Personality changes during adolescence: the role of gender and pubertal development

This study assessed how personality dimensions evolve during adolescence and how they are affected by gender and pubertal development. To this end, we used the Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and Tanner’s stages to measure personality and pubertal development, respectively, of 578 schoolchildren of 10 and 11 years old over a period of five years. The results indicated that personality was not stable in the age range analyzed and that these changes were independent of pubertal stages. Moreover, gender had significant effects on psychoticism and antisocial behaviour, and an interactive effect with age on neuroticism, which may be related to the increase in certain pathologies.