 I'm Petar, I am a postdoctoral fellow at the MESS University in Auckland and I did my PhD with the New Zealand Attitude and Value Study and I'm still working on the team. My current research is largely concerned with changes in personality in adulthood. Specifically we're interested in how people develop or if they change in terms of who or what they are or what they think of themselves as being like. Personality as such. The really cool thing about the NZFES in terms of methods is that it is a longitudinal study with a heterogeneous sample that is we're following a large group of diverse people over time which allows us to do more than previous research has been able to. That is we're actually able to follow change in things such as personality or anything else for that matter. So the research we're looking at at the moment is longitudinal in that nature in that we are able to model developmental change in a large sample of people across the adult lifespan. One of the most important questions in personality research at the moment is if and how personality changes. Now when we talk about personality we're talking about a framework of traits. Traits being stable patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving in people. Essentially personality talks about what people are like. When we talk about changes in personality and specifically when we talk about developmental change in personality we are actually asking do people change in what they are like as they grow older. So do they become more or less sociable, more or less conscientious as they go say from 20 through to 40 or 50 through to 60, things like that. Now this is a very important question for a number of reasons. Practically it quite simply tells us about whether and how people change as they grow older. So do they change in a systematic or a predictable manner. Secondly though it is very important for the very nature of a personality construct. Just to keep it simple there are two options here in terms of what we can expect. So we can expect on the one hand that personality is a static thing. So it may be as a lot of people believe largely determined by genetics and early life experiences which means that most of your development or change would happen in younger age, adolescence, things like that and then it would be rather unchanged in adults. On the other hand personality may be quite a dynamic thing and by that I mean it may be actually a process of continual change that is it might change with us, that is it change with our lives, social roles and identities we are involved in. So we have the two kind of questions in terms of what personality is like and how it develops and that's part of the reasons we actually went into this research. Some of our findings in this sense were quite interesting. So let's take the personality trait of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness relates to orderliness, how much people like and maintain order, how in past-oriented they are, how industrious they are. Now we found a very specific and quite interesting trend in this trait. That is conscientiousness tends to increase as people age through younger adulthood. So from about 20 onwards through to about age of 40-45, conscientiousness decreases and a bit of a curve. 45 onwards it stays stable. Now what might be the cause of this particular trend? So think about younger adulthood. It is a time when people are finishing schools, leaving schools and engaging in social roles which demand conscientiousness. So achievement in a new job, success in a career, even in New Zealand being able to work to buying a home and starting a family, all of it requires conscientiousness which is why we see that steady increase in conscientiousness. From about middle age onwards though, those demands are not as high anymore which is why conscientiousness remains stable. In agreeableness, in empathic concern, we see a very similar decrease through 20s and 30s. So as people go through 20s and 30s, empathic concern decreases and then from about late 30s onwards it remains stable. Now these two trends, these two patterns are quite telling, right? In this younger age, 20s and 30s, when things are happening, you have to be kind of on the ball, you have to achieve in your careers, your jobs make your way there, people become firstly less sociable, so less concerned with having larger group of friends going out, being the life of the party and also less concerned with others. On the flip side, they become more conscientious. So it's quite a cool pattern that actually tells us that personality changes in a way that is systematic and that is related to the changes in our lives, the social roles we undertake and the identities of ourselves. Because of the structure and the nature of the New Zealand Attitude and Value Study we were able to observe these patterns of change across six years of assessments. This is quite a cool thing in personality research because while there is about a hundred years of research into the development of personality and differences in personality across age, there is very, very little in the way of models being able to look at this sort of change as people age. And NZAVS, because of the sample structure, because of the people who respond every year, we are able to do this. Now, of course, six years is a sizeable amount of time but it's not long enough to look at change in some of these fundamental things such as personality. The more interesting question would be, ten years down the road, what patterns do we see there?