0.9 Trait theories of personality  (Page 31/41)

Paul Costa earned a Ph.D. in human development from the University of Chicago in 1970. He taught for 2 years at Harvard University, and then joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In 1978 he joined the National Institute on Aging, a branch of the National Institutes of Health. Since 1985, he has been the Chief of the Laboratory of Personality and Cognition, Gerontology Research Center. He also holds appointments at the University of Maryland, Duke University Medical Center, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the Georgetown University School of Medicine. Among numerous awards, he has been elected as a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Psychological Association, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He has published hundreds of research articles, many of them in collaboration with Robert McCrae. McCrae earned his Ph.D. in personality psychology at Boston University in 1976. After teaching and conducting research at Boston University, the Veteran’s Administration Outpatient Clinic in Boston, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston, in 1978 he joined the Gerontology Research Center at the National Institute on Aging, where he continues to conduct research today. He is also a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, as well as a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) of the American Psychological Association (for more information visit the National Institute on Aging website at www.grc.nia.nih.gov).

The Five-Factor Theory of Personality

Costa and McCrae acknowledged the important role that Eysenck played when he identified extraversion and neuroticism as second-order personality factors, and for developing the Maudsley Personality Inventory, the Eysenck Personality Inventory, and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (the latter test, developed with his wife Sybil, was the first to include psychoticism; see S. Eysenck, 1997) as tools for measuring these factors. However, they disagreed with Eysenck regarding psychoticism. They initially proposed a different factor called openness . When they discussed this issue with Eysenck, he felt that openness might be the opposite pole of psychoticism, but McCrae and Costa believed the factors were significantly different (see Costa&McCrae, 1986). Since that time, Costa and McCrae have moved beyond the third factor of openness, and added two more second-order factors: agreeableness and conscientiousness (see Costa&McCrae, 1989; Costa&Widiger, 1994; McCrae&Allik, 2002; McCrae&Costa, 2003). Together, Costa and McCrae developed the NEO Personality Inventory (or NEO-PI) to measure neuroticism, extraversion, and openness, and later they developed the Revised NEO-PI , or NEO-PI-R, which also measures agreeableness and conscientiousness (see McCrae&Costa, 2003).