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Childhood personality as a harbinger of

competence and resilience in adulthood

ARTICLE in DEVELOPMENT AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY MAY 2012

Impact Factor: 4.89 DOI: 10.1017/S0954579412000120 Source: PubMed

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Development and Psychopathology 24 (2012), 507528
# Cambridge University Press 2012
doi:10.1017/S0954579412000120

SPECIAL SECTION ARTICLE

Childhood personality as a harbinger of competence and resilience

in adulthood

REBECCA L. SHINERa AND ANN S. MASTENb

a
Colgate University; and b University of Minnesota

Abstract
This study examined the significance of childhood Big Five personality traits for competence and resilience in early adulthood. Resilience was defined in terms
of adaptive success in age-salient developmental tasks despite significant adversity throughout childhood/adolescence. The Project Competence Longitudinal
Study tracked 205 young people from childhood (around age 10) to emerging adulthood (EA, age 20) and young adulthood (YA, age 30; 90% retention).
Multimethod composites were created for personality traits, adversity exposure, and adult outcomes of academic achievement, work, rule-abiding conduct,
friendship, and romantic relationships. Regressions showed significant main effects of childhood personality predicting adult outcomes, controlling for
adversity, with few interaction effects. In person-focused analyses, the resilient group in EA and YA (high competence, high adversity) showed higher
childhood conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness and lower neuroticism than the maladaptive group (low competence, high adversity). The
competent (high competence, low adversity) and resilient groups showed similar childhood traits. Turnaround cases, who changed from the maladaptive group
in EA to the resilient group in YA, exhibited higher childhood conscientiousness than persistently maladaptive peers. Findings suggest that children on
pathways to success in adulthood, whether facing low or high adversity, have capacities for emotion regulation, empathy and connection, dedication to
schoolwork, and mastery and exploration.

