Running head: Makes Personality Happy?
DO CERTAIN PERSONALITY TRAITS MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY?
The Moderating Role of Age in the Relationship Between Conscientiousness, AgreeablenessOpenness to Experience, Extraversion & Neuroticism and Subjective Well-Being
Master Thesis, MSc HRM
University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business
Final Version 12-06-2015 M. Groenink Studentnumber: 2579197 Van Helomaweg 6 7971PX Havelte Tel: +31 (0)6-12655589 E-mail: m.groenink@student.rug.nl Supervisor/university Dr. P.H. van der Meer
Word count: 10.964
Acknowledgement:
Makes Personality Happy? 2 ABSTRACT
Much research is already done on the relationship between only two personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism and subjective well-being. Therefore the main goal of this research is to study if the personality traits conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, extraversion and neuroticism are related to subjective well-being, and if age moderates these relationships.
To test the hypotheses, data of the LISS panel is used which is based on a true probability sample of the Dutch population. Data of wave 1, 2008 is used where 4761 respondents answered all the questions linked to my variables of interest.
A positive relation for conscientiousness, agreeableness and extraversion on subjective well-being was expected, which was not confirmed for the personality trait conscientiousness. Alternatively, no effects for openness to experience and a negative relation for neuroticism on subjective well-being were predicted and confirmed.
The second hypothesis is confirmed which proposed that age would have a U-shaped effect on subjective well-being.
For the moderating analysis a positive significant relation was found for
conscientiousness, and an increasingly significant negative effect for neuroticism. People under 20 show to have a positive relation between extraversion and subjective well-being compared to people above 20. For the other two personality traits no significant effects were found which means that age does not moderate the relationship between agreeableness, openness to experience and subjective well-being.
Further research could make use of longitudinal data to research the effects of age on the relationship between personality and subjective well-being and compare these results to this research.
Makes Personality Happy? 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION 4
1.1 Research Question 6
2. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES 7
2.1 Subjective Well-Being 7
2.2 Personality Traits 8
2.3 Age 12
3. METHOD 16
3.1 Sample and Procedure 16
3.2 Measures 17
3.3 Data Analyses 18
4. RESULTS 20
4.1 Descriptive Statistics 20
4.2 One Way ANOVA 22
4.3 Hypotheses Testing 24
5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 36
5.1 Findings 36
5.2 Implications 39
5.3 Limitations and Further Research 41
REFERENCES 43
Makes Personality Happy? 4 1. INTRODUCTION
A happy person is a "young, healthy, well educated, well-paid, extroverted, optimistic, worry-free, religious, married person with high self-esteem, job morale, modest aspirations, of either sex and of a wide range of intelligence" (Wilson, 1967, p. 294). As we can see in the definition of Wilson there are a lot of factors like personality and external circumstances that are influencing happiness. In this thesis however, I will not only focus on happiness but on subjective well-being.
Subjective well-being contains besides happiness, the affective aspect of well-being, also cognitive well-being, which represents life satisfaction. So happiness and life satisfaction together are studied as subjective well-being and consist of life satisfaction, positive and negative affect (Olesen, Thomsen & O’Toole, 2015). Lucas & Donnellan (2007) define subjective well-being as the extent to which people think and feel that their life is going well. Lucas & Diener (2015) add to this that subjective well-being is an overarching evaluation that should be able to capture if a person’s life is going well and is also seen as an umbrella term for how we think and feel about our lives (Diener et al., 1999). Concluding, subjective well-being takes an individual to assess his/her well-well-being as the overall assessment of his/her life (Dolan, Peasgood, & White 2008).
Diener (1996), Diener & Lucas (1999) and Diener, Suh, Lucas & Smith (1999) stated that personality is regarded as a strong predictor of subjective well-being. Their extensive research led to the suggestion that subjective well-being is strongly linked to stable
personality characteristics (Lucas & Diener, 2015). Personality, defined by Deng, Liu, Li & Hu (2013), is seen as stable characteristics and tendencies which determine commonalities and differences in people’s behavior. The most consistent model of personality traits is the Big-Five Model (McCrae & Costa, 1987) where the five traits of stable personality
characteristics; neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness are assessed.
Makes Personality Happy? 5 An explanation for this could be that out of this earlier research, researchers only found that neuroticism and extraversion were strongly correlated with variables measuring subjective well-being and that the other three traits were correlated weaker (Lucas & Diener, 2015).
Therefore, in this research, I will focus on the direct effect of all five personality traits; openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism in relation to subjective well-being and I hope that my research will shed new light on this gap in the literature. The reason I also include the traits extraversion and neuroticism is that in this way I can confirm if the results of my research correspond with the existing literature.
Secondly, the research done on the relationship between personality traits and subjective well-being was mainly conducted among university employees, students, small samples or by self-report assessments with lack of other data (Jibeen, 2014, Jing, Ling, & Lijuan, 2014). No studies have been found with a large sample so that it can be used to research the whole Dutch population. Therefore it is an opportunity to use the LISS database to research a representative sample of the Dutch population and make a contribution to the growing research of economists on personality and the influence it has on people’s lives.
Besides personality traits and subjective well-being, another factor will be introduced as a moderating variable; age. What kind of influence can different age groups have on the influence of personality traits on subjective well-being? Diener et al. (1999), suggest that life satisfaction often increases, or at least does not drop, with age. But how stable are the Big-Five personality traits in different life stages? Do they have different effects?
According to Cole & Balasubramanian (1993) and Yoon (1997), age differences do play an important role in understanding human behavior and perceptions. It is also known that the effect of age differs, and that there is an U-shaped effect of age in relation with the
happiness and life satisfaction of people. This means that people are the least happy when they are around their thirties and that their happiness is higher before and afterwards (Clark & Oswald 1994).
Makes Personality Happy? 6
1.1 Research Question
This thesis will examine the way in which the personality traits openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism influence subjective well-being and whether age plays a moderating role in these relationships. Therefore the research question which will be central in this paper is:
Does age moderates the relationship between conscientiousness, agreeableness openness to experience, extraversion, neuroticism and the subjective well-being of people?
