308 III. DEvELOPMENT
stability, extraversion, agreeableness, and 
conscientiousness. Individuals showing this 
personality profile tend to experience more 
adaptive life outcomes both in the short run 
(Robins et al., 1996) and in the long run 
(Caspi, 2000). Persons resembling the over-
controlled  trait configuration score high on 
neuroticism combined with lower scores on 
extraversion, and represent a kind of inter -
nalizing trait profile, with an increased risk 
for anxiety related problems later in life. 
Finally, individuals showing the undercon -
trolled  trait profile score low on agreeable -
ness and conscientiousness, and have an 
increased risk of showing conduct disorders 
and various externalizing problems in ado -
lescence, and antisocial problems, violent, 
and dark triad behaviors as young adults 
(Alessandri et al., 2014; De Clercq, Rettew, 
Althoff, & De Bolle, 2012; Pilarska, 2018; 
Robins et al., 1996).
Although replicable and appealing, the 
person-  centered approach and its resulting 
prototypes have had a limited impact on the 
development of the personality field due to 
multiple reasons. First, researchers preferred 
the more continuous Big Five constructs in -
stead of working with categorical prototype 
membership to preserve predictive validity of 
personality. Second, the individuals assigned 
to a particular cluster type still demonstrate 
substantial variability; in other words, not 
every cluster member resembles the proto -
type equally well or to the same extent. Par -
ticularly for adolescents under development, 
using potentially stigmatizing categorical 
labels, such as over- or undercontrolled, is 
to be avoided. Third, and finally, both theo -
rists and practitioners remained interested in 
the constituting building blocks of the pro -
totypes, hence requiring a description of the 
adolescent in terms of their standing on the 
Big Five.
Personality Development 
and Sex Differences
The idea that traits are not fixed, but natu -
rally develop through maturation and en -
vironmental influences, brought a more 
dynamic perspective to the psychology of in -
dividual differences. Age and sex differences 
have been adequately described for adults (Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001; Mc -
Crae et al., 1999; Srivastava, John, Gosling, 
& Potter, 2003), but were only recently sys -
tematically and comprehensively addressed 
for children and adolescents.
Soto, John, Gosling, and Potter (2011) 
looked at patterns for age and gender in a 
cross-  sectional sample of 1,267,218 residents 
of English-  speaking countries who voluntary 
provided personality self-  descriptions on 
the BFI (John et al., 1991). The sample was 
quite diverse in terms of ethnicity, national -
ity, and socioeconomic status, though it was 
constrained to people filling out the BFI on -
line. Age of participants ranged from 10 to 
65 (M = 25 years, 7 months, SD  = 10 years, 
9 months). They further grouped items into 
two facets per domain (Soto & John, 2009) 
to be able to examine age and gender dif -
ferences at a more fine-  grained level than 
the broad Big Five domains, distinguishing 
the facets self-  discipline and order for con -
scientiousness, altruism, and compliance for 
agreeableness, anxiety and depression for 
neuroticism, assertiveness and activity for 
extraversion, and ideas and aesthetics for 
openness to experience (Soto et al., 2011). 
Overall trends are considered in this review, 
but special consideration is given at the facet 
level for the age group 10–20 years.
Conscientiousness showed rather identical 
change patterns for males and females, with 
a considerable drop from ages 10 to 13–14, 
followed by a gradual and steep increase 
until young adulthood. Pronounced sex dif -
ferences in conscientiousness emerged at the 
beginning of young adulthood, and these 
continued over the lifespan. Conscientious -
ness levels further increased throughout the 
lifespan. Especially scores for self-  discipline 
showed this steep declining pattern in mid -
puberty, followed by a steep increase toward 
young adulthood, whereas the decreasing 
pattern for order was less steep, and sex 
differences for order could be observed al -
ready across puberty, with girls being more 
orderly than boys. Females scored higher on 
agreeableness, and this personality domain 
showed a rather similar pattern as consci -
entiousness before young adulthood, with a 
decrease curve pointing in midpuberty, then 
increasing toward young adulthood, with a 
slower pattern of increase toward age 60. Sex 
differences were already there before age 20, 