 As you can imagine, previous studies looking at how people change around natural disasters for quite obvious reasons are rare simply because there isn't many studies out there following people over time with a disaster in between. It's not something we plan for, it's not something we look for, it just happens as life does. Now New Zealand Energy's Invalid study is one of the very very few studies in the world that is uniquely positioned to answer these sort of questions, particularly around the Christchurch earthquake, because the study started in 2009 and has followed through from before to after the earthquakes, giving us a unique opportunity to look at change from before and after, rather than just what happens after. There are a couple of reasons these questions are very important. Firstly, and perhaps most practically, they answer the questions about what happens to people in terms of who they are and how they see themselves, when a dramatic, quite a dramatic life event occurs, such as an earthquake. It is important for Kintebrians, it is important for New Zealanders overall, and it is important for survivors of natural disasters in general across the world. Secondly, it is very important theoretically in terms of our understanding of personality as a kind of fundamental dimensions of who we are and how we develop, how our environment impacts us and how we grow or not. When we talk about personality within psychology and psychological research, we usually look at it in a matter of a couple of key dimensions along which people differ. So, for instance, we have the dimension of extraversion, which relates to people's sociability, how sociable people are, how much they interact with new people versus how quiet they are, how much they feel they keep to the background. We have a dimension of agreeableness, which relates to people's politeness or how much they kind of follow others. Then we have a dimension of conscientiousness, which generally relates to how much people like order, they like getting their chores done in time, versus disorderliness or some would say laziness. Then we have a dimension of openness to experience, which in very simple term if you think of a person's CD collection, the one with the more variable CD collection is the one who's more open. These are people who are open to new experiences, abstract ideas. Then we have a dimension of neuroticism, sometimes referred to as emotional stability, which relates to people's reactivity to their environment, how much they feel that they are moody, that they have mood swings, that they feel down sometimes. Finally, and this is kind of a newer model, we have a sixth dimension of honesty-humility, which relates to people's sense of entitlement. Do they wish that they had expensive luxury goods or not? This is not important to them. As you can imagine, a negative life event such as a Christchurch earthquake, for instance, for the survivors would be associated largely with changes in things that relate to your reactivity to stress, which then relates to our dimension of emotional stability or neuroticism. The question is, do the other dimensions change? And of course, the big question is, does this emotional stability dimension change at all? We don't have, until recently, research to show this. So we went into this research, into this study, with the expectation that given that personality is a stable thing, we are talking about people's traits and these are adults or you are adults that we are looking at, we expected not much in the way of change, but we did expect to see some specific change to emotional stability. That is, we would have expected a negative life event to be associated with a decrease in emotional stability with people feeling a bit more moody, a bit more stressed out. To get to the actual findings of our study, the stuff people want to know about, what we found was pretty much what we expected. We found that there was very, very little in the way of change in personality from before to after the Christchurch earthquakes, as we would have expected, because personality is a stable construct. We are talking about personality traits, things that people carry across the lifespan. However, we did find that slight decrease in emotional stability, the one that we were talking about in terms of people's reactivity to stress, people feeling a bit more stressed out, a bit more moody. We found that people's emotional stability decreases by a very tiny fraction for those who were affected by the earthquakes, compared to those who were not. What these findings mean is actually quite important, both for Kentabrians and for personality research all around. Firstly, we know quite comfortably, I guess, that people don't change dramatically when they experience something quite dramatic as the Christchurch earthquakes. It doesn't necessarily affect the core of who you are in terms of how you see yourself. We did, however, find that slight decrease in emotional stability, which we'll have to follow this up, might dispose people to a certain vulnerability to anxiety and stress, as a lower level of emotional stability tends to. In terms of what this means for research and for personality theory altogether, it means that changes in personality are not necessarily associated with these dramatic, unexpected life events. Now, we know that personality changes somewhat for adults. The question is what are the life events that actually relate to them, to those changes, if they're not these dramatic natural disasters, so to speak.