Makes Personality Happy? 7 2. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES
2.1 Subjective Well-Being
As already been introduced, subjective well-being represents a person’s overall
evaluation about the quality of his or her life (Lucas & Diener, 2015). So well-being is viewed and evaluated from a person’s own perspective on their quality of life. However subjective well-being cannot be measured with a single construct as it represents different broad categories which are often correlated to each other. The different categories are: peoples emotional responses and domain satisfactions, which together are labeled as the affective aspects of well-being, and the judgments of life satisfaction (Stones & Kozma, 1985). Therefore Diener et al. (1999), defined subjective well-being as a general area of scientific interest rather than a single specific construct. Nowadays the view of Lucas & Diener (2015) about subjective well-being is that it is a global construct reflecting a broad evaluation of a person’s life from his or her perspective. They state that subjective well-being is high when things are going well in a person’s life.
In measuring subjective well-being the cognitive- (life satisfaction) and affective (happiness) components of well-being are measured separately as they are both represented in the categories of subjective well-being. The cognitive component, also known as life
satisfaction, measures the judgments about how one’s life is going or the evaluation of the quality of life. The affective components on the other hand consists of the emotions and feelings a person experiences which leads to sociability and physical health (Lucas & Diener, 2015). Moods and emotions together are labeled as affect and can lead to both positive and negative affect. These two types of affect are assessed separately as they are almost always separable and also not always correlated (Lucas & Diener, 2015). So when a person assesses his or her life both a cognitive evaluation of life satisfaction and an evaluation of
positive/negative affect is involved (Jibeen, 2014; Wilks & Neto, 2013).
In the article of Jibeen (2014) the World Health Organization stated that when a person is mentally healthy this contributes to his/her subjective being. Subjective well-being is thus high when things are going well in a person’s life (Lucas & Diener, 2015). This will be achieved when a person experiences high positive affect, low negative affect (affective components) and high life satisfaction (cognitive component), which will then lead to
Makes Personality Happy? 8 energy and engagement while negative affect is associated with distress and anxiety (Olesen et al., 2015). In addition to this statement Lucas & Diener (2015) note that it is clear
something stable and internal to a person affects his/her levels of subjective well-being. Dolan at al. (2008) in their review study examined all influences on subjective well-being and
determined seven categories including personal characteristics. Therefore the personality traits of the Big-Five are included in this thesis, to research the effects of these traits on subjective well-being.
2.2 Personality Traits
Before exploring the different personality traits, first the definition of personality needs to be clear. Deng, Liu, Li & Hu (2013) in their research define personality as stable characteristics and tendencies which determine commonalities and differences in people’s behavior. In order to be able to research these stable characteristics, researchers in the 1980’s became concerned and recognized the need for an agreement on the general outlines to research personality traits (McCrae & Costa, 1987). Independent researchers examined natural language dictionaries to identify personality attributes, who were then subjected to a factor analysis and resulted in a five-factor solution; the Big-Five model (DeNeve & Cooper 1998). Norman in 1963 replicated the Five-Factor model of Tupes & Chistal (1961) and called it “an adequate taxonomy of personality”.
Out of the research of McCrae & Costa (1987), supported with the results from the analyses of the NEO Personality Inventory, the five adjective factors showed substantial cross-observer agreement for all 5 traits on (peer) ratings and self-reports. Nowadays the Five-Factor model is presented as the most consistent model regarding personality traits (John & Srivastava, 1999, McCrae & John, 1992). Therefore in this research I will use these five factors: conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, extraversion and
neuroticism.
Makes Personality Happy? 9 (2) Agreeableness is associated with cooperative behavior, likeability, forgiveness, kindness, sympathy, and trust (McCrae & John, 1992). People with high levels of
agreeableness are more likely to be more successful and receive greater emotional support (Zaman, Anis-ul-Haque, Nawas, 2014; Zellars & Perrewe, 2001) which may lead to higher life satisfaction or happiness.
(3) Openness to experience on the other hand, refers to the extent to which a person is willing to try new and different things (Deng et al., 2013). Other characteristics which refer to openness to experience are being curious, creative, flexible and intellectual (McCrae & Costa 1987).
The fourth trait (4) extraversion refers to the tendency to be positive, assertive, energetic, social, talkative, and warm (John, 1989).
Neuroticism (5) is the only trait which is negatively phrased and refers to the
tendency to experience anxiety, self-pity, hostility, impulsivity, self-consciousness, irrational thinking, depression, and low self-esteem (John 1989; McCrae & Costa 1987; McCrae & John 1992).
Subjective well-being and personality. In many studies personality is mentioned as a strong or even the strongest predictor of subjective well-being (Diener, 1996; Diener & Lucas, 1999 and Diener et al., 1999). Also DeNeve & Cooper (1998) in their research showed that
personality is one of the leading predictors of subjective well-being as they summarized the correlations of 137 personality traits (including the Big-Five) with subjective well-being. Their work has been cited multiple times (around 200 times) and they showed how important personality is in understanding happiness (Steel et al., 2008). An explanation comes from Roberts (2009) who argues that personality traits define how people unfold their view on the world and understand its development.
Makes Personality Happy? 10 determinant of genes. Lucas & Diener (2015) agree because the evidence on the link between personality traits and subjective well-being is very consistent and it shows that something stable and internal to the persons affect his/her level of subjective well-being. Therefore it is important to understand the link between personality traits and subjective well-being where a person evaluates his/her own life.
Not all personality traits have a direct influence on subjective well-being. A consistent finding in the existing literature is that especially extraversion and neuroticism are strongly related to subjective well-being and the other three relations show weaker relations (Lucas & Diener, 2015). This might also be the reason why only few researchers focused on all of the Big-Five traits, besides extraversion and neuroticism, which are thus extensively researched. For example extraverted people have higher levels of positive affect, engage more in social situations and have stronger affective responses to positive events and people who are more neurotic experience more negative affect and have strong reactions to negative events (Soto, 2015; McCrae & Costa, 2008). Soto (2015) explained with these direct effects of the two traits on positive and negative affect that extraverted and non-neurotic (emotionally stable) people mostly experience greater well-being.
Makes Personality Happy? 11 The relations that are described in the literature between conscientiousness,
agreeableness, openness to experience and subjective well-being are as follows. People who are highly agreeable, express more pro-social behavior and tend to be better liked by their colleagues (Soto, 2015). Jibeen (2014) researched the treat conscientiousness and suggested that more conscientious people are more satisfied with their lives, which is consistent with the finding of conscientiousness predicting life satisfaction (Diener & Lucas, 1999; McCrae & John, 1992; Vittersø & Nilsen, 2002). About the relation of the personality trait openness to experience to subjective well-being almost no information is available. Only McCrae & Costa (1991) made a statement and described that “open individuals are characterized by both a broader and deeper scope of awareness and by a need to enlarge and examine experience…” (p.228). They state that openness to experience is positively correlated with both positive and negative affect which is a confusing result as people who are associated with high levels of subjective well-being experience high positive affect and low negative affect.
