About me

Prof. Costa’s enduring interests are in the structure and measurement of personality and the Five-Factor Model of Personality and specifically, the NEO Inventories which he developed with Robert McCrae. The Five Factor Model: Personality is central to understanding the individual person, and it influences, to some degree, nearly all aspects of experience and functioning in everyday life. A major obstacle to progress in personality psychology for many decades was the inability of psychologists to agree on taxonomy of traits that would offer a comprehensive yet manageable set of trait constructs. Since 1983, Costa’s research has contributed to a worldwide consensus that the Five-Factor Model points to such taxonomy. The broad factors of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness appear to encompass most specific traits, and offer a framework for systematic literature reviews and research designs. Personality psychology has made striking advances and breakthroughs in the past two decades. Today there is a real science of personality psychology—an organized and growing body of knowledge—in the form of a generally accepted model of personality traits. These traits are rooted in biology, endure in adulthood, and influence an extraordinary range of psychological outcomes. My research is organized around the Five-Factor Model of personality (FFM) and broadly, the goals are to employ this comprehensive structural model of personality to investigate basic questions concerning aging and human development.