The COVID-19 pandemic may have had a negative impact on the psychological development of young adults.
Psychological maturation is a process that sees people become more thoughtful, agreeable, and less neurotic as they age. This process is known as psychological maturation. The pandemic in the United States seems to have been caused by a lack of awareness. That personality trajectory was reversedResearchers report that September 28 was a particularly important date for adults younger than 30. PLOS ONE. These patterns could lead to long-term problems for the cohort, according to researchers.
“You get better as you go through life at being responsible, at coping with emotions and getting along with others,” says personality psychologist Rodica Damian of the University of Houston, who was not involved with this study. “The fact that in these young adults you see the opposite pattern does show stunted development.”
How people think, feel and act is influenced by their personalities. Researchers often assess a person’s personality profile along five core traits: neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and Transparency to Experience (SN: 9/1/21). These traits can change over time. Neuroticism tends decrease in some people, but agreeableness usually improves.
However, the pandemic may be reversing these trends. Even after factoring out expected changes, researchers in the new study observed about a decade’s worth of personality change, averaged across all study participants, in just three years — but going in the opposite of the expected direction. The greatest changes in certain traits were seen in young adults. Middle-aged adults — 30 to 64 years old — showed more change across all traits. While the personalities of older adults remained largely unchanged, they showed more change across all traits.
Personality psychologist Wiebke Bileidorn from the University of Zurich believes that such age differences make intuitive sense. “The density of experiences in adolescence and young adulthood is so much higher” than in later life, says Bleidorn, who was not involved with the study. “If you miss out on your senior year of high school, you can’t get that back.”
Angelina Sutin (personality psychologist) and colleagues looked at the personality changes in the United States prior to and during the pandemic. They analyzed data from Understanding America Study.
This survey examines the changes in attitudes and behaviors that occur in response major events like the 2020 presidential election or the ongoing pandemic. Among those surveyed, roughly 7,000 people — ranging in age from 18 to 109 — took a personality inventory at least once in the six years prior to the pandemic and once during the pandemic.
These responses indicate that neuroticism in the United States fell slightly in 2020, the first year after the pandemic. This finding is similar to what researchers discovered with a second dataset two years ago when they reported that neuroticism had declined in the United States. In adults, the number of cases fell in the first six week after the pandemic.. The new data, however, includes data from 2021-2022 that show that the dip was temporary.
That initial dip was probably due to the sense of solidarity that emerged in the health crisis’s earlier months, along with people attributing their worries to the crisis rather than their own internal state, says Sutin, of Florida State University in Tallahassee. “In the second year, all that support fell apart.”
The average neuroticism score has since returned to pre-pandemic levels. Researchers found that the picture is complex. The 2020 dip was almost entirely caused by middle-aged adults and older adults. These two groups saw their neuroticism scores fall more slowly over the years than they did before the pandemic. However, neuroticism scores among young adults rose to levels that were higher than those in the pre-pandemic years.
Similarly, conscientiousness and agreeableness scores also declined among middle-aged adults in 2021 and early 2022, but the drop wasn’t nearly as steep as the one observed among young adults.
Sutin states that these findings are alarming. “We know these traits predict all sorts of long-term outcomes.”
High neuroticism is linked to depression, anxiety and loneliness. Low conscientiousness can also be linked to poor outcomes in education, work, health, and relationships.
However, it remains to see if these personality shifts persist. It could be that young adults “missed the train” during a critical development period, Damian says. Perhaps they could have pursued a better career path or earned a college diploma. Maybe they can still get to their destination, even if it is a little later than planned.
“There are critical developmental periods and then there is plasticity,” Damian says. “We don’t know how it’s going to play out.”