As persons do not express only one personality trait it is important to see how all the Big-Five traits interact in relation to subjective well-being. Out of the researchers who already did research towards all Big-Five personality traits, they described the following
combinations of personality traits in order to achieve high levels of subjective well-being. Soto (2015) described that extraverted, agreeable and conscientious people with low levels of neuroticism are associated with higher levels of subjective well-being. DeNeve & Cooper (1998) agree with this finding and state that individuals with these combination of personality traits are normally more satisfied with their lifes, experience more positive- and less negative affect.
Because out of the research done by among others Soto (2015), Steel et al. (2008), DeNeve & Cooper (1998), McCrae & Costa (1991), Vittersø & Nilsen (2002), Lucas & Diener (2015) and Jibeen (2014) consistent results concerning the effects of the Big-Five personality traits on subjective well-being are shown, I will follow these results in predicting the relationships in my research. Therefore the hypotheses formulated for this relationship are:
Makes Personality Happy? 12 Hypothesis 1b: Agreeableness is positively associated towards subjective well-being;
higher degree of agreeableness leads to higher subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 1c: Openness to experience is not related to subjective well-being; higher or lower levels of openness to experience have no effects on subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 1d: Extraversion is positively associated to subjective well-being; higher levels of extraversion leads to higher subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 1e: Neuroticism negatively relates towards subjective well-being; higher levels of neuroticism leads to lower levels of subjective well-being.
2.3 Age
When people grow older, behavior changes and it is interesting to see if age has a direct effect on subjective well-being and if it moderates the relationship between personality traits and subjective well-being. First the effect of age on subjective well-being will be researched in the existing literature and thereafter the moderating role of this variable will be explored.
Makes Personality Happy? 13 These results already give an indication that the effects of age on subjective well-being are complex and this is confirmed with a lot of mixed results reported in literature. Kahneman & Krueger (2006) for example did research into the developments of measurement of
subjective well-being and also concluded that the research of age is complex. In their study the lowest life satisfaction is experienced by people who have teenagers living at home and afterwards their reported satisfaction increases. This finding is consistent with the findings of Clark & Oswald (1994) where they state that people are the least happy when they are in their mid-thirties and that happiness is apparently U-shaped in age, with the minimum level around the 30’s (Oswald, 1997). Many economist agree with this U-shaped effect in age, and this can be explained by the fact that people around their thirties have high unfulfilled expectations about for example their careers which they cannot manage very well. At a later age these people are better able to manage these unfulfilled expectations as their emotions become better regulated and therefore it does not influence their subjective well-being as much (Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998).
On the other hand Siedlecki, Salthouse, Oishi & Jeswani (2014) concluded that there were no substantial differences in predictors of subjective well-being across age. More mixing results come from the literature review of Wilks & Neto (2013). They state that Mroczek & Kolarz (1998) found positive affect increasing with age while negative affect declines. This means that older people are not unhappier than middle aged adults or younger people despite their decline in physical health or death of spouses and peers (Mroczek & Kolarz, 1998). Also some dimensions of subjective well-being might decline over time and others remain stable but age is not per se the cause of the decline of subjective well-being, it might on the other hand be a correlate (Kunzmann et al., 2000).
Makes Personality Happy? 14 Hypothesis 2: Age is U-shaped related to subjective well-being; when people grow
older (towards 80) their age leads to higher levels of subjective well-being compared to when they are at their middle-age.
The moderating role of age on the relation between personality and subjective well-being. For the relation of the personality traits; conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to
experience, extraversion and neuroticism with age it is first important to know that personality traits show consistency over moderate time periods but there is also systematic variation in this stability during different stages of the life-span (Milojev & Sibley, 2014).
A trend in findings of previous research suggest that stability increases towards middle-age, but when people grow older there is a decrease again in personality stability (Lucas & Donnellan, 2011). Out of the results of the research of Milojev & Sibley (2014) appeared that for conscientiousness and openness to experience an inverted U-shape describes the stability across the lifespan of people. They conclude, in alignment with the findings of Lucas & Donnellan (2011), that from a persons’ 20’s to 40/50’s stability increases, but thereafter decreases when a person grows older towards 80 years.
This inverted U-shape predicted for the relationship between personality and age is opposite of the proposed U-shape effect between age and subjective well-being, where age might positively influence subjective well-being when a person grows older. One of the questions that needs to be answered regarding the interaction effect of the personality traits and age in relation to subjective well-being for example for the trait extraversion is: is the effect of the personality trait extraversion on subjective well-being different (lower/higher) for younger persons compared to older persons (higher/lower)?
Makes Personality Happy? 15 age, but extraversion showed a direct relationship to subjective well-being for young and middle-age adults but not for older adults. For the other three personality traits unfortunately no initial results are presented yet. Nevertheless, for each personality trait a separate sub-hypothesis for my research is proposed:
Hypothesis 3a: Age increasing towards older age strengthens the positive effect of conscientiousness on subjective well-being compared to younger people.
Hypothesis 3b: Age increasing towards older age strengthens the positive effect of agreeableness on subjective well-being compared to younger people.
Hypothesis 3c: No effects are predicted between the relation of openness to experience on subjective well-being when age increases towards older age.
Hypothesis 3d: Age increasing towards older age strengthens the positive effect of extraversion on subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 3e: When age increases towards older age, the negative relation between neuroticism and subjective well-being is expected to stay present and become stronger.
Makes Personality Happy? 16 3. METHOD
3.1 Sample and Procedure
This paper uses data of the LISS panel which is a representative sample of the Dutch population, by individuals participating in monthly internet surveys. The panel is based on a true probability sample of households drawn from the population register. Because the surveys are conducted by internet the households that otherwise could not participate are provided with a computer and internet connection. A longitudinal survey is fielded in the panel every year, covering a large variety of domains including work, education, income, housing, time use, political views, values and personality.
For this research the data of the longitudinal survey of wave 1 is used which is measured in 2008. The data is available for free if you register at the website of the LISS panel as a researcher or student. In total 6808 (78.1%) respondents filled out the core module on personality where, among others, personality traits and subjective well-being were
measured. 6769 (77.61%) panel members filled in the questions about personality and 6728 (77.14%) respondents the questions about subjective well-being.