Children growing up in conditions of adversity face many
challenges as they move into adolescence and adulthood, in-
cluding heightened risks for academic failure, social difficul-
ties, conduct problems, and various forms of psychopathol-
ogy (Burt & Masten, 2009; Luecken & Gress, 2010;
Luthar, 2006). Yet, a surprising number of children facing se-
rious adversity in their families and communities avoid such
negative outcomes and show positive patterns of develop-
ment; such phenomena have come to be labeled resilience
(Masten, 2001). A number of childhood factors have been
identified as promoting resilience, including contextual fac-
tors such as positive parenting and schools (Luthar, 2006;
Masten, 2007). Childrens individual differences likewise
Work on this paper was supported by grants from the Colgate Research Coun-
cil and from a Presidential Scholar award from Colgate University (to R.L.S.)
and the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs (to A.S.M.). The
results were based on data collected as part of the Project Competence Lon-
gitudinal Study, which has been supported through grants to Ann Masten,
Auke Tellegen, and Norman Garmezy from the National Institute of Mental
Health (MH33222), the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Science
Foundation (SBR-9729111), and the University of Minnesota. Any conclu-
sions or views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not nec-
essarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Mental Health, National
Science Foundation, or William T. Grant Foundation.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Rebecca L. Shiner, De-
partment of Psychology, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY
13346; E-mail: rshiner@colgate.edu.
507
may promote positive functioning in the face of adversity;
there is considerable evidence, for example, showing that
IQ, self-regulation, and positive self-perceptions are associ-
ated with good developmental outcomes among children
who have overcome diverse disadvantages and adversities
(Sapienza & Masten, 2011).
Childrens personality traits, which are their typical pat-
terns of behaving, thinking, and feeling, are likely to be an-
other source of resilience as young people navigate the years
from childhood to adulthood. Although a number of studies
have examined the contributions of childrens traits to resili-
ent outcomes over shorter time windows (Lengua & Wachs,
in press), few studies have examined the contributions of a
broad range of childhood traits to the development of resili-
ence in adulthood. The present study examines the contribu-
tions of the Big Five personality traits assessed in childhood
to resilient outcomes assessed in the transition to adulthood
(around age 20) and young adult years (age 30) in the longi-
tudinal Project Competence study of risk and resilience (Gar-
mezy & Tellegen, 1984; Masten & Powell, 2003; Masten &
Tellegen, 2012).
Risk, Competence, and Resilience: A Conceptual
Overview
Over the last four decades, researchers have developed in-
creasingly complex models for describing and investigating
508
resilience in young people who overcome adversity (Egeland,
Carlson, & Sroufe, 1993; Garmezy, Masten, & Tellegen,
1984; Luthar, 2006; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Mas-
ten, 2001, in press; Masten et al., 1988; Rutter, 1987; Werner
& Smith, 1982, 1992, 2001). Resilience can be conceptual-
ized as the capacity of a dynamic system to withstand or re-
cover from significant challenges that threaten its stability,
viability, or development (Masten, 2011, p. 494). Although
there remain disagreements about the definition of resilience,
most contemporary models require two conditions to be met
for identifying resilience in the lives of individuals (Luthar,
2006; Masten, 2007, 2011): the individual must have been ex-
posed to significant risk that increases the likelihood of
negative development, and the individual must display posi-
tive adaptation in spite of that risk.
Risk is a very broad term referring to elevated probability for
some undesired outcome in a population or group, and a risk
factor usually designates an attribute (of the individual or the
context) that is associated with the negative outcome (Masten,
in press). Individuals with the risk factor have a generally
higher likelihood of developing the undesired outcome, but
whether they actually do develop the problem will vary: risk
is a probabilistic concept. Adversity, including negative or trau-
matic life experiences, encompasses a broad subtype of risk fac-
tors, whether acute (e.g., car accident) or chronic (e.g., child
maltreatment) in nature. Risk factors commonly co-occur or
pile up in the lives of individuals, and often show cumulative
effects; on average, problems tend to arise as risk cumulates, a
phenomenon described in terms of risk gradients or dose effects
(Obradovic, Shaffer, & Masten, in press).
Positive adaptation likewise has been defined in a variety of
ways across studies. Although some researchers have focused
on the absence of problematic behaviors as the developmental
outcome of interest, most work on psychosocial resilience in-
stead has focused on the development of positive outcomes
(Luthar, 2006; Masten, in press). These positive outcomes
may include external adaptation (e.g., academic achievement
or the development of positive relationships), internal adapta-
tion (e.g., well-being or maturity), or both. The model adopted
in the present study conceptualizes positive adaptation in terms
of the development of competence, or the accomplishment
of age-salient developmental tasks (Masten & Coatsworth,
1998; Masten et al., 1995; Waters & Sroufe, 1983). Develop-
mental tasks encapsulate expectations for behavior in different
domains of life within a particular context, culture, and time in
history, and they change in different periods of life as people
mature and face new challenges (McCormick, Kuo, & Masten,
2011). At this time, in the United States and many other soci-
eties, it is widely expected that school-age children will achieve
in school (academic achievement), follow rules of conduct in
the home, school, and community (rule-abiding conduct),
and get along with peers and develop friendships (social com-
petence; Masten et al., 1995). These three domains of compe-
tence remain important in the late adolescent and emerging
adult years spanning the late teens to the 20s (Arnett,
2000), and they play an important role in shaping later success
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
in competence in work and romantic relationships, two do-
mains that become especially salient in young adulthood
(McCormick et al., 2011; Roisman, Masten, Coatsworth, &
Tellegen, 2004).
Much of the early work on resilience addressed the question
of what factors or processes enable children to attain positive
outcomes despite exposure to adversity and risk (Masten,
2007, in press). As with the concepts of risk and positive adap-
tation, these factors have been conceptualized in a variety of
ways. Two particularly important basic models for defining
these factors are main effect models and moderating ef-
fects models. In the case of main effects, the identified factors
are related to outcomes of interest in similar ways across levels
of risk exposure. Factors with positive effects independent of
risk have been variously termed promotive factors (Sameroff,
2000), assets, or resources. For example, in a study of children
either exposed or not exposed to domestic violence, easy tem-
perament predicted positive outcomes, regardless of the chil-
drens violence exposure (Martinez-Torteya, Bogat, von Eye,
& Levendosky, 2009). In many cases, however, and particu-
larly in the case of individual differences in personality, the
same attribute could be easily described by positive or negative
language, because it is distributed along a continuum.
In the case of moderating effects, the effects of the mod-
erator variable differ depending on level of risk exposure
(Masten, 2001, in press). Moderators are described as pro-
tective factors when the expected negative effect of high
risk or adversity appears to be attenuated or reduced in the
presence of the protective factor. For example, in a study of
young homeless children, parenting quality moderated risk,
such that when sociodemographic risk was high, the achieve-
ment of children with good parenting quality appeared to be
protected (Herbers et al., 2011). In the case of individual dif-
ferences in personality as moderators of adversity, when ad-
versity is expected to have negative effects on outcomes, per-
sonality traits could attenuate the effects of adversity
(protective function) or exacerbate them (vulnerability effect)
or both. Moreover, these effects could vary across situations,
developmental timing, or criteria of adaptation.
In the context of considering the contributions of personal-
ity traits to resilience, it is especially important to emphasize
that resilience itself is not a trait (Masten, in press). The capac-
ity for adaptation indicated by the concept of resilience extends
beyond the individual (e.g., relationships also contribute to re-
silience), and also is dynamic over time, changing as a result of
many interactions between individuals and their contexts. Re-
silience emerges from the interplay of many processes in con-
cert; it is not a static characteristic of a person (Luthar et al.,
2000; Masten, 2001, in press; Yates, Egeland, & Sroufe,
2003). Resilience therefore can change as the person and con-
text change. Sometimes researchers describe particular person-
ality traits or personality types as being resilient personal-
ities; this name is problematic if it suggests that resilience is
a stable characteristic of a person. Personality traits undoubt-
edly contribute to the development of resilience (and maladap-
tation), both overall and in specific outcome domains, but the
Childhood personality and resilience
processes involved are complex. Moreover, the same trait (e.g.,
fearfulness) could be protective with regard to one outcome
(such as delinquency or risk-taking behavior), while at the
same time posing vulnerability for another outcome (social
problems or anxiety symptoms). Furthermore, recent research
on biological sensitivity to context suggests that there may
be individual differences in how responsive individuals are
to experience. In other words, the same trait could function
to enhance vulnerability in the context of adversity, but in a be-
nign environment or in an intervention context it could func-
tion to enhance positive adaptation (Belsky, Bakermans-Kra-
nenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007; Ellis & Boyce, 2011).
Childrens Personality Traits as a Potential Source
of Resilience
From the inception of research on resilience over four decades
ago, researchers have been interested in the possibility that chil-
drens traits may influence their capacity to thrive even in the
face of adversity. For example, in the pioneering Kauai Longi-
tudinal Study initiated by Emmy Werner (Werner & Smith,
1982, 1992, 2001), the researchers included measures of the
young childrens early temperaments as potential predictors
of later resilience. Similarly, in the Project Competence study
that is the focus of this paper (Garmezy et al., 1984; Masten
& Tellegen, 2012), Garmezy and colleagues measured a broad
range of individual differences in the children at the start of the
study. Garmezy did so because he considered individual attri-
butes to be a major potential source of resilience (Garmezy,
1985). Thus, the children in Project Competence were rated
by parents, interviewers, and teachers on a wide range of indi-
vidual differences that might prove to be moderators of risk, ei-
ther reducing or exacerbating the effects of adversity on out-
comes. The researchers included such items as turned on by
the life of the mind, kind and generous, cynical, gets upset
easily, serious about schoolwork, colorful and expresses self
vividly, and imaginative and creative. Researchers studying Childrens personality traits are likely to shape the develop-
resilience seem to have recognized from the outset that childrens
typical patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion likely shape
their competence and influence adaptation in the face of stress.
Although researchers studying resilience recognized the po-
tential importance of childrens traits from the start, they had
relatively little guidance about what traits to measure in the
early days of resilience research. Over the last two decades,
the structure of childrens personality traits has become increas-
ingly well understood. The basic structure observed in children,
adolescents, and adults is a five-factor structure (Caspi & Shi-
ner, 2006; Shiner & DeYoung, in press); specifically, the Big
Five traits are extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness,
agreeableness, and openness to experience. Extraversion
describes the extent to which a person actively engages the
world or avoids intense social experiences. Extraverted chil-
dren are outgoing, energetic, and expressive versus socially in-
hibited and passive. This trait bears similarity to a temperamen-
tal trait of surgency/positive emotionality, which taps young
childrens tendencies toward high activity, a rapid approach
509
style, expressions of positive emotions, and pleasure and ex-
citement in social interactions (Rothbart, 2011). Neuroticism
describes the extent to which a person experiences the world
as distressing or threatening. More neurotic children routinely
experience a wide variety of negative emotions, such as worry,
irritability, distress, and feelings of vulnerability and self-con-
sciousness. This trait shares significant overlap with a tempera-
ment trait called negative emotionality, which taps childrens
tendencies toward sadness, fear, irritability, and frustration,
and their difficulty with being quieted after high arousal (Roth-
bart, 2011). Conscientiousness describes the extent and
strength of impulse control in task-focused endeavors. Children
high on this trait are persistent, planful, careful, and attentive ra-
ther than careless and impulsive. This trait appears to be an ex-
panded version of the temperament trait effortful control, which
includes persistence at tasks, pleasure in low intensity situa-
tions, and the ability to inhibit impulses and sustain attention
(Rothbart, 2011). Agreeableness describes a persons interper-
sonal nature on a continuum from warmth and compassion to an-
tagonism. Highly agreeable children are cooperative with limits
set by adults, generous, kind, and considerate, rather than self-
ish, egotistical, aggressive, and hurtful. Openness to experience
(sometimes called intellect) describes the degree to which a
person explores, seeks, and attends to internal and external sen-
sory stimulation and abstract information. Children high on this
trait are quick and eager to learn, perceptive, curious, creative,
and adaptable in the face of uncertainty, whereas children low
on this trait exhibit lower levels of creativity and intellectual in-
terests. This Big Five model thus includes a more complete
range of traits than most temperament models, while still in-
cluding important temperament traits (Caspi & Shiner, 2006;
Shiner, 1998).
Findings on the Contributions of Temperament and
Personality Traits to Resilient Outcomes
ment of resilience through a number of direct and indirect pro-
cesses. Dozens of studies now document that childrens tem-
perament and personality traits shape their competence and
maladaptation over time (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005;
Caspi & Shiner, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, &
Goldberg, 2007; Rothbart & Bates, 2006; Shiner & Caspi,
2003; Zenter & Shiner, in press). Childrens traits appear to
have direct effects on academic achievement, rule-abiding
conduct, and relationships with peers, both concurrently
and across time into adulthood, even when earlier compe-
tence in those domains is taken into account. For example,
conscientiousness and effortful control are robust and consis-
tent predictors of academic achievement, and this seems to be
the case because these traits directly affect homework com-
pletion, classroom behavior, and regulation of interpersonal-
and work-related impulses (Duckworth & Allred, in press).
Similarly, children with high levels of positive affect engage
in less solitary activity and have more positive interactions
with peers than do children low on positive affect, as long
510
as the positive emotions are accompanied by good self-regu-
lation (Coplan & Bullock, in press); these behaviors seem to
be likely mediators between positive affect and stronger
friendships and popularity with peers. Thus, childrens traits
may have a direct impact on resilience by directly shaping
childrens capacity for competent functioning in the face of
adversity.
Childrens traits are likely to have indirect effects on even-
tual competence and resilience as well, because traits shape
experiences of the environment (Caspi & Shiner, 2006; Len-
gua & Wachs, in press). Several indirect processes seem espe-
cially relevant to coping with adversity: childrens traits influ-
ence the reactions and support that they evoke from others,
their interpretation of daily experiences, and their ability to
cope with adversity. First, childrens traits elicit different re-
actions from the environment and influence others reactions,
beginning in the first few months of life. For example, there is
some limited evidence that more emotionally positive chil-
dren evoke more support and acceptance from adults, espe-
cially parents (Bates, Schermerhorn, & Peterson, in press;
Werner, 1996). By evoking more support, emotionally posi-
tive children may garner more resources for coping with
chronic adversity. Second, traits are likely to have an impact
on how youths interpret adverse life experiences. With the
