ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns personality trajectories from early childhood into emerging adulthood. It uses the notion of empirically based personality types, a relatively new approach to studying personality that originates in the seminal work of Jack Block in his book Lives Through Time (1971). Block’s theoretical approach predicts three personality types (Resilients, Overcontrollers, and Undercontrollers) that indeed seem to exist in childhood and adolescence, in various countries (see Caspi & Shiner, 2006). The Munich Longitudinal Study on the Ontogenesis of Individual Competencies (the LOGIC study) sample was one of the samples in which these types were found (Asendorpf & van Aken, 1999), and this chapter takes the three types as a departing point for studying the individual trajectories of two personality characteristics, shyness and aggression.