Not all the variables of interest including the control variables, which are introduced beneath, are measured in the personality module and therefore the dataset is combined out of six core modules which are conducted by the LISS panel. In order to only use the respondents who filled in all six module questionnaires and reported no missing values I cleaned up the dataset, which resulted in a total of 4761 respondents. For these 4761 respondents the mean age was 46.50 year (SD = 15.726). Out of these respondents 45.9% (N = 2185) was male and 54.1% (N = 2576) female.
The original questionnaires were conducted in Dutch, but in order to get a
Makes Personality Happy? 17
3.2 Measures
Questions asked about age, personality traits and subjective well-being were used for this research. All variables are looked at, at individual level and only that data is used for this research. Any missing variables were not replaced by the series mean, however the data was checked for the coding of all 999 variables and then coded into the same way.
Subjective well-being. Subjective well-being was measured with two questions represented in the personality module of the LISS core study in May and August 2008. Only the respondents who did not fill in the questionnaire in May received a reminder to participate again in August 2008. The questions representing subjective well-being measured affective well-being
(happiness) as well as cognitive well-being (life satisfaction). The questions asked were: “On the whole, how happy would you say you are?” (cp010) and “How satisfied are you with the life you lead at the moment? ” (cp011). The answers were measured on a 11-point scale (0 = totally unhappy; 10 = totally happy and 0 = not at all satisfied; 10 = completely satisfied). The two questions are thus combined into one variable measuring subjective well-being which is possible because Cronbach’s alpha for subjective well-being was .905. This means that can be concluded that the consistency of the questions is high and that the 2 questions truly measured the same construct.
Personality. People were also asked about their personality by 50 items (cp020-cp069) in the internet surveys of May and August 2008. The items to test personality were obtained from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) (Goldberg, 1992, 1999). Each personality trait was measured with 10 items per trait. The variables; conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, extraversion and neuroticism were measured by using a 5-point scale (1 = very inaccurate; 5 = very accurate). Examples of the questions asked were: “Start
conversations”; “Change my mood a lot”; “Feel others’ emotions”;
“Am the life of the party” and “Get stressed out easily”. 18 out of the 50 questions (021, 025, 027, 028, 029, 031, 035, 037, 038, 039, 041, 045, 047, 049, 051, 055, 057, 065) had to be recoded as these questions measured the response the other way around and without recoding these items there would not be a consistent analysis. Cronbach’s alpha for the five personality traits were: conscientiousness .771, openness to experience .765, agreeableness .795,
Makes Personality Happy? 18 Age. Age is measured monthly to stay up-to-date with the questionnaire called household box. For every LISS panel household, the contact person completes this questionnaire. The
household box needs to be completed, before it is possible to start filling in other
questionnaires. For my research I only used the question “Age of the household member” which was answered numerically. Because I had the opportunity to use such an extensive dataset it was possible to make seven age categories which were entered in the dataset as dummy variables in order to be able to research the interaction effect of the age categories with personality traits. The age categories are: ≤ 20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61-70 and > 70 years old.
Control variables. In this research six control variables are included in all conducted analyses, as these variables have a proven influence on subjective well-being. For example the
influence of the control variable; relative income, depends on relativities. This means that a higher income makes happier but that the average subjective well-being of a person stays the same if all members of the comparison gain the same raise in income (Dolan et al., 2008). This effect and possible effects of the other five variables need to be controlled for because I only want to explore the effects of personality traits and age on the amount of happiness a person feels and how satisfied they are with their lives. I want to be sure that this is not
influenced by one of the control variables. The variables and the questions which were used to measure these variables are; gender, relative income (ci006) “How satisfied are you with your financial situation?”, education (cw005) “What is the highest level of education that you have completed with diploma or certificate?”, health (ch004) “How would you describe your health, generally speaking?”, partnership/marriage (cf024) “Do you currently have a partner?” and having children (cf035) “Have you had any children?”.
3.3 Data Analyses
Makes Personality Happy? 19 from all its values which results in a variable having a mean of zero. This centering of the personality traits was done among others, in order to be able to compute the interaction effect of the age categories on personality traits.
Are the personality traits stable during different life stages of people? This effect was analyzed with an one-way ANOVA test. But before proceeding to the hypotheses testing a descriptive analysis and a correlation analysis were performed for the main variables of interest (personality traits, age, subjective well-being), and the control variables (gender, relative income, education, health, partnership, having children). Finally, to test the
Makes Personality Happy? 20 4. RESULTS
In this part of my thesis the results of the data analyses are presented. First, I will present some descriptive statistics and a correlational analysis of the variables of interest. Then the results of the One-way ANOVA are described and finally the hypotheses are tested and presented in the order of the hypotheses described in the theoretical section.
4.1 Descriptive Statistics
First some descriptive and correlational analysis need to be presented which are shown in table 1. This table shows the means, standard deviations and correlations of the variables of interest. I would like to remark that the Big-Five variables used in this analysis are the non-centered variables. The analysis shows that most of the relations are significant, and that the expected relationships which are described in the theory section are, besides openness to experience, also in the expected direction and thus in line with my first hypothesis.
The personality trait neuroticism, is expected to have a negative effect on subjective wellbeing and the correlation shows that these two variables are negatively correlated (r = -.428, p < .01). This indicates that high neuroticism leads to low subjective well-being, and vice versa. The other four personality traits are also significant but positively correlated to subjective well-being; conscientiousness (r = .175, p < .01), agreeableness (r = .147, p < .01), openness to experience (r = .099, p < .01) and extraversion (r = .237, p < .01). Hypothesis 1c stated that no effects are predicted for the relation between openness to experience and subjective well-being which deviates as there is a significant positive correlation found.
Next to neuroticism, most of the negative correlations are found with the variable age. Age is significantly and negatively correlated with openness to experience (r = -.121, p < .01), extraversion (r = -.097 p < .01), neuroticism (r = -.077 p < .01), health (r = -.181, p < .01), education (r = -.134, p < .01), and gender (r = -.081, p < .01).
