Parental Support during Childhood Predicts Life History-Related Personality Variation and Social Status in Young Adults

Evolutionary Psychological Science, Mar 2015

Adaptationist theories of development posit the existence of facultative mechanisms designed to calibrate individual differences in life history strategy to cues available in childhood. Such theories have led to the discovery of links between parenting-related cues and multiple life history phenotypes in offspring (e.g., reproductive timing), but less is known about the influences of parental behavior on the development of stable personality traits. This article reports a preliminary test of the hypothesis that life history-related personality variation is developmentally calibrated in response to the level of parental support received during childhood. Consistent with this, in a sample of young adults (N = 321), (i) subjects’ reports of their parents’ income positively predicted the level of parental support they recall having received during childhood; (ii) these measures of parental income and parental support in childhood positively predicted subjects’ standing on the general factor of personality (GFP), long-term mating orientation, and prestige-based social status; and (iii) path analyses fit a model of the following form: parental income → parental support in childhood → GFP → prestige-based status. Moreover, these effects held when controlling for perceptions of current social support, which implies that associations of parental support in childhood with outcomes in adulthood did not reflect current perceptions or global self-evaluative biases. These findings, though preliminary, are consonant with recent theories positing that the GFP and prestige-based status reflect individual differences along a fast-slow life history continuum, and suggest that life history-related personality variation may be developmentally calibrated to parental support during childhood.

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Parental Support during Childhood Predicts Life History-Related Personality Variation and Social Status in Young Adults

Evolutionary Psychological Science Parental Support during Childhood Predicts Life History-Related Personality Variation and Social Status in Young Adults Aaron W. Lukaszewski 0 0 A. W. Lukaszewski ( 1 ) Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University , 116 N. Murray, Stillwater, OK 74074 , USA Adaptationist theories of development posit the existence of facultative mechanisms designed to calibrate individual differences in life history strategy to cues available in childhood. Such theories have led to the discovery of links between parenting-related cues and multiple life history phenotypes in offspring (e.g., reproductive timing), but less is known about the influences of parental behavior on the development of stable personality traits. This article reports a preliminary test of the hypothesis that life history-related personality variation is developmentally calibrated in response to the level of parental support received during childhood. Consistent with this, in a sample of young adults (N=321), (i) subjects' reports of their parents' income positively predicted the level of parental support they recall having received during childhood; (ii) these measures of parental income and parental support in childhood positively predicted subjects' standing on the general factor of personality (GFP), long-term mating orientation, and prestige-based social status; and (iii) path analyses fit a model of the following form: parental income → parental support in childhood → GFP → prestigebased status. Moreover, these effects held when controlling for perceptions of current social support, which implies that associations of parental support in childhood with outcomes in adulthood did not reflect current perceptions or global selfevaluative biases. These findings, though preliminary, are consonant with recent theories positing that the GFP and prestige-based status reflect individual differences along a fast-slow life history continuum, and suggest that life history-related personality variation may be developmentally calibrated to parental support during childhood. Evolutionary psychology; Facultative calibration; General factor of personality; Life history theory; Prestige; Social status - The extent to which parenting has enduring effects on offspring personality development and related life outcomes has long been a question of central interest in psychology and developmental science. However, despite decades of research into the correlates of parenting styles and tactics (Darling and Steinberg 1993) , conflicting findings and theoretical disagreements have prevented the formation of a general consensus regarding what specific role—if any—parental behavior plays in shaping children’s stable personality characteristics (Bugental 2000; Harris 1995, 2011; Plomin et al. 2013; Raby et al. 2015) . This ambiguity highlights the importance of theories that can generate testable, a priori predictions about the specific links between aspects of parental behavior and offspring personality development. Recent adaptationist theories provide a powerful framework within which to understand effects of early experiences on personality development. Broadly speaking, these models are based on the premise that interindividual variation in developmental trajectories may be orchestrated, in part, by facultative adaptations designed to calibrate behavioral phenotypes in response to cues that have reliably predicted optimal trait levels over human evolutionary history (Buss 2009; Del Giudice et al. 2015; Ellis et al. 2009; Frankenhius and Panchanathan 2011; Lukaszewski and Roney 2011; Penke 2011; Nettle et al. 2013; Tooby and Cosmides 1990) . In theory, such cue-based developmental mechanisms would have been selected for as they outcompeted alternative variants (e.g., genetically fixed phenotypes) by improving the functional match between phenotypic strategies and individual circumstances. In identifying specific cues to which phenotypic variation should be calibrated over development, recent research has increasingly drawn upon life history theory (Ellis et al. 2009; Figueredo et al. 2014; Del Giudice et al. 2015; Kaplan et al. 2009; Roff 2002) . From this standpoint, phenotypic variation often reflects the existence of alternative strategies for allocating limited resources in a way that optimally negotiates fundamental tradeoff decisions faced by organisms, such as whether to invest in present versus future reproduction, mating versus parenting effort, and the quality versus quantity of offspring. For example, if exposed to cues indicative of being born into a harsh (i.e., high mortality) environment, it would have been adaptive for human ancestors to calibrate toward a life history strategy that entails reproducing early and often, rather than investing in an uncertain future (Belsky et al. 1991; Brumbach et al. 2009; Crisholm et al. 2005; Ellis et al. 2009; Figueredo et al. 2011; McCullough et al. 2012; Vigil et (...truncated)


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Aaron W. Lukaszewski. Parental Support during Childhood Predicts Life History-Related Personality Variation and Social Status in Young Adults, Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2015, pp. 131-140, Volume 1, Issue 3, DOI: 10.1007/s40806-015-0015-7