My wife became much more assertive and disagreeable after we had a special needs child in the NICU for nine months and the constant pressure from doctors to get unnecessary procedures like a tracheostomy. They also said we didn’t have to resuscitate her if we didn’t want to. Constant battles and pressure and my wife can be a stone cold bitch now when she needs to be, where she used to just say “okay”.
Our daughter is seven now, she does use a wheelchair, but is normal intelligence and just went in her cute little electric car she got for Christmas with her big sister to a friend’s house down the street. I’m so proud of her, and my wife.
So sometimes these traumatic events improve your personality in the sense that they give you a more realistic way of how the world actually works, and how to achieve your goals (especially when those goals are dearly held, like “I want my child to survive and have the best quality of life possible).
Also, with COVID I’d imagine a lot of the neuroticism going up or down depended on where you were and your philosophy. For me, and a lot of people leaning conservative, living in the Midwest, I think it is less neurotic, perhaps to our detriment. Totally disregarding health warnings, and being insubordinately against precautions rather than becoming more neurotic. Many of these people got covid. One died. Most were fine. There is likely a “correct” amount of neuroticism, although that obviously changes depending on your circumstances.
Extremely high neuroticism would help someone who was Jewish in 1930s Europe decide to get themselves and their family out of there at any cost, but extremely high neuroticism might not be great during the Pax Americana of the last 60 years.
Daniel Nettle gives a great layperson's explanation of the Five Factor model in his book "Personality," and the first thing he explains is in line with exactly what you ended on. We exhibit a variety of personalities because different personalities are useful in different environments. Sometimes it's GOOD to be highly neurotic, or low extraversion. Natural selection doesn't care about your internal conscious experience of life, it will make you miserable if that helps you survive.
Depends which side of Pax Americana you were on in those 60 years. If you're gay or black (or both!) in the Midwest, being neurotic and avoiding getting lynched or smeared rates a lot higher than if you'd be the one doing the smearing. If your mom was almost the victim of a serial killer, she'd be neurotic as hell! And she wouldn't even be wrong about it. These are corner cases of course, but the past 60 years haven't been all gravy for everyone, so we shouldn't think that it was.
>Totally disregarding health warnings, and being insubordinately against precautions rather than becoming more neurotic.
It's not such a clean map between neuroticism and reaction there. My father was very against the precautions in a clearly neurotic manner. To the point where he was just sitting at home ranting about how he couldn't go anywhere or do anything without the vaccine, months after anywhere except a few voluntarily strict venues had stopped checking.
The strange thing is, whilst I found the pandemic itself very difficult, I came out a much more confident, extraverted person. Actually quite the opposite from my pre COVID personality.
My bet is loads of people would have shot way up on the neuroticism scale.