examined whether the amount of time spent using brain training programs increased cognitive performance, but found that there was no relationship between self-reported length of time participants devoted to brain training and cognitive performance.

What's the impact?

The findings of this study do not support computerized games as a way to improve cognitive performance. Given that a billion-dollar industry with over 70 million active users has been built on this premise, more research is needed into whether such brain-training programs are really worth people’s time and money. In particular, studies that employ a within-subject design or follow participants over time are needed in order to draw stronger conclusions.

A word of caution: The methodology in this study did not take into account individual improvements within-subjects (comparing each participant’s cognitive ability before and after brain training), and participants were not randomly assigned to receive brain training.

Stojanoski et al. Brain training habits are not associated with generalized benefits to cognition: An online study of over 1000 “brain trainers”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2020). Access the original scientific publication here.