emergence of belief systems and expectations, childrens
traits may begin to influence how environmental experiences
are construed, thus shaping childrens effective experiences
of the environment. A recent empirical example of such con-
strual processes involves the development of depressogenic
cognitive styles. Childrens early tendencies toward negative
emotionality interact with their negative life experiences to
predict a negative attributional style for explaining life events
(Mezulis, Hyde, & Abramson, 2006). A child lower in negative
emotionality may therefore tend to develop a more protec-
tive way of interpreting adverse life experiences. Third, traits
shape childrens capacities for coping with daily stress. A re-
cent meta-analysis explored the relations between personality
traits and particular coping styles in youths and adults and
found that traits were more strongly related to coping strategies
in younger samples than older ones (Connor-Smith & Flasch-
bart, 2007). For example, the highly effective coping strategy
of problem solving is associated positively with agreeableness,
openness to experience, and conscientiousness and negatively
with neuroticism. Children with different traits therefore may
have different sources of support, interpretive styles, and cop-
ing strategies to draw from in times of stress.
Lengua and Wachs (in press) recently reviewed the exist-
ing literature examining the links between childrens tem-
perament traits and their resilient outcomes. These authors
examined two primary models for how childrens traits and
their outcomes may be linked. First, they reviewed studies
that examined whether childrens temperament traits predict
their competent or adaptive outcomes, over and above the ef-
fects of adversity. In other words, these studies investigated
main effects models for temperament traits. Lengua and
Wachs (in press) found relatively few studies looking at
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
childrens extraversion or positive emotionality as predictors
of childrens adjustment in studies also examining the impact
of adversity. However, aspects of childrens negative emo-
tionality and effortful control have received more intensive
study; there is good evidence that negative emotionality pre-
dicts more negative outcomes and that effortful control pre-
dicts more positive outcomes, even after controlling for the
effects of adversity. These findings suggest that low negative
emotionality and high effortful control may serve as assets or
promotive factors, with positive effects across conditions.
Second, Lengua and Wachs (in press) reviewed studies in-
vestigating whether temperament traits moderate the impact
of adversity on childrens outcomes. Again, very few studies
have examined the moderating role of extraversion or positive
emotionality. However, a handful of studies examining di-
verse types of adversity and a range of outcomes have found
that negative emotionality and effortful control sometimes
moderate the effects of adversity. Specifically, in some in-
stances, high negative emotionality and low effortful control
interact with adversity to predict worse outcomes. Children
high on negative emotionality and low on effortful control ap-
pear to be at particular risk in adverse conditions, whereas
children low on negative emotionality and high on effortful
control appear to be buffered from the negative effects of
stress. These traits may serve as protective or vulnerability
factors for children facing adversity.
There were some significant limitations, however, to the
moderation studies reviewed by Lengua and Wachs (in press).
Some of the studies examined traits, adversity, and competent
outcomes simultaneously, which limits the conclusions that
may be drawn regarding the role of traits in shaping outcomes
over time. Of the few studies examining the prediction of
competence longitudinally, the samples were not tracked
for much more than 5 years. More generally, very few studies
have examined whether traits interact with adversity to pre-
dict resilient outcomes in adulthood. Finally, only a limited
number of traits have been examined as predictors of compe-
tence and resilience. The present study was designed to pro-
vide a more thorough investigation into whether childrens
personality traits serve as promotive or protective factors in
the development of competence and resilience in adulthood.
The Present Study
In the present study, we investigated whether Big Five per-
sonality traits assessed in childhood predict competence
and resilience in adulthood in a normative sample of partici-
pants tracked from childhood through adulthood. As noted
above, the data for this study were drawn from the Project
Competence Longitudinal Study of risk and resilience. The
study was initiated to investigate resilience in development,
with a focus on the structure, predictors, and moderators of
competence under varying conditions of stress and adversity
(Garmezy et al., 1984; Masten et al., 1999, 2004; Masten &
Tellegen, 2012). At the start of the study, the participants
were 8 to 12 years old, and their childhood personalities,
Childhood personality and resilience
competent functioning, and adverse experiences were mea-
sured through a variety of means. The cohort was followed
up by mail 7 years later. Approximately 3 years after that
(10 years from the initial data collection), when the cohort
was on average 20 years old, during a transitional period be-
tween adolescence and adulthood sometimes referred to as
emerging adulthood (EA; Arnett, 2000), the participants
and their parents completed a variety of tests and question-
naires about the participants adaptive functioning. Again
after approximately 10 more years, when participants were
on average 30 years old and in young adulthood (YA), partic-
ipants and their parents completed questionnaire packets by
mail. Competence was defined for each assessment period
in terms of success in multiple domains of age-salient devel-
opmental tasks, with multiple measures and informants.
We chose to focus on the childrens Big Five traits as po-
tential predictors of resilience because these traits offer a
fairly complete picture of childrens personality traits in mid-
dle childhood. Previous work on Project Competence iden-
tified a set of four traits in childhood and explored the links
between these traits and concurrent and EA competence (Shi-
ner, 2000) and between these traits and YA personality and
competence (Shiner, Masten, & Roberts, 2003). For the pres-
ent study, we modified the measurement of those traits to
bring them more in line with what is known about the Big
Five traits in childhood, which resulted in measures of extra-
version, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to
experience. We added a new measure of neuroticism as well.
Because of the comprehensive and long-term nature of the
Project Competence study, we were able to address the ques-
tion of whether childrens personality traits predict whether
they are able to achieve competent outcomes in adulthood
even after facing chronic adversity earlier in life. We ad-
dressed this fundamentally important question about resili-
ence through three sets of analyses. In the first set of analyses,
we adopted a variable-focused approach. We tested whether
chronic adversity in childhood and adolescence, childhood
personality traits, and their interaction predicted change ver-
sus continuity in competence from childhood through EA and
to YA. For EA at around age 20, we considered three salient
developmental task domains of competence: academic attain-
ment, rule-abiding versus antisocial conduct, and social com-
petence in friendships with peers. In YA at around age 30, we
looked at the same domains, along with additional domains
that become salient in early adulthood: work competence, com-
petence in romantic relationships, and parenting competence
(for participants who had become parents). Through these anal-
yses, we were able to test whether the participants exposure to
adversity and childhood traits had main effects on their eventual
competent outcomes. Positive main effects of childhood traits
on later competence, after controlling for the main effects of
chronic adversity, would suggest that personality traits serve
as promotive factors for adult competence, meaning that such
traits have positive effects on competent outcomes in both
high- and low-adversity conditions. Based on previous research
in this sample, we expected to find main effects of childhood
511
personality on adulthood competence (Shiner, 2000; Shiner
et al., 2003). More specifically, we expected adult academic
achievement and work competence to be predicted positively
by childhood conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness
and negatively by childhood neuroticism; adult rule-abiding
conduct to be predicted by childhood conscientiousness and
agreeableness; and friendships and romantic competence to be
predicted positively by childhood extraversion and agreeable-
ness and negatively by childhood neuroticism.
The variable-focused analyses also allowed us to test
whether the participants childhood traits moderated the ef-
fects of adversity on adult outcomes; in other words, we
were able to determine whether childhood traits served as pro-
tective factors in high-adversity conditions. As noted pre-
viously, relatively few studies have obtained evidence for
moderating effects, but some studies have found negative
emotionality and effortful control to moderate effects of ad-
versity on some outcomes, particularly externalizing behavior
(Lengua & Wachs, in press). Thus, we expected that child
neuroticism and conscientiousness might moderate the ef-
fects of adversity on some adult outcomes, particularly
rule-abiding versus antisocial conduct.
In a second set of analyses, we took a person-centered ap-
proach to probing the links between childhood personality
traits and resilience (following the strategy delineated by
Masten et al., 1999, 2004). Specifically, we examined the
childhood personalities of three sets of individuals classi-
fied by their EA outcomes: competent (average or better com-
petence in EA, low adversity), resilient (average or better
competence in EA, high adversity), and maladaptive (below
average competence in EA, high adversity). Those in the
competent and resilient groups had similar outcomes in EA
(good functioning across major developmental tasks domains
at the time of assessment) but different histories (low vs. high
adversity). The resilient and maladaptive groups had similar
histories of very high adversity but very different EA out-
comes (good vs. poor adaptation). We then examined the
childhood personalities of those three groups, as defined by
the same chronic adversity scores in childhood and adoles-
cence, but using YA outcomes instead of EA outcomes to de-
fine competence. These person-centered analyses took into
account configural patterns of resilience, meaning that we
were able to explore whether there was anything distinctive
about the childhood personalities of those who were able to
do well across multiple domains of adult competence despite
their earlier exposure to adversity. Prior Project Competence
analyses of these configural groups have found that, in most
instances, the resilient and competent groups have similar re-
sources (e.g., socioeconomic status, parenting quality, IQ),
and much better resources than the maladaptive group (Mas-
ten et al., 1999, 2004). We therefore predicted that, similarly,
the participants classified as resilient and competent in EA or
YA would have had higher levels of positive personality traits
in childhood than those classified as maladaptive in EA or
YA. Specifically, we expected that the resilient and compe-
tent groups would have had higher levels of conscientious-
512
ness, agreeableness, and openness to experience and lower
levels of neuroticism in childhood than the maladaptive group,
because previous research has linked these traits with a number
of different positive outcomes (Caspi & Shiner, 2006; Rothbart
& Bates, 2006; Shiner & Masten, 2008). We did not expect the
groups to differ in extraversion because, although this trait is
associated with good social outcomes, it is sometimes associ-
ated with higher levels of conduct problems (Caspi & Shiner,
2006; Lengua & Wachs, in press).
In a third set of analyses, we explored whether there was
anything notable about the childhood personality traits of
those individuals who switched from the maladaptive cate-
gory in EA to the competent category in YA; we were inter-
ested in whether this small group differed, first, from those
who remained competent or resilient from EA to YA, and,
second, from those who remained maladaptive from EA to
YA. Previous longitudinal studies of competence and resili-
ence have sometimes identified a group of late bloomers,
who achieve positive outcomes later in adulthood, after strug-
gles earlier in adolescence or emerging adulthood (Masten,
Obradovic, & Burt, 2006; Rutter, 1987). These later transfor-
mations have been predicted by new opportunities in early
adulthood, such as military service, good marriages, or
school opportunities (Werner & Smith, 1992). Earlier work
on Project Competence identified a small group of partici-
pants who switched from maladaptive in EA to competent
in YA (Masten et al., 2004) and found that this group at the
time of the EA assessment showed higher planfulness/future
motivation, autonomy, and adult support outside the family
than the group who would prove to be consistently maladap-
tive. Although our analyses looking at the childhood person-
alities of this late resilient group were largely exploratory, we
expected that they may have differed from the consistently
maladaptive group in higher childhood conscientiousness
or openness, given that these traits may be precursors to plan-
fulness/future motivation and autonomy.
Method
Sample and procedures
Participants were drawn from a sample of 205 children (91
boys, 114 girls) who have participated with their families in
the 20-year Project Competence study of competence and re-
silience (Garmezy & Tellegen, 1984; Masten et al., 1995,
1999, 2004). Families were recruited from two Minneapolis
elementary schools when the children were 8 to 12 years
old (M 9.96) and in third to sixth grade. The participants
schools were located in a diverse but generally lower- to mid-
dle-class area of Minneapolis; socioeconomic status among
the childrens families ranged from 7 to 92.3 on the 100-point
Duncan Socioeconomic Index (Hauser & Featherman, 1977),
with a sample mean of 43 (the equivalent of skilled labor or
clerical positions). After the initial study phase, participants
and their families were subsequently followed up after 7,
10, and 20 years, with retention rates of 88%, 98%, and
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
90%, respectively. This study focuses on the subsample of
176 participants (71 males, 105 females) for whom there
were complete data on childhood personality traits, child-
hood/adolescent adversity, and adult competence. Within
this subsample, 25.6% were ethnic minority (16.5% African
American, 3.4% Chicano, 4.6% American Indian, and 1.1%
Asian). Compared to the group of participants missing key
data or lost to attrition, the subsample in this study was
slightly more conscientious, F (1, 195) 4.17, p .043,
M 0.04 for subsample versus M 20.35 for missing par-
ticipants, and less extraverted, F (1, 203) 7.50, p .007, M
20.05 for subsample versus M 0.33 for missing partic-
ipants, in childhood. The subsample did not differ from the
missing participants on other childhood personality traits,
chronic adversity scores, EA or YA competence, sex, minor-
ity status, or socioeconomic status.
Extensive information on the participants and their life ex-
periences was collected during each phase of the study. Dur-
ing childhood, participants parents or guardians (mostly
mothers) were interviewed at home, and the children were in-
terviewed twice, typically at school. Classroom peer nomina-
tions were obtained using the Revised Class Play (Masten,
Morison, & Pellegrini, 1985; Morison & Masten, 1991),
and parents also completed questionnaires. Several other
measures of child functioning were obtained, including
school records, an individual standardized achievement test,
and a teacher questionnaire assessing classroom behavior.
During the assessment 7 years later in adolescence (ages
1419), participants and their parents completed parallel
packets of questionnaires, which included assessments of ad-
verse life events that had occurred during the interval between
the first and second assessments. During the 10-year follow-
up during EA, when the cohort was 1723 (M 19.8 years),
participants and their parents underwent interviews and com-
pleted a wide variety of questionnaires. The cohort was recon-
tacted 10 years later (20-year follow-up) during YA (ages 28
34; M 30.8). This follow-up was designed to be conducted
by mail, and again both participants and their parents com-
pleted an extensive set of questionnaires.
Measures
Childhood personality (age 10). Measures of four personality
traits in childhood were derived previously in this sample:
mastery motivation, academic conscientiousness, surgency,
and agreeableness (Shiner, 2000). Each of these higher order
traits was measured through the combination of lower order
scales from the parent interview, the child interview, and/or
the teacher report from the Devereux Elementary School Rat-
ing Scale (Spivack & Swift, 1967). Reliability information is
not available for the parent interview ratings used to measure
personality in this study; however, the interviewers did not
have to make many inferences in coding the parents re-
sponses, and in many cases the interviewers read parents
the possible options for answering questions. For the child in-
terview, two advanced graduate students made ratings of the
Childhood personality and resilience
