Regardless of age, there are certain things in life that are linked to happiness.

According to research published by the American Psychological Association, there are certain personality traits that are linked to happiness in life. This is true even though people’s social roles and responsibilities may change over the course of their adult lives.

“Many studies have shown that people with certain personality profiles are more satisfied with their life than others. Yet, it had not been extensively studied whether this holds true across the lifespan. For example, extraverted – that is sociable, talkative – people might be particularly happy in young adulthood, when they typically are forming new social relationships,” says co-author Gabriel Olaru. “We thus wanted to examine if some personality traits are more or less relevant to life, social and work satisfaction in specific life phases.”

The findings were reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers examined data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel survey, a nationally representative survey of Dutch households, from 2008 to 2019 to see how the association between personality characteristics and life satisfaction varies over time.

Over 11 years, 9,110 Dutch people aged 16 to 95 at the time of the first survey filled out multiple questionnaires to measure their Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability/neuroticism) and how happy they were with their social connections and life in general.

Only the 5,928 survey participants who were working at the time of the study responded to the questions on how satisfied they were with their jobs.

The study discovered that most of the interactions between personality traits and satisfaction stayed the same over an adult’s lifetime. They also found that emotional stability was the trait most strongly linked to satisfaction with life, social connections, and career.

“Our findings show that – despite differences in life challenges and social roles – personality traits are relevant for our satisfaction with life, work and social contacts across young, middle and older adulthood,” adds co-author Manon van Scheppingen. “The personality traits remained equally relevant across the adult lifespan, or became even more interconnected in some cases for work satisfaction.”

The researchers also discovered that certain personality qualities, most notably conscientiousness for job satisfaction and extraversion and agreeableness for social satisfaction, were associated to peoples’ contentment with their social life and employment. Respondents reported higher levels of personal, social, and job satisfaction when these attributes increased over time.

Age differences had the most effect on how happy people were with their jobs. As the people in the study got older, the link between being happy at work and being emotionally stable got a little stronger.

The researchers discovered that individuals who improved their openness also had a rise in life happiness throughout the course of the LISS survey’s 11-year measurement period, despite a generally lower link between openness and life satisfaction. According to the researchers, indirect mechanisms may be able to account for this association.

“Emotional stability likely shows a strong link with global and domain-specific satisfaction because this trait colors people’s general view of the world,” Olaru adds.

“A good example of how personality interacts with the environment can be found in the work context. One of our findings was that the link between emotional stability and work satisfaction increases across age. This might be explained by the fact that emotionally stable people are less scared to quit unsatisfactory jobs and more likely to apply for jobs that are more challenging and perhaps more fulfilling and enjoyable in the long run,” van Scheppingen points out.

Researchers say that more research should look at how things that change with age, like income, employment status, marital status, and health, affect the link between personality traits and overall life satisfaction.

“While we did not examine what caused these changes, [the research] shows that our personalities and our happiness are not set in stone,” van Scheppingen adds. “Perhaps we may even be able to influence how we change: If we try to become more organized, outgoing, friendly, this might increase life, social or work satisfaction as well.”

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