Besides the main variables also the control variables showed to have mainly
significant correlations. For example the control variable education is significantly correlated with all variables, besides subjective well-being (r = .007, p = .622) and the control variables partnership and children are significantly and positively correlated with among others
Makes Personality Happy? 21 TABLE 1
Makes Personality Happy? 22
4.2 One Way ANOVA
In order to be able to answer the question if the Big-Five personality traits are stable during the different life stages of people, I conducted an One-Way ANOVA test. The Big-Five personality traits were entered as the dependent variable and the variable age categories as a factor. The results of this test are shown in table 2. There were significant effects (p < .001) of the age categories on all the five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, extraversion and neuroticism. Because the effects were significant, I secondly conducted a post hoc tests for all five personality traits. The results are described below.
Conscientiousness. The post hoc test showed that the level of experienced conscientiousness for people in the age category under 20 is lower than the amount of conscientiousness people experience in the other age categories. So there is an increasing tendency that people are more conscientious when they become older. This result is in line with the correlational analysis of table 1 where age showed to have a positive significant relation on conscientiousness. The biggest increase in level of conscientiousness people experience is shown between people under 20 and people between 21-30. It can be said that this effect is mainly due to puberty and that after people turn 20 their level of conscientiousness becomes more or less stable.
Agreeableness. For the trait agreeableness the same tendency as for conscientiousness is found, which also corresponds with the correlational analysis where age and agreeableness show a positive correlation. Again people in the age category under 20 experience the lowest amounts of agreeableness compared to the other age categories. When people turn 20 the amount of agreeableness they experience becomes more stable with only some small changes. People between 51-60 show to have the highest level of experienced agreeableness.
Makes Personality Happy? 23 Extraversion. Similar to openness to experience, extraversion in the post hoc test shows a decreasing effect when people grow older. This means that people above 70 show less levels of extraversion compared to people under 20. Similar to the other three personality the correlation between age and extraversion showed the same tendency as the ANOVA test namely a negative correlation.
Neuroticism. As shown in table 2 the level of experienced neuroticism for people in the age category under 20 is higher than the amount of neuroticism people experience in all the other age categories. As showed in the correlational analysis this trait also showed a significant negative correlation towards age. Overall there is a very small decline visible, but this trait is mainly consistent over time.
We can conclude that most of the deviations in the One-Way ANOVA table are experienced by people younger than 20. As already mentioned with conscientiousness this can mean that this is the effect of puberty. Besides this age category the traits are mainly stable.
Makes Personality Happy? 24
4.3 Hypotheses Testing
To test my first hypothesis a regression analysis is performed with subjective well-being as the dependent variable and the five personality traits as independent variables. The centered variables of the personality traits are used for all the regression analyses. Because the hypothesis consists of 5 subparts I will treat them separately. Table 3 shows the results of this regression analysis. Besides the direct effects of the personality traits on subjective well-being the six control variables; health, education, relative income, partnership, children and gender are included. All six control variables are significant, which means that they all have
influence on subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 1a. This hypothesis predicted that conscientiousness positively relates to subjective well-being, so more conscientious people experience higher levels of subjective well-being than low conscientious people. Table 1 also already showed a positive correlation between conscientiousness and subjective well-being. Out of the results of the regression analysis it can be concluded that there is a positive and significant effect for this personality trait on subjective well-being (p < .01). However when the control variables are taken into account there is still a small positive effect although this effect is not significant anymore (p = .082) and therefore this hypothesis is rejected.
Hypothesis 1b.Regarding the personality trait agreeableness I predicted a positive relation,
which is confirmed by the correlation and regression analysis (p < .01). This means that a higher level of agreeableness leads to a significant higher level of subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 1c. Foropenness to experience I predicted no relationship with subjective
Makes Personality Happy? 25 Hypothesis 1d. Extraversion was predicted to be positively associated to subjective well-being, which is confirmed by the regression analysis (p < .01). The results show that this trait has the biggest positive effect on subjective well-being compared to the other personality traits. If a person is more extraverted instead of introverted he/she will experience higher levels of subjective well-being.
Hypothesis 1e. The last sub-hypothesis where neuroticism is predicted to negatively relate to subjective well-being is also confirmed. Table 1 already showed a significant and negative correlation between neuroticism and subjective well-being and now table 3 shows a
significant negative effect (p < .01) of the regression analysis. This means that when a person is more neurotic this will lead to lower levels of subjective well-being.
Makes Personality Happy? 26 TABLE 3
Regression of Personality Traits on Subjective Well-Being
The second hypothesis stated that age is U-shaped related to subjective well-being; when people grow older they experience higher levels of subjective well-being compared to when they are in the middle of their lives. Therefore, another regression analysis is performed with again subject well-being as the dependent variable and the six age categories, ranging from people under 20 until people above 70, as the independent variable. Also in this analysis the six control variables are included. The results are presented in table 4 and show if
Makes Personality Happy? 27 TABLE 4
Regression of Age Categories on Subjective Well-Being
The constant of table 4 shows that people in the age category younger than 20 in relation with subjective well-being score 4.663 (p < .01). Subjective well-being was measured on a scale from 0-10, so this score is just beneath average. In comparison with this age
Makes Personality Happy? 28 In model 2 of table 4 we can see that besides children the other five control variables are significally related to subjective well-being. Education is the only control variable that has a significant negative influence on subjective well-being, whereas the other control variables have a positive effect.
The third hypothesis, which investigates the moderation effect of age categories on the relation of personality traits on subjective well-being is also divided into five sub-hypotheses. The results will also be presented following these sub-hypotheses as for all the five
personality trait a separate moderating analysis is performed. I did not standardize the data but only centered the variables measuring the personality traits. Then per age category I made an interaction term for the moderation analysis.
Hypothesis 3a. The first sub-hypothesis predicted that age increasing towards older age will strengthen the positive effect of conscientiousness on subjective well-being. In table 5 the results of the moderating analysis including the control variables is presented. We can conclude that there is an overall positive effect of the age categories on the relation between conscientiousness and subjective well-being however not all categories are significant: 21-30 (p = .292), 31-40 (p = .872), 41-50 (p = .539), 61-70 (p = .118) and people over 70 (p = .051). Only the age category 51-60 shows a significant positive effect (p < .01). The adjusted R square is significant in model 3 which means that the degree of variation of subjective well-being is increasingly significant explained by the interaction terms. This results that it can still be concluded that conscientiousness leads to higher levels of subjective well-being and
Makes Personality Happy? 29 TABLE 5
Interaction of conscientiousness and age on subjective well-being
Makes Personality Happy? 30 Hypothesis 3b. The same effect as with conscientiousness is predicted for the personality trait agreeableness. Thus I expect that when age is increasing towards older age this strengthens the positive effect of agreeableness on subjective well-being. As can be seen in table 6, all the interaction terms are non-significant and also show mainly a negative instead of positive result. Also the adjusted R square does not change significantly and therefore this hypothesis is rejected.