items for a subset of the cases; for the scales created from the
child interview, the two raters obtained a mean intraclass cor-
relation of 0.78, indicating good reliability. The Devereux
teacher questionnaire has previously been established as a re-
liable and valid measure of childrens classroom behavior
(Finkelman, Ferrarese, & Garmezy, 1989; Kendall, Pelle-
grini, & Urbain, 1981).
As noted in the introductory section, in the decade since
these personality scales were created, it has become increas-
ingly clear that the structure of childhood personality traits
fits a five-factor model akin to the Big Five personality trait
model observed in adulthood (Shiner & DeYoung, in press).
Thus, for the present study, two of the childhood personality
traitssurgency and mastery motivationwere modified to
bring them more in line with Big Five measures of extraver-
sion and openness to experience, respectively. Specifically,
the components labeled poor comprehension/disattention
(from the teacher ratings) and expressiveness (from the child
interview) were dropped from the Surgency Scale, leaving
only the component that is a clear marker of extraversion: ex-
traversion from the parent interview. Likewise, a component
labeled performance anxiety (from the teacher ratings) was
dropped from the Mastery Motivation Scale, leaving only
the two components that strongly resemble other childhood
measures of openness to experience: zestful engagement in
activities from the parent interview and achievement motiva-
tion from the childhood interview. The two personality scales
of agreeableness and academic conscientiousness were re-
tained in their prior form because they already mapped well
onto the relevant Big Five traits, but the Academic Conscien-
tiousness Scale is simply called conscientiousness for the
sake of simplicity.
Finally, to complete the measurement of the Big Five traits,
we added a fifth scale to assess the childrens neuroticism, or
Table 1. Big Five childhood personality traits: Components and sample items
Childhood Personality Traits
Extraversion (parent interview)
Neuroticism (parent questionnaire)
Conscientiousness
Academic conscientiousness (parent interview)
School carelessnessreversed (teacher questionnaire)
Agreeableness
Friendly compliance (parent interview)
Agreeableness (child interview)
Openness to experience
Zestful engagement in activities (parent interview)
Achievement motivation (child interview)
Note: The teacher questionnaire items are from the Devereux Elementary School Behavior Rating Scale Manual by G. Spivak and M. Swift,
1967, Devon, PA: Devereux Foundation. Copyright 1967 by the Devereux Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
513
predispositions toward experiencing and expressing negative
emotions. Childhood neuroticism scales often include a broader
range of negative emotions than adult neuroticism scales, which
focus more narrowly on internalizing negative emotions (Shiner
& DeYoung, in press). The present scale was designed to reflect
the broader range of negative emotions typically included in
other childhood neuroticism scales. Specifically, during the
childhood assessment, parents completed a Behavior Rating
Scale questionnaire on a 3-point scale that assessed their chil-
drens behavior, including a wide range of negative emotions,
such as worries, gets upset easily when things go wrong,
depressed and unhappy, complains no one loves me,
suddenly changes from happy to sad, and inferiority feel-
ings. The 11 questionnaire items measuring negative emotions
were averaged, and that score was standardized to create a neu-
roticism subscale with a resulting alpha value of 0.84.
In Table 1, we present descriptions of the Big Five child-
hood personality traits, including the components of each and
sample items.
Chronic adversity in childhood and adolescence. A thorough
description of the procedures used to develop comprehensive
measures of chronic adversity is offered in Gest, Reed, and
Masten (1999). More briefly, at each assessment, detailed in-
formation from multiple informants was gathered on negative
life events and adversities experienced by the participants, for
example, through structured life events interviews and Life
Event Questionnaires (Gest et al., 1999). After the 10-year
follow-up, all of the information on adverse life experiences
was culled, so that life charts could be generated for each
participant detailing negative life events experienced during
particular periods of his or her lifetime. The three periods in-
cluded birth to the childhood assessment; the 7 years from the
childhood assessment to the adolescent assessment; and the 3
Sample Items
Outgoing with other children; leader rather than
follower
Worries; gets upset easily when things go wrong
Serious about schoolwork; prompt in completing
schoolwork
Rushes in his or her work and makes unnecessary
mistakes; quick to say assigned work is too hard
Accepts criticism; considerate with other children
Kind and generous; selfishreversed
Enthusiastic and engrossed in activities; imaginative
or creative
Considers academic achievement very important;
intellecterturned on by the life of the mind
514
years from the adolescent assessment to the EA assessment.
Cumulative negative experiences that were independent of
the participants behavior were printed onto life charts for
each of these time periods, and independent judges with
no knowledge of participants competence or resources
then rated these life charts. Judges made the adversity ratings
on a 7-point scale that corresponded closely to the Severity
of Psychological Stressor Scale used at the time for Axis IV
of the diagnostic system of the American Psychiatric Asso-
ciation (1987). In this system, the ratings ranged from a 1 in-
dicating minimal adversity (only common, routine events
such as a friends move, or isolated events, such as a sibling
jailed overnight) to a 7 indicating catastrophic adversity (se-
vere acute and/or chronic stressors such as marital violence
or loss of both parents). The two ratings used in this study
were the one spanning birth to the childhood assessment
and the one spanning from the childhood to the adolescent
assessment 7 years later. Both ratings were rated reliably (in-
traclass correlation coefficients 0.82 and 0.85, respec-
tively), and the scores (r .62) were averaged to create a
composite measure of chronic adversity experienced over
the course of childhood and adolescence. The average levels
of adversity exposure during these two periods were 4.97
(SD 1.47) for birth to childhood and 5.34 (SD 1.15)
for childhood to adolescence. This indicates that the mean
level of cumulative adversity during both periods fell in
the severe range on the DSM scale (which was designed
for a shorter time interval). Cumulatively the average was
approximately 5, indicating exposure to multiple or chronic
events, such as interparental conflict, divorce, or stressful
family illnesses.
Competent adaptive functioning. Extensive prior work with
the Project Competence data set established robust indicators
of participants competent functioning in key age-salient de-
velopmental tasks at each assessment point. In childhood and
EA, three competence domains were defined as age salient:
academic achievement, social competence, and rule-abiding
versus rule-breaking conduct. By YA, three new domains be-
came salient as well: work, romantic relationships, and par-
enting (for those who became parents). These had emerged
earlier, but were viewed as important, additional salient do-
mains of competence in YA. The multidimensionality of
competence in childhood, EA, and YA has been confirmed
repeatedly in structural equation models in the course of ana-
lyzing the continuity and cross-domain cascades in compe-
tence over time in this study (e.g., Masten et al., 1995,
2005; Masten, Desjardins, McCormick, Kuo, & Long,
2010; Obradovic, Burt, & Masten, 2010). Indicators of these
major domains have also been composited for linear regres-
sion analyses (e.g., Masten et al., 1999, 2004; Roisman
et al., 2004). For each domain of competence for the present
study, the participants standardized scores on two to eight re-
liable indicators were averaged to create a composite compe-
tence score. More than one indicator was used for each do-
main of competence to increase reliability and validity.
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
Childhood (age 10). A detailed description of the measures
used to assess childhood academic achievement, rule-abiding
conduct, and social competence is provided elsewhere (Shi-
ner, 2000). The childhood competence indictors used in
this study were somewhat different from those used in most
Project Competence studies (e.g., Masten et al., 1999,
2004) because the indicators were modified to minimize over-
lap with the measures used to assess child personality. The
measure of academic achievement (a 0.96) tapped (a) the
childs grade point average in academic subjects as reported
on the school record and (b) performance on the Peabody In-
dividual Achievement Test (Dunn & Markwardt, 1970). The
measure of rule-abiding versus antisocial conduct provided
an index of the extent to which a child followed rules rather
than engaging in rule-breaking or antisocial behavior in the
home, school, and broader community. The measure (a
0.72) included both peer nominations of disruptive behavior
and parent report of six disruptive behaviors. The social com-
petence measure (a 0.62) assessed the childs social accep-
tance with peers through peer nominations on seven aspects
of positive social functioning and through (reversed) peer
nominations on three aspects of social problems.
EA (age 20; 10-year follow-up). A detailed description of the
measures used to assess EA academic attainment, rule-abiding
conduct, and social competence is provided elsewhere (Masten
et al., 1999). Academic attainment was defined in terms of the
level and quality of education attained to date and was a com-
posite of four variables (a 0.90): clinical ratings of achieve-
ment based on adolescent self-report Status Questionnaires,
parallel but independent ratings based on parent Status Ques-
tionnaire reports, an interviewers ratings of grades and attain-
ment based on the interview with the adolescent, and a parent
report of how far the participant had gone in school. Rule-abid-
ing conduct was defined in terms of a track record of following
or breaking societal norms for conduct, including legal and il-
legal behavior and was a composite of five variables (a
0.79): parallel adolescent and parent questionnaire ratings of
the seriousness of the adolescents involvement with the law,
a five-item factor-based scale from the adolescent interview,
a three-item factor-based scale from the parent interview, and
a two-item scale taken from a parent-report version of Harters
Competence Rating Scales modified for young adults (Harter,
1986; Neemann & Harter, 1986). The social competence mea-
sure primarily tapped the extent to which the participant had
close friends and an active social life. The eight indicators
were the following (a 0.86): parallel adolescent and parent
questionnaire ratings of the extent to which the adolescent
had a positive, active social life; parallel adolescent and parent
questionnaire ratings of the extent to which the adolescent had
close, confiding relationships; an eight-item composite from
the adolescent interview; a two-item composite from the parent
interview; two items tapping general quality of social life taken
from the parent report Competence Rating Scales; and two
items tapping close friendships taken from the parent report
Competence Rating Scales.
Childhood personality and resilience
YA (age 30; 20-year followup). The six YA competence do-
mains were assessed by combining reports from three
sources: the participants themselves, the parents, and clinical
ratings provided by two independent judges who were clin-
ical psychologists. Academic attainment and rule-abiding
conduct were conceptualized in a similar manner in EA and
YA. Social competence was judged on evidence of having
a close, confiding friendship. Work competence was defined
as successful performance in paid work, evidenced by a clear
track record of reliably holding and successfully executing
the responsibilities of paid positions. Success in romantic
competence was conceptualized in terms of having engaged
in a close and positive reciprocal relationship with a romantic
partner for more than a brief period of time. Parenting com-
petence, or effectiveness in the role of parenting, was assessed
for each participant who was a parent by YA.
The indicators used to assess the participants level and
quality of academic attainment (a 0.93) included a clinical
rating of educational success, and parallel participant and par-
ent composites of two status questionnaire items tapping level
of education and educational success. Work competence (a
0.72) combined a composite of two clinical ratings of holding
a job successfully and doing well in work; a composite of two
participant status questionnaire items tapping job responsibil-
ities and doing well in work; and a composite of two parent
status questionnaire items parallel to those from the partici-
pant. Rule-abiding versus antisocial conduct (a 0.86) com-
bined a composite of two clinical ratings of trouble with the
law and general rule-abiding conduct; a participant composite
consisting of one global law-abiding item from the status
questionnaire, eight behavioral/life events items from the sta-
tus questionnaire and Competence Rating Scales (e.g., history
of arrests, convictions, and parole, and time in prison), and
the Delinquency subscale from the Young Adult Self-Report
(Achenbach, 1997); and a parent composite that was parallel
to the participant composite except that it included the Delin-
quency subscale from the Young Adult Behavior Checklist
instead of from the self-report checklist (Achenbach, 1997).
Social competence (a 0.67) combined a clinical rating
of friendship quality; a participant composite of five partici-
pant status questionnaire items tapping friendship quality
and two self-report Competence Rating Scale items tapping
close friendships; and a parent composite of a parent status
questionnaire item tapping friendship quality and two par-
ent-report Competence Rating Scale items tapping close
friendships. Romantic competence (a 0.80) combined a
composite of two clinical ratings of involvement in and qual-
ity of romantic relationships; a participant composite of three
status questionnaire items tapping being close and getting
along with the romantic partner and three items from the
Competence Rating Scales; and a parallel parent composite.
Parenting competence (a 0.81) combined the average of
two clinical ratings of involvement in parenting and global
ratings of how well participants were doing as parents; a par-
ticipant composite of two status questionnaire items on how
well they were carrying out the job of child care and how
515
well they were doing as a parent overall; and a comparable
parent composite.
Results
To examine the role of childhood personality in the develop-
ment of resilience, we conducted two sets of analyses: vari-
able focused and person focused. First, in the variable-fo-
cused analyses, we conducted a series of regressions to test
whether childhood personality traits, chronic adversity, and
their interaction predicted change and continuity in compe-
tence from childhood to EA and YA, 10 and 20 years later,
respectively. Second, in the person-focused analyses, we
used classification criteria to create groups of competent, re-
silient, and maladaptive participants in EA and YA to deter-
mine whether these groups differed in their childhood person-
ality traits.
Variable-focused analyses
Correlations among the childhood variables and between the
childhood predictor variables and adult competent out-
comes. We first obtained the correlations among the child-
hood variables: the Big Five personality traits, the control
variables of sex and age, chronic adversity in childhood/ado-
lescence, and competence. These correlations are shown in
Table 2. These correlations reveal several important patterns.
First, agreeableness was positively correlated with conscien-
tiousness and negatively correlated with neuroticism, but no
other traits were significantly intercorrelated. Second, sex
was correlated with conscientiousness (girls had higher con-
scientiousness in childhood) but no other childhood vari-
ables, and age was correlated with academic achievement
(older children had modestly worse academic achievement)
but no other childhood variables. Third, chronic adversity
(life experiences judged to be independent of child behavior)
was modestly negatively correlated with conscientiousness,
agreeableness, and openness to experience and modestly pos-
itively correlated with neuroticism. Fourth, childhood com-
petence showed a number of associations with concurrent
personality traits. Academic achievement was associated
modestly with extraversion and conscientiousness and
strongly with openness. Rule-abiding versus antisocial con-
duct was moderately negatively correlated with extraversion
and neuroticism and moderately positively correlated with
conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. Social com-
petence with peers showed modest to moderate associations
with all the traits: a negative association with neuroticism
and a positive association with all the other traits. Thus, all
of the childhood personality traits already showed significant
relationships with competence in childhood.
We next computed the correlations between all of the
childhood predictor variables (the Big Five personality traits,
the control variables of sex and age, chronic adversity in
childhood/adolescence, and childhood competence in the do-
mains of academic achievement, rule-abiding conduct, and
516 R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten

