Predictors of Initial Status and Change in Self-Control During the College Transition.

Although self-control tends to increase through late adolescence, there are individual differences in patterns of growth. Latent growth modeling was used to investigate change in self-control across students' first year of college (N = 569, M age = 18.03; 70.3% female; 89.6% White), and whether attachment to parents predicted this change when controlling for personality and demographic variables. Self-control decreased linearly across five assessments, with significant heterogeneity in intercepts and slopes. Personality was associated with initial self-control, and greater avoidant attachment to mothers and openness to experience predicted greater declines. Overall, self-control changes across late adolescence, and attachment and personality explain individual differences in that change, indicating potential intervention targets during emerging adulthood.

Sleep: A Pathway Linking Personality to Mortality Risk.

Personality and sleep predict longevity; however, no investigation has tested whether sleep mediates this association. Thus, we tested this effect across a 20-year follow-up (N = 3,759) in the Midlife Development in the United States cohort (baseline M age = 47.15) using proportional hazards in a structural equation modeling framework. Lower conscientiousness predicted increased death risk via the direct, indirect, and total effect of quadratic sleep duration. Although there were no other direct personality-mortality effects, higher neuroticism and agreeableness and lower conscientiousness predicted increased death risk via the joint indirect effects of quadratic sleep duration and higher daytime dysfunction. Lower extraversion predicted increased mortality risk via the indirect effect of daytime dysfunction. Our findings have implications for personality-based health interventions.