TABLE 6
Interaction of agreeableness and age on subjective well-being1
Note: N = 4761 *: p < .05, **: p < .01
Makes Personality Happy? 31 Hypothesis 3c. There was no effect expected between openness to experience and subjective well-being, which is also confirmed in table 3. Because there was almost nothing known to my knowledge about the relation of this trait and age categories on subjective well-being I also predicted no effects when people grow older after their middle-life stage on the relationship between openness to experience and subjective well-being. Table 7 shows the results of the interaction term and concludes that no significant difference on subjective well-being is found when the different age categories and openness to experience interact together. Therefore this hypothesis is confirmed.
Hypothesis 3d. For the trait extraversion it is expected that when people grow older the positive relationship between extraversion and subjective well-being gets stronger compared to when people are younger. Out of the results presented in table 8 we can conclude that only the interaction terms with age categories 21-30, 41-50 and 51-60 are significant but
Makes Personality Happy? 32 TABLE 7
Interaction of openness to experience and age on subjective well-being2
Note: N = 4761 *: p < .05, **: p < .01
Makes Personality Happy? 33 TABLE 8
Interaction of extraversion and age on subjective well-being3
Note: N = 4761 *: p < .05, **: p < .01
Makes Personality Happy? 34 Hypothesis 3e. The last sub-hypothesis regarding neuroticism predicts that an older age does not positively moderates the negative relationship between neuroticism and subjective well-being. So when somebody is high in neuroticism his/her experienced subjective well-being is expected to not become higher but lower due to aging.
TABLE 9
Interaction of neuroticism and age on subjective well-being4
Note: N = 4761 *: p < .05, **: p < .01
Makes Personality Happy? 35 The results in table 9 show non-significant results for all age categories, however the adjusted R square does change significantly. This means that although there are no distinctive effects there is an increase in the adjusted R square. Concluding, the effect of neuroticism decreases with age, until the age of 70, so people become more neurotic which leads to lower levels of subjective well-being. Thus as shown in table 9, when people become older the negative relation between neuroticism and subjective well-being becomes stronger, therefore this sub-hypothesis is confirmed.
Because a lot of results are presented confirming/rejecting the stated hypotheses an overview is created to give a summary about the results, which are shown in table 10.
Makes Personality Happy? 36 5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Much research is already done on the relationship between personality traits and subjective well-being, however this research is mainly focused on the traits extraversion and neuroticism and excluded the other three Big-Five personality traits. Therefore the main goal of this research was to extend the existing literature by studying if the traits agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience are related to subjective well-being, and if age moderates these relationships. I proposed three hypotheses with sub-hypotheses representing the individual personality traits. First I expected a positive relation for conscientiousness, agreeableness and extraversion on subjective well-being, no effects for the trait openness to experience and a negative relation for neuroticism on subjective well-being. Then in the second hypothesis I stated that age would have a U-shaped effect on subjective well-being. For the moderating effects I proposed that age would strengthen the positive relationships of conscientiousness, agreeableness and extraversion, no moderating effect for openness to experience and an increasingly negative effect for neuroticism. To test these hypotheses I used the data of the LISS panel which is based on a true probability sample of the Dutch population. Data of wave 1, 2008 is used and 4761 respondents answered all the questions linked to my variables of interest.
5.1 Findings
The previous studies on extraversion and neuroticism consistently found that extraverted people experience, among others, higher levels of positive affect and neurotic people, not surprisingly, stronger negative reactions which leads to lower levels of subjective well-being. For extraverted people this logically leads to higher levels of experienced
Makes Personality Happy? 37 subjective well-being as then people generally experience high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect or the other way around.
However, in the literature conscientiousness is besides extraversion and neuroticism the personality trait with the highest correlation, up to r =.40 (Steel et al., 2008), and is
expected to lead to higher life satisfaction which is an important part of subjective well-being. In my research the correlation of conscientiousness and subjective well-being was also highly significant (p <.01) but the regression analysis did show a weak positive effect but was non-significant and therefore the positive relation between conscientiousness and subjective well-being is not confirmed.
Lastly, the personality trait agreeableness where high agreeable persons express, among others, more pro-social behavior is supposed to be positively related to the
experienced level of subjective well-being. My result reveals a positive and highly significant correlation and also a significant and positive relation in the regression analysis. Therefore can be concluded that there is a relation between agreeableness and subjective well-being.
Regarding my second hypothesis, a weak significant U-shaped effect describing the relationship of age categories on subjective well-being is found. When people grow older than 30 years the graph becomes negative and when people become 60 the graph would rise again but does not reach the level again of people under 20 and between 21-30 years.
The most important findings, which also contributes to the low amount of available research, are found with the moderating analyses. These results reveal that for the personality traits agreeableness and openness to experience none of the interaction terms are significantly related to subjective well-being. This means that there is no significant evidence that when people after their middle-life stage age towards their 80’s, the interaction with for example the personality trait agreeableness is positively related to the levels of experienced subjective well-being.
Conscientiousness only showed a significant positive interaction for people between 51 and 60 on subjective well-being, however the adjusted R square appeared to be significant. It was thus still possible to conclude that age strengthens the positive (non-significant)
relationship between conscientiousness and subjective well-being.
Makes Personality Happy? 38 from the other age categories and therefore another regression analysis was performed where a contrast between people under 20 and over 20 was made. This resulted in a positive
significant relation for people under 20.
Lastly neuroticism appeared to become increasingly negative. So how older the people, the stronger the negative relation between neuroticism and subjective well-being becomes. However when people turn over 70 the negative relation becomes less again, which raises the question if neurotic people do net get old?
In conclusion the sub-hypotheses for conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism, are confirmed, whereas the other two sub-hypotheses are rejected. The
increasingly negative finding for neuroticism deviates with the findings of Gomez et al (2012) where they concluded that neuroticism is negatively related to subjective well-being
regardless of age. Their result regarding the trait extraversion which showed a direct
relationship to subjective well-being for young and middle-age adults but not for older adults is in line with my research findings because after people turn 60 my results did not show any significant effects anymore.