Table 2. Correlations among the childhood variables: Big Five personality traits, sex and age, childhood/adolescent
adversity, and competence

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Childhood personality traits

1. Extraversion
2. Neuroticism 2.13
3. Conscientiousness 2.02 2.13
4. Agreeableness 2.01 2.45*** .23**
5. Openness .06 2.14 .10 .02
Control variables
6. Sex 2.01 2.09 .38*** .08 2.12
7. Age 2.12 .03 .12 2.03 2.06 2.05
8. Childhood/adolescent
adversity 2.06 .23** 2.15* 2.18* 2.16* 2.03 .04
Childhood competence
9. Academic achievement .19* 2.08 .16* .02 .51*** 2.12 2.18* 2.12
10. Rule-abiding conduct 2.23** 2.27*** .42*** .43*** .25*** .03 .00 2.18* .15*
11. Social competence .25*** 2.24*** .33*** .18* .23** .09 .13 2.20** .35*** .26***

*p , .05. **p , .01. ***p , .001.

social competence) and the competence variables in EA and
YA; the correlations are presented in Table 3. The results
demonstrate that all of the competence outcomes in EA and
YA were predicted by at least one and often by more than
one childhood personality trait. Sex was related to rule-abid-
ing conduct in EA and YA, such that females developed
higher levels of rule-abiding conduct. Age was modestly neg-
atively related to social competence in YA but no other out-
comes. Participants history of exposure to chronic adversity
in childhood and adolescence was modestly negatively re-
lated to all of the EA competence outcomes and to academic
attainment and rule-abiding conduct in YA. Finally, aca-
demic attainment in EA and YA, rule-abiding conduct in
EA and YA, and social competence in EA were all moder-

Table 3. Correlations between childhood predictor variables and emerging adult and young adult competent outcomes
10 and 20 years later

Emerging Adult Competence 10 Years Later Young Adult Competence 20 Years Later

Rule- Rule-
Academic Abiding Social Academic Abiding Social Work Romantic
Attainment Conduct Competence Attainment Conduct Competence Competence Competence

Childhood personality traits

Extraversion 2.06 2.14 .37*** .05 .01 .16* .14 .19**
Neuroticism 2.23*** 2.26*** 2.16* 2.12 2.11 2.09 2.17* 2.15*
Conscientiousness .39*** .35*** .02 .31*** .23** .05 .14 .00
Agreeableness .23** .40*** .22** .19** .25*** .20** .15* .06
Openness .36*** .28*** .25*** .37*** .18* .12 .22** .09
Control variables
Sex .11 .24** 2.02 .03 .17* .19 2.06 .02
Age 2.01 2.05 2.14 2.09 2.03 2.02 2.07 2.16*
Childhood/
adolescent adversity 2.21** 2.24** 2.18* 2.23** 2.23** 2.03 2.02 2.06
Childhood competence
Academic
achievement .45*** .17* .26*** .52*** .15* .19** .28*** .21**
Rule-abiding
conduct .34*** .52*** .08 .24** .29*** .04 .13 2.04
Social competence .25*** .17* .31*** .25*** .15* .12 .22** .24**

*p  .05. **p  .01. ***p  .001.

Childhood personality and resilience
ately to strongly predicted by childhood competence in the
same domains, but were predicted by other domains of child-
hood competence as well. Work competence and romantic
competence in YA were both predicted by childhood aca-
demic achievement and social competence.
Regressions. We investigated whether chronic adversity,
childhood personality traits, and their interaction predicted
EA and YA competence, after taking into account childhood
competence in the same or the most conceptually related do-
main for aspects of competence that were not salient in child-
hood (e.g., academic was controlled for work and social for
romantic competence). In other words, we examined whether
chronic adversity, childhood traits, and their interaction pre-
dicted interindividual change in competence from childhood
through EA and YA. We addressed this question by conducting
separate hierarchical multiple regressions predicting each of the
three EA and five YA competence variables in a series of steps.
In Step 1, we entered the scores for the most relevant childhood
competence domain. In Steps 2 and 3, the control variables of
sex and age, respectively, were entered. In Step 4, scores for
chronic adversity in childhood and adolescence were entered
to examine the potential main effect of adversity on later com-
petence. In Step 5, we entered a single Big Five childhood trait
to determine whether that trait predicted later competence after
taking chronic adversity into account. Finally, in Step 6, we en-
tered the interaction of the specific Big Five childhood trait and
chronic adversity; this final step enabled us to determine
whether the effects of adversity on EA and YA adaptation var-
ied depending on the participants childhood personality traits.
The results are summarized in Table 4, Table 5, and Table 6
and indicate the increment in R2 for each step of the regressions
and the significance of the F test for that step. The results pre-
sented in this section report the beta weights for variables at
their entry.
The results of the regressions predicting EA and YA aca-
demic attainment, rule-abiding conduct, and social compe-
tence are shown in Tables 4 and 5, respectively. Academic at-
tainment in EA and YA was predicted positively by
childhood academic achievement (B 0.45 for EA, B
0.52 for YA); negatively by chronic adversity (B 20.16
for EA, B 20.17 for YA); and positively by childhood con-
scientiousness and agreeableness (conscientiousness: B
0.29 for EA, B 0.23 for YA; agreeableness: B 0.19 for
EA, B 0.15 for YA). In addition, for EA academic attain-
ment, sex was a significant predictor (females had higher at-
tainment), extraversion was a negative predictor (B 20.16),
neuroticism was a negative predictor (B 20.18), and open-
ness was a positive predictor (B 0.17). The interaction of
chronic adversity and the childhood traits did not add to the
prediction of academic attainment once the main effects of
both variables were accounted for.
Rule-abiding conduct in EA and YA was positively pre-
dicted by childhood conduct (B 0.52 for EA, B 0.29
for YA); predicted by sex (females had higher rule-abiding
conduct at both times); and negatively predicted by adversity
517
(B 20.14 for EA, B 20.18 for YA). In addition, EA con-
duct was positively predicted by childhood agreeableness and
openness (agreeableness: B 0.19; openness: B 0.17), but
YA conduct was not predicted by any of the childhood traits.
The interaction of agreeableness and chronic adversity added
to the prediction of EA conduct (B 0.13); the interaction is
plotted in Figure 1 for low and high adversity (1 SD above and
below the mean) and low and high agreeableness (1 SD above
and below the mean). At high levels of childhood agreeable-
ness, adversity did not predict EA rule-abiding conduct. In
contrast, at low levels of childhood agreeableness, conduct
was much worse at outcome with a high adversity history.
Thus, the combination of low childhood agreeableness and
high chronic adversity predicted a heightened risk for conduct
problems in EA, consistent with agreeableness functioning as
a protective factor or its lack functioning as a vulnerability, or
both. None of the other interactions of childhood traits and
adversity added to the prediction of EA or YA conduct.
Findings for predictors of social competence varied some-
what for EA and YA. For EA, social competence was posi-
tively predicted by childhood social competence (B
0.31), negatively predicted by age (B 20.19), and posi-
tively predicted by extraversion, agreeableness, and openness
(B 0.28 for extraversion and B 0.16 for agreeableness and
openness). Neither sex nor chronic adversity added to the pre-
diction of EA social competence. Only in the case of child-
hood conscientiousness did the interaction of a childhood trait
and chronic adversity add to the prediction of EA social com-
petence (B 0.15); the interaction is plotted in Figure 2 for
high and low adversity (1 SD above and below the mean)
and low and high conscientiousness (1 SD above and below
the mean). Generally, a history of adversity was negatively re-
lated to social competence outcomes in EA, but this associa-
tion was stronger for those who were less conscientious in
childhood. When adversity exposure was low (more benign
life conditions), less conscientious children had better social
competence outcomes in EA, but when adversity exposure
was high, the less conscientious did not show an advantage
in this domain. This finding was surprising because it sug-
gested positive outcomes for low childhood conscientious-
ness in this domain when there was a history of low adversity
exposure. Ten years later, social competence in YA was pre-
dicted only by sex (females had better quality YA friend-
ships) and by childhood agreeableness (B 0.17), but not
by childhood social competence, age, any of the other child-
hood traits, chronic adversity, or the interaction of the child-
hood traits and adversity.
The results of the regressions predicting YA work compe-
tence and romantic competence are shown in Table 6. YA
work competence was predicted positively by childhood aca-
demic achievement (B 0.28), positively by childhood
conscientiousness (B 0.15) and agreeableness (B 0.15),
and negatively by childhood neuroticism (B 20.16). YA
romantic competence was predicted positively by childhood
social competence (B 0.24) and negatively by age (B
20.19), but not by any of the other predictors.
 Table 4. Hierarchical multiple regressions relating childhood Big Five personality traits to competence 10 years later in emerging adulthood

Competence 10 Years Later in Emerging Adulthood

Academic Attainment Rule-Abiding Conduct Social Competence

1. Childhood competence in same domain .21*** .28*** .09***

2. Sex .03* .04** .00
3. Age .00 .00 .04**
4. Adversity in childhood/adolescence .02* .02* .01
5. Childhood traits E N C A O E N C A O E N C A O
.03** .02* .06*** .04** .02* .00 .01 .00 .03** .03** .07*** .00 .00 .02* .02*
6. Trait Adversity interaction .01 .01 .01 .00 .00 .00 .00 .01 .02* .00 .01 .00 .02* .00 .00
Total R2 .30*** .29*** .33*** .30*** .28*** .34*** .35*** .35*** .39*** .37*** .22*** .14*** .16*** .16*** .16***

Note: E, extraversion; N, neuroticism; C, conscientiousness; A, agreeableness; O, openness to experience. The R2 change and the significance of the increment are shown at each step.
*p  .05. **p  .01. ***p  .001.
518

Table 5. Hierarchical multiple regressions relating childhood Big Five personality traits to competence in the domains of academic attainment, conduct, and social
competence 20 years later in young adulthood

Competence 20 Years Later in Young Adulthood

Academic Attainment Rule-Abiding Conduct Social Competence

1. Childhood competence in same domain .27*** .08*** .02

2. Sex .00 .02* .03*
3. Age .00 .00 .00
4. Adversity in childhood/adolescence .03** .03** .01
5. Childhood traits E N C A O E N C A O E N C A O
.00 .00 .04*** .02* .01 .00 .00 .00 .01 .01 .01 .00 .00 .03* .02
6. Trait Adversity interaction .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00
Total R2 .30*** .30*** .34*** .32*** .31*** .13*** .13*** .13*** .14*** .14*** .07 .06 .06 .09* .08

Note: E, extraversion; N, neuroticism; C, conscientiousness; A, agreeableness; O, openness to experience. The R2 change and the significance of the increment are shown at each step.
*p  .05. **p  .01. ***p  .001.
Childhood personality and resilience 519

Table 6. Hierarchical multiple regressions relating childhood Big Five personality traits to work and romantic competence
20 years later in young adulthood

Competence 20 Years Later in Young Adulthood

Work Competence Romantic Competence

(Academic achievement) (Social competence)

1. Childhood competence in related domain .08*** .06**
2. Sex .00 .00
3. Age .00 .04**
4. Adversity in childhood/adolescence .00 .00
5. Childhood traits E N C A O E N C A O
.00 .03* .02* .02* .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00
6. Trait Adversity interaction .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00 .00
Total R2 .08* .11** .10** .10** .08* .10* .10* .10* .10* .10*

Note: E, extraversion; N, neuroticism; C, conscientiousness; A, agreeableness; O, openness to experience. The R2 change and the significance of the increment
are shown at each step.
*p  .05. **p  .01. ***p  .001.

