Personal Growth in Middle Age: A Personality Perspective

An individual's personality provides him/her with a unique set of experiences by virtue of specific personological traits that attune him towards characteristic choices and reaction patterns. Alongside the enormous array of life sustaining adaptive decisions that an individual makes by using the capacities endowed by his personality, he/she is fueled to strive for autonomy and yearning for excellence. In the same light the present study aimed to assess the specific association of personality traits of middle aged Punjabi men as mapped by the NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and Personal Growth indices of Inner Directedness and Time Competence using the Personal Orientation Inventory (Shostrom, 1964). Correlational analysis provided clear linkages between Openness to experience and Conscientiousness dimensions of personality with Personal Growth indices.