Besides the main effects I also included six control variables in all the regression analysis to see if these variables are significant predictors of subjective well-being. As can be seen in the tables which presents the results of the hypothesis testing only the control variable having children is not a significant predictor. Of the other five significant control variables; health, education, relative income, partnership and gender only education shows to have a negative relation on subjective well-being. These control variables could also already been used as possible mediator variables which I introduced earlier to explain the relation of conscientiousness and openness to experience on subjective well-being.
Concluding, my research supports the main research findings concerning the most researched traits extraversion and neuroticism and their main effects on subjective well-being as well as the moderating findings of Gomez et al (2012) on extraversion. Also the interaction variable of conscientiousness and age show a positive result on subjective well-being,
Makes Personality Happy? 39
5.2 Implications
As already mentioned in the introduction and theory parts, personality traits are a strong predictor of subjective well-being (Diener, 1996; Diener & Lucas, 1999 and Diener et al., 1999). Steel et al. (2008) even report that genes account for 80% of the variance in subjective well-being, and that genes are mainly expressed through personality traits. However DeNeve & Cooper (1998) state that personality traits only account for 4% of the variance of subjective being. This leads to the discussion if happiness/subjective well-being is a choice or not. Out of my regression analysis appeared that the Big-Five personality traits account for 21% of the variance in subjective well-being. When also the control
variables are taken into account the percentage of variables explaining the variance in subjective well-being rises to 31.3%. This does mean that there are still more variables
besides the personality traits that influence subjective well-being as 68.7% is still unexplained for other influencing variables. For example, more neurotic people also show to have more health problems and lower relative incomes (negative correlations). So besides factors that are not influenceable, like your personality, also the choice and blessing of, for example, having a partner and children as well as the environment influences the variance of subjective well-being.
Further, the existing literature mainly focuses on the personality traits extraversion and neuroticism as these two traits are known to have to strongest correlations and are strongly related to subjective well-being. Although in my research I also found highly significant and positive correlations for the traits conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to
experience on subjective well-being. Unfortunately these correlations did not result in
significant direct relations as there was no significant effects found for conscientiousness and openness to experience. For agreeableness however I did find a significant positive main effect. This implicates that also conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience matter in relationship with subjective well-being and that they should not always be excluded.
For conscientiousness and openness to experience it might be possible to find mediators which ultimately should lead to higher or lower levels of subjective well-being. This was also already indicated by DeNeve & Cooper (1998) who implied that
Makes Personality Happy? 40 significantly related. But there are presumably much more variables that might mediate the relationship between conscientiousness, openness to experiences and subjective well-being which needs further research as this was unfortunately for my thesis not possible anymore. Additionally, a lot of mixed results of age on subjective well-being are found in the literature. Some researchers find an U-shaped effect whereas others (Siedlecki et al., 2014) do not find an effect of age on subjective well-being. In my research a very weak U-shaped effect was found which indicates that subjective well-being first becomes lower but after a certain threshold increases again, but not to the extend as when people where young (under 20 or 21-30).
Is it possible that these differences in results can be explained by the way the
researchers researched subjective well-being? It might be possible that some researchers only focused on happiness or life satisfaction and not of the construct of these two aspects taken together as subjective well-being. Therefore I looked into the researches of Kahneman & Krueger (2006) who proposed equal to Clark & Oswald (1994) an U-shaped effect of age in relation to subjective well-being. Siedlecki et al (2014) proposed no age effects on subjective well-being whereas Wilks & Neto (2013) state that positive affect increases with age while negative affect declines. Kahneman & Krueger focused both on life satisfaction and happiness as well as Siedlecki et al. who used different surveys to measure their data including the Satisfaction with Life Scale and measures of positive and negative affect. Clark & Oswald focused on the people’s feelings of subjective well-being by using scores of the General Health Questionnaire which is argued to be a very reliable indicator of distress (Clark & Oswald, 1994). Wilks & Neto focused more on job-related affective well-being and therefore they used the Warr 12 item scale (Wilks & Neto, 2013) which consists of six positive and six negative feelings. Then they did not focus on life satisfaction but on job satisfaction which was also measured with a scale based on Warr.
All researches thus, did include satisfaction and affect although they are not all
Makes Personality Happy? 41
5.3 Limitations and Future Research
The major strength of my research consist of the large amount of available data. Most of the previous research on the relationship between personality traits and subjective well-being was mainly conducted among university employees, students, small samples or by self-report assessments with lack of other data (Jibeen, 2014, Jing, Ling, & Lijuan, 2014). To my knowledge this is the first study into this research topic that is generalizable for the whole Dutch population.
Besides the generalizability, the large dataset of the LISS panel made it also possible to make seven age categories ranging from people under 20 until people over 70 due to the high number of participants. With these seven age categories I was able to extend the research of Gomez et al. (2012) as they were the only ones who used age categories as a moderator before, although they used only three age categories of young, middle-aged and older adults. Besides these strengths the study also had some limitations.
The first limitation is related to the time available for this research. Because there was a time constraint of roughly six months, it was unfortunately not possible to do more
extensive research into for example possible mediators, besides the included control variables, to explain the relation between conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience and subjective well-being.
Additionally, subjective well-being is measured with two subjective questions as people need to rate their own happiness and life satisfaction. The question which rises is if this is representative? It might be possible that some participants were in an extremely happy or negative mood while filling in the questionnaire which could have influenced their
subjective well-being score.
Makes Personality Happy? 42 Finally, more future research needs to be conducted with regard to the possible
mediators that influence the proposed indirect relationship of the personality traits
conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience by DeNeve & Cooper (1998). Out of my results can be concluded that conscientiousness and openness to experience indeed are affected by the included control variables, however this were only six variables. Therefore I propose that in another study, mediating variables should be the main point of interest. More factors that might explain the relationship between these personality traits and subjective well-being should be researched.
Makes Personality Happy? 43 REFERENCES
Bowling, A. (2011). Do older and younger people differ in their reported well-being? A national survey of adults in Britain. Family Practice, 28(2): 145-155.
Bowling, A., Gabriel, Z., Dykes, J., Dowding, L. M., Evans, O., Fleissig, A., Banister, D. & Sutton, S. (2003). Let's Ask Them: A National Survey of Definitions of Quality of Life and Its Enhancement among People Aged 65 and over. International Journal Of Aging And Human Development, 56(4): 269-306.