The overall pattern of findings from the regressions sug-
gests several conclusions. Chronic childhood and adolescent
adversity predicted more negative EA and YA outcomes in
the domains of academic attainment and rule-abiding conduct,
even after taking into account earlier competence in the same
domains. However, chronic adversity did not add to the predic-
tion of EA and YA social competence, nor to the prediction of
YA work and romantic competence. Consistent with previous
findings, childhood personality traits predicted multiple do-
mains of adaptive competence outcomes in EA and YA (Shi-
ner, 2000; Shiner et al., 2003), and the current regressions
demonstrated that this was true even after controlling for par-
ticipants history of chronic adversity. These findings provide
support for a main effects model of childhood personality
traits in which such traits serve as promotive factors across
levels of adversity. Finally, the interaction of childhood traits
and chronic adversity did not add to the prediction of EA
and YA adaptive outcomes, except in two instances, once
the main effects of chronic adversity and childhood personality
were taken into account. Thus, the effects of childhood traits
on later outcomes did not vary in most instances by the partic-
ipants exposure to cumulative adversity experiences, at least
for adversity that arose independent from child behavior.
Person-focused analyses
Comparison of EA and YA competent, resilient, and mal-
adaptive groups on childhood personality traits. We under-

Figure 1. The interaction effect of childhood/adolescent adversity and child- Figure 2. The interaction effect of childhood/adolescent adversity and child-
hood agreeableness in the prediction of rule-abiding conduct in early adult- hood conscientiousness in the prediction of social competence in early adult-
hood (EA). [A color version of this figure can be viewed online at http:// hood (EA). [A color version of this figure can be viewed online at http://
journals.cambridge.org/dpp] journals.cambridge.org/dpp]
520
took person-focused analyses to provide a complementary per-
spective on the contributions of childhood personality to com-
petent EA and YA functioning in the face of adversity. These
analyses looked at the childhood traits of participants with par-
ticular configurations of adversity exposure and competent EA
and YA functioning across multiple domains. Participants were
classified in EA into groups based on participants EA compe-
tent outcomes and history of chronic adversity in childhood
and adolescence. Three groups of individuals were identified:
competent (adequate competence, low adversity), resilient
(adequate competence, high adversity), and maladaptive (low
competence, high adversity). Following procedures used in
Masten et al. (2004) for YA, participants were reclassified in
YA into competent, resilient, and maladaptive groups, this
time based on their YA competent outcomes and the same
measure of chronic adversity in childhood and adolescence.
There were too few participants in the highly vulnerable cell
(low competence, low adversity) in EA and YA to include
that cell in the analyses. Although many participants remained
classified in the same group in EA and YA, some participants
switched groups because those participants adaptive function-
ing changed from EA to YA.
The competent, resilient, and maladaptive groups were
identified during EA and YA by using cut scores on adversity
and competence. High adversity was defined in both EA and
YA by ratings of severe to catastrophic adversity (5.0) in
two periods: from birth through the childhood assessment
and from the childhood assessment through the adolescent as-
sessment 7 years later. Low adversity was defined as ratings
below 5.0 throughout childhood and adolescence. These
cut points yielded a high adversity group that averaged above
a 6 on the 7-point scale. These high adversity scores translated
into a childhood and adolescent history of many serious
events (e.g., divorce, financial crises), multiple traumatic ex-
periences (e.g., death of parents, assault), or chronic severe
stressors (e.g., living with a violent alcoholic parent in
chronic poverty).
Although high and low adversity was defined the same
way in EA and YA, the definitions of adequate and low com-
petence differed for EA and YA outcomes. In EA, compe-
tence was defined using cut scores for the three major compe-
tent outcomes (academic attainment, rule abiding conduct,
and social competence). Participants were classified as hav-
ing adequate competence if they scored higher than 0.5 SD
below the sample mean on all three competence indicators
in EA (i.e., z scores . 20.5). In contrast, participants were
classified as exhibiting low competence if they fell more
than 0.5 SD below the mean on at least two of the three com-
petence indicators (i.e., z scores , 20.5). Adequate and low
competence was defined somewhat differently in YA to ac-
commodate the changing expectations for competence in
YA versus EA. During YA competent individuals may step
back from some domains of life to focus on others (e.g., a per-
son may choose not to work in order to focus on parenting, or
may opt to focus on work rather than on cultivating a long-
term romantic relationship). In addition, parenting becomes
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
an especially important domain of competence for those indi-
viduals who have become parents. Thus, in YA participants
were considered adequate in competence if they scored higher
than 0.5 SD below the sample mean on four YA competence
indicators (i.e., z scores . 20.5) and low in competence if
they fell more than 0.5 SD below the mean on at least three
YA competence indicators (i.e., z scores , 20.5). Parents
were required to score in the adequate range on parenting
competence to be considered adequate in competence overall.
Using these criteria for adversity and competent outcomes, in
EA 27 competent, 36 resilient, and 25 maladaptive partici-
pants were identified, and in YA 34 competent, 49 resilient,
and 21 maladaptive participants were identified. A number
of participants were not assigned to any group because they
did not meet the criteria for the high and low adversity groups
and/or they did not meet the criteria for the adequate and low
competence groups.
Once the groups were identified, we turned to the question
of whether the competent, resilient, and maladaptive groups
identified in EA and YA differed in their childhood person-
ality traits. First, a series of one-way analyses of variance
(ANOVAs) was conducted to compare the three EA groups
and then the three YA groups on their average levels of the
Big Five traits in childhood. In the cases in which the F values
indicated significant differences among the groups on a child-
hood trait, a post hoc least significant difference test was
used to pinpoint which groups significantly differed from an-
other. The results of the ANOVAs and post hoc tests are pre-
sented in Table 7. A very similar pattern of results was ob-
tained for both the EA and YA groups. The competent,
resilient, and maladaptive groups in EA and YA did not differ
on childhood extraversion. However, the groups in EA and
YA differed on all of the other Big Five childhood traits. In
all cases except for one, the competent and resilient groups
did not differ from each other but did differ from the mal-
adaptive group. Specifically, for both EA and YA outcomes,
the competent and resilient groups exhibited higher agree-
ableness and openness to experience and lower neuroticism
in childhood than did the maladaptive group. Similarly, for
EA outcomes, the competent and resilient groups exhibited
higher conscientiousness in childhood than did the maladap-
tive group. A somewhat different pattern emerged for child-
hood conscientiousness among the YA groups; in this case
only, the competent participants demonstrated higher child-
hood conscientiousness than the resilient group, which in
turn demonstrated higher childhood conscientiousness than
the maladaptive group. In most cases for both EA and YA
outcomes, the competent and resilient groups had obtained
personality trait scores close to the mean in childhood,
whereas the maladaptive group had displayed notably
negative personality traits in childhood. This pattern suggests
that the participants who eventually became competent and
resilient in EA and YA had displayed normal-range personal-
ities in childhood, whereas the participants who eventually
became maladaptive in EA and YA had already manifested
personality difficulties earlier in life.
Childhood personality and resilience 521

Table 7. Group means (standard deviations) on childhood personality traits for competent, resilient, and maladaptive
youth defined by competence in emerging adulthood and young adulthood

Group Status in Emerging Adulthood

Competent Resilient Maladaptive

Childhood Personality Traits (N 27) (N 36) (N 25) One-Way F for Group

Extraversion 0.14 (0.80) 0.19 (0.88) 20.13 (1.01) 0.96

Neuroticism 20.24a (0.97) 20.04a (0.86) 0.77b (1.01) 8.50***
Conscientiousness 0.28a (0.83) 0.16a (0.69) 20.28b (0.81) 3.91*
Agreeableness 0.29a (0.68) 0.24a (0.79) 20.56b (0.77) 10.51***
Openness to experience 0.23a (0.52) 0.17a (0.83) 20.45b (0.63) 7.40***

Group Status in Young Adulthood

Competent Resilient Maladaptive

(N 34) (N 49) (N 21)

Extraversion 0.06 (0.98) 20.08 (1.04) 20.39 (1.05) 1.28

Neuroticism 20.17a (0.95) 0.04a (1.05) 0.64b (0.90) 4.46*
Conscientiousness 0.43a (0.43) 0.07b (0.74) 20.34c (0.81) 7.04***
Agreeableness 0.21a (0.70) 0.11a (0.74) 20.40b (0.69) 5.17**
Openness to experience 0.19a (0.59) 0.09a (0.82) 20.44b (0.73) 5.35**

Note: Personality trait values are reported in full sample-based z scores. Groups with different subscripts differ significantly.
*p  .05. **p  .01. ***p  .001.

Continuity and change group comparisons on childhood per-
sonality traits. As noted earlier, although most participants
remained in the same group from EA to YA, there were
some participants who switched groups from EA to YA.
We were especially interested in exploring the childhood per-
sonality traits of the participants who switched from the mal-
adaptive group in EA to the resilient group in YA a decade
later. Thus, we created a change classification for participants
based on their group identifications at EA and YA: partici-
pants who were competent at both time points, participants
who were resilient at both time points, participants who
were maladaptive at both time points, and a small group of
six participants who changed from maladaptive in EA to re-
silient in YA. Only two participants switched from resilient
in EA to maladaptive in YA and therefore could not be stud-
ied as a group. All of the participants in the change group
were female.
Two sets of planned contrasts were undertaken. The first
set of contrasts compared the stable competent and resilient
groups (CC or RR) to the group changing from maladaptive
to resilient (MR) to determine whether the latter group had
faced any particular challenges in terms of negative child-
hood personality traits. The second set of contrasts compared
the group changing from maladaptive to resilient to the group
that remained maladaptive across time (MR vs. MM) to deter-
mine whether the change group exhibited any childhood per-
sonality traits that may have served as resources for their late-
emerging positive development. The results of the one-way
ANOVAs testing the planned contrasts on the Big Five child-
hood traits are presented in Table 8. First, for the tests com-

Table 8. Group means (standard deviations) on childhood personality traits for stable/change groups

EA  YA Status Change

Planned Contrasts

CC RR MR MM CC, RR . MR MR . MM

Childhood Personality Traits (N 23) (N 29) (N 6) (N 13) F F

Extraversion 0.14 (0.85) 0.24 (0.91) 20.01 (1.12) 20.26 (0.90) 0.21 0.29
Neuroticism 20.17 (1.01) 20.16 (0.89) 1.06 (1.12) 0.77 (0.95) 4.37* 0.33
Conscientiousness 0.38 (0.72) 0.21 (0.63) 0.35 (0.34) 20.51 (0.83) 0.43 5.75*
Agreeableness 0.20 (0.66) 0.30 (0.81) 20.44 (0.38) 20.56 (0.80) 2.60 0.12
Openness to experience 0.25 (0.51) 0.23 (0.79) 20.31 (0.63) 20.57 (0.72) 1.79 0.54

