and concluded that those most central to personality did not seem to
show developmental change in adulthood. Of course, there are many ,many Dynamic Processes and some of these doubtless change. Cogni -
tive processes like memory and reasoning show well-known changes
with age (Salthouse, 1989). There is some evidence that emotional ex -
pression becomes muted with age (Bromley , 1978), and there may be
some changes in preferred ways of coping or defending in times ofstress (Costa, Zonderman, & McCrae, 1991). Because there is as yet nocomplete catalog, there can be no systematic review of age changes inDynamic Processes, but that would probably be one fruitful way to ap -
proach the topic of adult development.
The Objective Biography
The Objective Biography is the cumulative record of everything a per-
son does and experiences, and it is the one aspect of the personality sys-tem that necessarily must change with age. Every day lived adds another
page to the Objective Biography . There is a sense, however, in which therate of change decreases with time. As a proportion of life lived, eachnew day becomes smaller and smaller. The first week of college is full ofnew experiences; the thousandth week of factory work is pretty muchlike every other. Still, it is useful to recall that there are always changesof some kind, even in the most routine life structure.
Behaviorally oriented psychologists sometimes attempt to define
personality as the sum total of all behaviors. Personality psychologistsusually laugh at such a definition (if they don’t cry) because it repre -
sents an incredibly naïve attempt to maintain the notion that personal -
ity encompasses the whole individual while reducing personality to ob -
servable facts. In many circumstances behaviors reflect personality ,
although they also, and probably more often, reflect situational de -
mands and constraints and what we have learned by dealing with simi -
lar situations. In any case the behavior is not the same thing as the en -
tity it expresses. We would say that the behaviorist’s definition reduces
personality to the Objective Biography—a peripheral component of thepersonality system.
Consequently , there is no contradiction at all in saying that person -
ality remains stable whereas behavior changes. All this means is that the
situation we face in young adulthood, at a certain point in the history of208 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD