ABSTRACT
In studying personality traits, developmental researchers examine how traits change across development. One issue is the pattern by which, on average across many individuals, the level of a trait increases or decreases with development. Using the trait of dominance as an example, what is the overall trajectory across time that characterizes the level of this trait? Are there periods of development during which the expression of dominance waxes, and are there other periods during which it wanes? Such patterns can be tracked by looking for changes in the mean of the trait across developmental levels.