Note: Personality trait values are reported in full sample-based z scores. C ! C, Competent in emerging adulthood (EA) and young adulthood (YA); R ! R,
resilient in EA and YA; M ! R, maladaptive in EA and resilient in YA; M ! M, maladaptive in EA and YA.
*p , .05.
522
paring the stable competent and resilient groups to the change
group, the groups significantly differed on only one child-
hood trait: the group that changed from maladaptive to resil-
ient received scores more than 1 SD higher on childhood neu-
roticism than the stable competent and resilient groups.
Second, for the tests comparing the stable maladaptive group
to the change group, one childhood trait differed; the group
that changed from maladaptive to resilient displayed higher
childhood conscientiousness than the stable maladaptive
group. These results suggest that the group that changed from
maladaptive to resilient was characterized by very high levels
of neuroticism in childhood but also displayed levels of child-
hood conscientiousness comparable to the competent and re-
silient groups.
Discussion
This study examined the significance of the Big Five person-
ality traits assessed in childhood for resilience in early adult-
hood. Resilience was defined in terms of adaptive compe-
tence in multiple domains of age-salient developmental
tasks despite significant adversity throughout childhood
and adolescence. Variable-focused and person-focused anal-
yses were conducted. Regression analyses showed significant
main effects and only two interactions effects (personality by
adversity) for childhood personality predicting competence
10 and 20 years later. Specifically, childhood personality
traits predicted adult adaptive outcomes, even after control-
ling for the main effects of adversity. Person-centered analy-
ses found that individuals identified as resilient in EA and YA
(adequate competence, high adversity) differed from those
identified as maladaptive (low competence, high adversity)
in manifesting higher conscientiousness, agreeableness, and
openness and lower neuroticism 10 or 20 years earlier. Resil-
ient adults generally did not differ from their competent, low-
adversity peers in childhood personality. Participants who
moved from the maladaptive category in EA to competent
in YA exhibited higher childhood conscientiousness than
their consistently maladaptive peers. Results point to the im-
portance of childhood personality for the development of
adult competence across both high- and low-adversity condi-
tions. In the following, we explore the findings in greater de-
tail, first addressing the general findings for the links between
child personality traits and adult competence and resilience
and then turning to the results for each of the Big Five traits.
We close by discussing the implications of the findings for fu-
ture research on child personality and resilience.
General findings for childhood personality and adult
resilience
Does personality assessed in childhood predict adult compe-
tence and resilience?
Variable-focused analyses. In the variable-focused anal-
yses, we examined whether the participants exposure to
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
chronic adversity across the childhood and adolescent years,
their personalities as children, and the interaction of the two
predicted the participants competence in developmental
tasks 10 and 20 years later. In both EA and YA, the tasks in-
cluded academic attainment, rule-abiding versus antisocial
conduct, and social competence with peers. Two additional
tasks were examined in YA: work competence and compe-
tence in romantic relationships. Chronic childhood/adoles-
cent adversity predicted academic attainment and rule-abid-
ing conduct in EA and YA but none of the other competent
outcomes; thus, main effects of chronic adversity seemed
to be limited to the domains of academic attainment and
conduct.
For all of the outcomes 10 years later in EA and for aca-
demic attainment, social competence with peers, and work
competence 20 years later in YA, at least one of the childhood
Big Five traits added significant predictive power, even after
controlling for childhood competence in the same domain (or
for childhood academic achievement in the case of YA work
competence) and for the main effects of adversity. These re-
sults indicate that childhood personality traits predicted
changes in competent adaptation over time. These findings
are consistent with a model of personality traits serving as
promotive factors for children facing adversity. Positive per-
sonality traits added to the prediction of participants adaptive
outcomes regardless of the participants exposure to signifi-
cant adversity. In other words, particular personality traits
confer benefits for specific adult outcomes both for people
who have grown up in adverse conditions and for people
who have grown up in more benign conditions. Our findings
in this regard complement those summarized by Lengua and
Wachs (in press) in their review of the contributions of tem-
perament to resilience; they found a number of previous
studies in which low negative emotionality (similar to low
neuroticism) and high effortful control (similar to high con-
scientiousness) predicted positive outcomes, controlling for
adversity exposure. We obtained similar findings for neurot-
icism and conscientiousness. Our findings add to the previous
ones by documenting that the predictive effects of childhood
traits extend to adulthood and that the personality traits of
agreeableness and openness to experience additionally serve
as promotive factors for some adult outcomes. In addition, we
were able to document that extraversion was a promotive fac-
tor for EA social competence with peers but a risk factor for
worse EA academic attainment.
In the regression analyses, after examining whether adver-
sity and childhood traits predicted adult outcomes, we investi-
gated whether the interaction of adversity and the childhood
traits added to the prediction of adult competence. We found
two instances of this: child agreeableness interacted with ad-
versity to predict EA rule-abiding conduct, and child con-
scientiousness interacted with adversity to predict EA social
competence. We discuss these interaction effects in more de-
tail in the next section on each of the Big Five traits. It should
be kept in mind, however, that for the majority of the regres-
sions, the interaction effects did not add to the prediction of
Childhood personality and resilience
adult outcomes. Thus, we did not obtain consistent evidence
for childhood traits serving as protective or vulnerability fac-
tors because childhood personality only rarely moderated the
effects of adversity on adult outcomes. Lengua and Wachs
(in press) review of the literature did identify some instances
in which the temperament traits of negative emotionality and
effortful control moderated the impact of adversity; however,
these studies generally measured personality, adversity, and
outcomes simultaneously or over much shorter periods of
time. Our findings should not be taken as demonstrating
that moderating effects of child personality and adversity
do not occur; such effects are difficult to detect without a
very large sample size (Donnellan, Conger, McAdams, &
Neppl, 2009). Moreover, it is conceivable that the moderating
influences of personality and adversity are more readily de-
tected during short time windows rather than across long
time periods. Future work with large, longitudinal samples
is needed to examine the possible moderating role of child-
hood personality and adversity for adult outcomes.
Person-centered analyses. In the person-centered analyses,
we examined the childhood personality traits of participants
with particular configurations of EA or YA competence and
childhood/adolescent adversity. The competent and resilient
groups defined in both EA and YA exhibited different patterns
of childhood traits than the maladaptive group. Specifically, the
competent and resilient groups manifested higher levels of
childhood conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to
experience and lower levels of childhood neuroticism than
the maladaptive group; the three groups did not differ in child-
hood extraversion. The competent and resilient groups did not
differ from each other in their earlier childhood traits, with one
exception; in the YA analyses, the competent group manifested
higher childhood conscientiousness than the resilient group.
The pattern of findings for these person-centered analyses
yields some important insights into the prediction of resili-
ence from childhood personality. In most cases, the mean per-
sonality trait scores for the competent and resilient groups fell
within 0.33 SD of the mean for the whole Project Competence
sample. In other words, the two groups with good adult out-
comes had not exhibited extremely positive personality traits
in childhood; rather, they had exhibited personality traits that
were modestly above or below the average in a positive direc-
tion. Further, the findings indicated that the resilient partici-
pants were able to attain positive adult outcomes with the
same levels of positive childhood traits as the competent par-
ticipants, suggesting that only modestly positive levels of per-
sonality traits were needed for participants to be able to over-
come adversity. In contrast, for all the childhood traits except
for extraversion, the maladaptive participants scored between
0.28 and 0.77 SD away from the sample mean in a negative
direction. The participants who struggled to overcome adver-
sity by adulthood were those who had exhibited relatively
higher negative emotions, along with lower levels of positive
interpersonal traits, self-control, and drive for mastery as chil-
dren.
523
It is interesting to note that three of the childhood traits that
differentiated the later competent and resilient participants
from the maladaptive ones were (low) neuroticism, conscien-
tiousness, and agreeableness. Across a number of studies with
both children and adults, these traits tend to covary and, at a
higher level of organization, form a metatrait labeled stabil-
ity by DeYoung (2006). Digman (1997) was one of the first
researchers to identify this metatrait of low neuroticism, high
conscientiousness, and high agreeableness; he described this
metatrait as representing a system indexing the different de-
grees of success achieved by the socialization process
(p. 1250). He viewed these traits as the ones that adults strive
to cultivate in the children under their care. This overarching
trait measures individuals tendencies to maintain well-con-
trolled, stable functioning in emotional, social, and motiva-
tional domains (DeYoung, 2006). Given the importance of
this cluster of traits for maintaining stable, adaptive function-
ing, it is not surprising that all three traits foreshadowed later
adult competent outcomes.
What childhood traits characterize the late-blooming partic-
ipants? Following earlier work by Masten et al. (2004), we
examined the childhood traits of the group of six participants
who changed status from maladaptive in EA to competent in
YA. Relative to the participants who remained competent or
resilient from EA to YA, this late-blooming group differed on
one notable childhood trait: neuroticism. The group changing
from maladaptive to competent exhibited levels of neuroti-
cism more than 1 SD higher than the two groups that had al-
ready achieved positive outcomes by EA. Most likely, the
high levels of negative emotions experienced by the change
group posed difficulties for them in childhood and adoles-
cence. Perhaps the final maturing of cognitive control systems
or opportunities to move into new contexts in early adulthood
facilitated positive change in this group (Burt & Masten,
2009; Steinberg, 2009).
This change group also differed from the group that was
consistently maladaptive from EA to YA; in this case, the
change group turned out to have demonstrated higher levels
of childhood conscientiousness than the stable maladaptive
group. Given the level of negative emotionality displayed in
childhood by this group, perhaps they were able to correct their
developmental pathway in early adulthood with the support of
adult executive functions that require late-maturing prefrontal
neural systems. They may have needed fully mature executive
functions to make important changes in their lives, including
better self-regulation of negative emotions. The current find-
ings are consistent with results from earlier analyses from Pro-
ject Competence on the EA resources of the two groups (Mas-
ten et al., 2004); in these earlier analyses, the change group
exhibited higher planfulness/future motivation and autonomy
in EA than the group remaining maladaptive from EA to
YA. The late-blooming group showed evidence of potential in-
ternal resources in terms of self-control, both in childhood and
in EA. We should note that all of the participants in the change
group were female, which is consistent with Werner and
524
Smiths (1992) finding that females were more likely than
males to show significant turnarounds in resilience from ado-
lescence to adulthood. Females exhibited higher childhood
conscientiousness than boys in this sample, consistent with
other research on childhood gender differences in self-control
(Else-Quest, Hyde, Goldsmith, & Van Hulle, 2006). The all-
female makeup of the late-blooming resilient participants in
this study sample may perhaps be due in part to the fact that
the female participants had higher average levels of conscien-
tiousness, which may have provided them with an advantage
over the males in the development of competence over time.
Findings for specific Big Five childhood traits and adult
competence and resilience
Extraversion. Extraversion measured the childrens tenden-
cies toward being outgoing and socially dominant, rather
than socially withdrawn and passive. The current measure