Carstensen, L. L. (1995). Evidence for a life-span theory of socioemotional selectivity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4: 151–156.
Clark, A.E. & Oswald, A.J. (1994). "Unhappiness and Unemployment". Economic Journal, 104(424): 648-659.
Cole, C.A. & Balasubramaian, S.K. (1993). Age-differences in consumers search for
information – Public-policy implications. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(1): 157- 169.
DeNeve, K. M., & Cooper, H. (1998). The happy personality: A meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 124: 197–229. Deng, S., Liu, Y., Li, H. and Hu, F. (2013). How does personality matter? An investigation of
the impact of extraversion on individuals SNS use. CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, 16(8): 575-581.
Diener, E. (1996). Traits can be powerful, but are not enough: Lessons from subjective well- being. Journal of Research in Personality, 30: 389-399
Diener, E., & Lucas, R. E. (1999). Personality and subjective well-being. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, N. Schwarz (Eds.) , Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 213-229). New York, NY, US: Russell Sage Foundation.
Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125: 276–302.
Dolan, P., Peasgood, T., & White, M. (2008). Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29: 94-122.
Makes Personality Happy? 44 Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory
measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt, & F. Ostendorf (Eds.). Personality psychology in Europe (Vol. 7, pp. 7–28). Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.
Gomez, V., Allemand, M., & Grob, A. (2012). Neuroticism, extraversion, goals, and subjective well-being: Exploring the relations in young, middle-aged, and older adults. Journal Of Research In Personality, 46(3): 317-325.
Jibeen, T. (2014). Personality Traits and Subjective Well-Being: Moderating Role of Optimism in University Employees. Social Indicators Research, 118(1): 157-172. Jing, W., Ling, Q., & Lijuan, C. (2014). The Mediating Effect of Personality Traits on the
Relationship between Self-concealment and Subjective Well-being. Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 42(4): 695-703.
John, O. P. (1989). Towards a taxonomy of personality descriptors. In D. M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 261–271). New York: Springer.
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of
personality: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 102–138). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Kahneman, D., & Krueger, A. B. (2006). Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being. Journal Of Economic Perspectives, 20(1): 3-24.
Kunzmann, U., Little, T. D., & Smith, J. (2000). Is age-related stability of subjective well- being a paradox? Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from the Berlin aging study. Psychology and Aging, 15: 511–526.
Lucas, R. E., & Diener, E. (2015). Personality and subjective well-being: Current issues and controversies. In M. Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, M. L. Cooper, R. J. Larsen (Eds.) , APA handbook of personality and social psychology, Volume 4: Personality processes and individual differences (pp. 577-599). Washington, DC, US: American
Psychological Association.
Makes Personality Happy? 45 Lucas, R. E., & Donnellan, M. B. (2011). Personality development across the life span:
Longitudinal analyses with a national sample from Germany. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4): 847–861.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52: 81–90.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. Jr. (1991). Adding liebe und arbeit: The full five-factor model and well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17: 227–232.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. Jr. (2008). The five-factor theory of personality. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 159–181). New York: Guilford Press.
McCrae, R. R., & John, P. O. (1992). An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of Personality, 60: 175–215.
Milojev, P., & Sibley, C. G. (2014). The stability of adult personality varies across age: Evidence from a two-year longitudinal sample of adult New Zealanders. Journal Of Research In Personality, 51: 29-37.
Mroczek, D. K., & Kolarz, C. M. (1998). The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental perspective on happiness. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 75: 1333–1349.
Meer van der, P.H., & Wielers, W. (2013). What makes workers happy? Applied Economics, 45(3): 357-368.
Norman, W. T. (1963). TOWARD AN ADEQUATE TAXONOMY OF PERSONALITY ATTRIBUTES: REPLICATED FACTOR STRUCTURE IN PEER NOMINATION PERSONALITY RATINGS. Journal Of Abnormal & Social Psychology, 66(6): 574-583.
Olesen, M. H., Thomsen, D. K., & O’Toole, M. S. (2015). Subjective well-being: Above neuroticism and extraversion, autonomy motivation matters. Personality And Individual Differences, 77: 45-49.
Oswald, A. J. (1997). HAPPINESS AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE. Economic Journal, 107(445): 1815-1831.
Makes Personality Happy? 46 Roberts, B. W., Chernyshenko, O. S., Stark, S., & Goldberg, L. R. (2005). The structure of
conscientiousness: An empirical investigation based on seven major personality questionnaires. Personnel Psychology, 58: 103–139.
Scherpenzeel, A.C., and Das, M. (2010). “True” Longitudinal and Probability-Based Internet Panels: Evidence From the Netherlands. In Das, M., P. Ester, and L. Kaczmirek (Eds.), Social and Behavioral Research and the Internet: Advances in Applied Methods and Research Strategies. (pp. 77-104). Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis.
Siedlecki, K. L., Salthouse, T. A., Oishi, S., & Jeswani, S. (2014). The Relationship between Social Support and Subjective Well-Being across Age. Social Indicators
Research, 117(2): 561-576.
Soto, C. J. (2015), Is Happiness Good for Your Personality? Concurrent and Prospective Relations of the Big Five With Subjective Well-Being. Journal of Personality, 83: 45–55.
Steel, P., Schmidt, J., & Shultz, J. (2008). Refining the relationship between personality and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 134: 138–161.
Stones, M., & Kozma, A. (1985). Structural Relationships Among Happiness Scales: A Second Order Factorial Study. Social Indicators Research, 17(1): 19-28.
Vittersø, J., & Nilsen, F. (2002). The conceptual and relational structure of subjective well- being, neuroticism, and extraversion: Once again, neuroticism is the important predictor of happiness. Social Indicators Research, 57: 89-118.
Wilks, D., & Neto, F. (2013). Workplace Well-being, Gender and Age: Examining the 'Double Jeopardy' Effect. Social Indicators Research, 114(3): 875-890.
Wilson, W. (1967). Correlates of avowed happiness. Psychological Bulletin,67: 294-306. Yoon, C. (1997). Age differences in consumers’ processing strategies: an investigation of
moderating influences. Journal of Consumer research, 24(3): 329-342.
Zellars, K. L., & Perrewe, P. L. (2001). Affective personality and content of emotional social support: Coping in organizations. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 86: 459–467. Zaman, S., Anis-ul-Haque, M., & Nawaz, S. (2014). Work–family interface and its