of extraversion emphasized participants tendencies toward
social potency, rather than their positive emotions and
warm connections with others. In the present study, extraver-
sion had mixed relationships with competence and resilience.
Concurrently, childhood extraversion was associated posi-
tively with academic achievement and social competence,
but it was associated negatively with rule-abiding conduct.
Consistent with previous findings in this sample (Shiner,
2000), extraversion predicted positive relationships with
peers in EA, controlling for childhood social competence
and adversity exposure. However, extraversion also predicted
negative changes in academic attainment from childhood to
EA, controlling for adversity. Extraversion was also the
only childhood trait that did not vary across the EA and YA
competent, resilient, and maladaptive groups. Overall, in
this study extraversion seemed less relevant for the develop-
ment of adult resilience than any of the other traits, perhaps in
part because of its mixed impact on the development of com-
petence. This finding may seem to contradict earlier work
from the Kauai Longitudinal Study showing that more emo-
tionally positive children became more resilient as adults
(Werner & Smith, 1992). It seems possible that the childhood
measures of emotional positivity in the Kauai study may have
indexed the positive emotions associated with early agree-
ableness, rather than extraversion.
Neuroticism. Neuroticism measured the childrens propensity
toward feeling worried, distressed, easily upset, inferior, and
sad. Childhood neuroticism was negatively associated with
concurrent rule-abiding conduct and social competence.
This trait predicted worsening academic achievement from
childhood to EA, and it negatively predicted YA work com-
petence after controlling for childhood academic achieve-
ment. In addition, the maladaptive participants in EA and
YA exhibited much higher levels of neuroticism as children
than those who were competent and resilient in EA and
YA, and the late-blooming participants who switched from
maladaptive in EA to competent in YA likewise showed ex-
R. L. Shiner and A. S. Masten
tremely high levels of childhood neuroticism compared to the
persistently competent and resilient groups. Taken together,
these findings suggest that high levels of neuroticism pose
risks for development across all levels of adversity. Previous
work in the Project Competence sample examined differ-
ences in concurrent negative emotionality and stress reactiv-
ity in the EA competent, resilient, and maladaptive groups
and found that the maladaptive group reported considerably
higher levels of these negative personality traits (Masten
et al., 1999); the present findings add to this earlier work
by showing that these differences in negative emotions in
the three EA groups were already present in childhood. The
present findings are consistent with the large literature linking
negative emotionality with adaptive failures in childhood and
neuroticism with social difficulties and psychopathology in
adults (Caspi & Shiner, 2006). Previous work from Project
Competence demonstrated that adaptive problems in child-
hood predicted increasingly high levels of negative emotion-
ality from childhood through EA (Shiner, Masten, & Telle-
gen, 2002). Thus, negative emotions in childhood and
adaptive difficulties may have reciprocal negative effects on
each other.
Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness focused on the chil-
drens serious, thorough, and responsible approach to school;
children high on this trait embraced the schools agenda for
them and showed good self-control. Conscientiousness was
positively associated with all three concurrent indicators of
competence. Further, even after controlling for adversity ex-
posure, the trait was a robust predictor of positive increases
in academic achievement from childhood to EA and YA,
and it predicted YA work competence as well. In addition,
the competent and resilient participants in EA and YA had
a childhood history of higher conscientiousness than their
maladaptive peers. As noted previously, this was the one
childhood trait that differentiated those who switched from
maladaptive in EA to resilient in YA from those who re-
mained maladaptive over time. The present findings add to
the cumulating evidence that childhood self-control is crucial
for many aspects of positive adult development (Moffitt et al.,
2011) and demonstrate the importance of childrens con-
scientious approach to schoolwork.
We found an interesting interaction effect for childhood
conscientiousness and chronic adversity in the prediction of
social competence with peers in EA. Specifically, children
who were low on conscientiousness and exposed to low levels
of adversity had higher levels of social competence in EA,
whereas children who were low on conscientiousness and ex-
posed to high adversity and the children who were high on
conscientiousness (regardless of adversity exposure) devel-
oped lower levels of social competence in EA. In other words,
low conscientious children with relatively benign life condi-
tions had the best outcomes in terms of friendships with peers
in the EA years. Previous work in Project Competence may
help to clarify this surprising finding. Children who were
high on conscientiousness grew up to be more likely to see
Childhood personality and resilience
themselves as behaviorally controlled, nonaggressive, and
traditional and as disliking risky situations, and they reported
having somewhat more inhibited social relationships as adults
(Shiner et al., 2003). Perhaps the less conscientious children
who had experienced less adversity were less inhibited in the
EA years and better able to cultivate friendships with peers
during the EA phase of life, when forming friendships re-
quires considerable self-initiative. It is important to empha-
size, however, that any advantage of low childhood conscien-
tiousness for positive friendships disappeared by YA.
Agreeableness. Agreeableness assessed the childrens ten-
dencies to be considerate, flexible, kind, and tolerant rather
than selfish, egotistical, rude, and cynical. This trait was pos-
itively associated with rule-abiding conduct and social com-
petence in childhood and with a broader range of positive
adult outcomes than any other trait. After controlling for ad-
versity exposure, childhood agreeableness predicted positive
changes in academic achievement in EA and YA, rule-abid-
ing conduct in EA, and social competence with peers in EA
and YA, and it predicted positive work competence in YA,
controlling for earlier academic achievement. Clearly, agree-
ableness was important both for more task-focused endeavors
like school and work and for relationships. The competent
and resilient groups in EA and YA also manifested higher
agreeableness in childhood than the maladaptive group. Be-
cause much of the work on traits as sources of resilience
has focused on temperament traits, agreeableness has been
an overlooked contributor to resilient outcomes. Other re-
search confirms that disagreeableness is associated with a
wide variety of negative outcomes (Caspi & Shiner, 2006;
Laursen, Hafen, Rubin, Booth-LaForce, & Rose-Krasnor,
2010) and that agreeableness may be an especially important
source of resilience for those confronted by severe difficulties
(Boyce & Wood, 2011).
Agreeableness may also serve a protective effect for con-
duct for people exposed to high levels of adversity, given
that the interaction of childhood agreeableness and chronic
adversity predicted EA rule-abiding versus antisocial con-
duct. Participants with a history of high childhood agreeable-
ness manifested good rule-abiding conduct rather than antiso-
cial conduct in EA regardless of adversity exposure; in
contrast, at low levels of childhood agreeableness, conduct
was worse in EA in interaction with high adversity. Although
results do not always replicate, a number of studies have doc-
umented geneenvironment interactions in which particular
types of chronic adversity in combination with specific genes
predicted heightened risks of conduct disorder or antisocial
behavior (Thapar, Harold, Rice, Langley, & ODonovan,
2007). Looked at differently, these studies show that particu-
lar genes may promote resilience in the face of adversity
(Kim-Cohen & Gold, 2009). The trait of agreeableness may
be a mediator through which genetic vulnerabilities and pro-
tections have their effects. Certainly, this trait warrants more
consideration as a source of resilence, given its association
with many positive adult outcomes.
525
Openness to experience. Openness to experience described
the childrens imaginativeness, creativity, enthusiastic in-
volvement in activities, and engagement in the life of the
mind. Similar constellations of traits with the label mastery
motivation or achievement motivation have received a great
deal of attention in the developmental literature, particularly
because these traits typically are linked with better academic
attainment, at least in childhood (Wigfield, Eccles, Schiefele,
Roeser, & Davis-Kean, 2006). In this study, childhood open-
ness was associated positively with all three childhood compe-
tence domains, and it predicted positive changes in academic
achievement in EA and YA and in social competence in EA,
controlling for adversity and childhood competence in those
domains. Higher childhood openness also differentiated the
competent and maladaptive groups in EA and YA from the
maladaptive group. Some childhood measures of openness ac-
tually include items measuring childrens ability to adapt flex-
ibly to new or challenging situations (e.g., Goldberg, 2001). In
a study of adults presented with a laboratory stressor, higher
openness was related to better stress regulation at both the
physiological and psychological levels (Williams, Rau, Crib-
bet, & Gunn, 2009). This trait appears to index individual dif-
ferences in positive engagement with novel information and
situations and may be an important source of adaptability in
stressful times.
Limitations and implications of findings for future work on
childhood personality and the development of resilience
This study had a number of limitations as well as strengths.
The sample size was moderate for the complexity of the anal-
yses, and the cohort varied in age at each assessment point. In
addition, the Big Five childhood personality traits were mea-
sured using different measures for each trait, rather than via a
single standardized personality measure. This study also did
not attempt to elucidate the processes by which childhood
personality may influence the development of competence
or resilience. Nonetheless, this study offers a rare glimpse
at the predictive significance of childhood personality for
competence and resilience in adulthood, providing important
clues for future investigation. Strengths of the study include
the longitudinal design with high retention, multimethod as-
sessments, and robust indicators of a wide range of child
traits, including agreeableness and openness, two traits that
have been previously overlooked in developmental research
on resilience.
The present findings demonstrate that all of the Big Five
childhood traits except for extraversion are harbingers of
adult competence and resilience. Taken together, the results
suggest that children who do well in important developmental
tasks, whether they face low or high adversity, have the
ability to regulate their emotions and apply themselves seri-
ously to schoolwork, as well as the capacity for empathy
and connection, and the drive for mastery and exploration.
However, youths do not need to exhibit unusually high levels
of these positive traits for them to attain resilient outcomes in
526
the face of stress and adversity; rather, modestly positive
levels of these traits seem to suffice. In contrast, youths
with more challenging personality traitshigh levels of
negative emotions, poor self-control, disagreeableness, and
disinterest in mastery developmentare likely to be at risk
for negative outcomes, regardless of their exposure to ad-
versity.
There undoubtedly are many processes by which person-
ality traits in childhood could influence adult success, in
low- as well as high-adversity contexts. These were not exam-
ined in this study, but it will be important to elucidate these
processes, particularly for the goal of preventing maladaptive
outcomes and promoting resilience among young people ex-
posed to high adversity. Childhood personality already was
moderately related to concurrent competence at the outset
of the study, suggesting earlier influence of child traits on
competence already had occurred. Moreover, specific traits
were related to multiple domains of competence over time,
suggesting that there may be multiple pathways through
which child traits affect adaptation. A number of previous re-
ports from this study have indicated cascade effects, where
adaptive behavior in one domain appears to spread to other
domains over time (Masten et al., 2005, 2010; Obradovic
et al., 2010). Personality could have various indirect effects
on adult competence via its effect on related domains of com-
petence. For example, agreeableness could influence work
outcomes indirectly though effects on social competence;
earlier results from this study indicate that social competence
in childhood has unique predictive effects on work compe-
tence (Masten et al., 2010). Future work may help to elucidate
the processes through which childrens personality traits
shape their behavior and subsequent adaptation.
Although temperament and personality traits show some
continuity across time, even in the early childhood years (Ro-
berts & DelVecchio, 2000), they also change over time. Ra-
ther than being static, endogenous features of the person,
traits are developmental constructions that emerge through
the interplay of genetic and environmental factors (Rothbart,
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