Running head: PERSONALITY TRAITS AND RELIGIOUSNESS

We examined the associations of the Big Five personality factors with religiousness in adulthood for a 19-year longitudinal sample of 492 adolescents aged 12 to 18. Among the Big Five, Conscientiousness in adolescence was uniquely related to higher religiousness in early adulthood. For adolescents high in emotional stability, the link between strength of religious upbringing and religiousness in adulthood was weaker than it was for adolescents who were less emotionally stable. These findings replicate the work of others demonstrating the importance of Conscientiousness as a predictor of religiousness, and suggest that emotionally unstable adolescents might be more likely to adopt levels of religiousness that are similar to those of their parents. Findings from the Terman Longitudinal Study If we ask what psychology has contributed to our understanding of the religious nature of man, the answer is, " Less than we might wish. " (Allport, 1955, p. 93). Personality psychology has had a longstanding, if somewhat estranged, relationship with the scientific study of religion. On one hand, some of personality psychology's most noteworthy pioneers, including Galton, Freud, Jung, Allport, and McClelland viewed religious phenomena as interesting and worthwhile topics of scientific inquiry. On the other hand, even during Allport's era, mainstream personality researchers devoted scant empirical attention to religiousness. Forty-five years later, the relationship between personality psychology and the scientific study of religion appears to be warming. Personality researchers from diverse theoretical camps have begun to view religiousness and spirituality as potentially fruitful areas for personality theory and research. Indeed, a recent issue of Journal of Personality was devoted to the topic of religion (Emmons & McCullough, 1999). Religiousness, the Big Three, and the Big Five Determining how religiousness is related to the major dimensions of human personality has been an important starting point for improving relations between personality psychology and the scientific study of religion. In the last decade, many researchers have investigated whether individual differences in religiousness are associated with individual differences in the personality traits of the Big Three or P-Religiousness and the Big Three Cross-sectional studies using Eysenck's P-E-N model (e.g., Eysenck, 1992) indicate that religiousness, as measured by a variety of indicators including frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of private prayer, and positive attitudes toward religion, is inversely Indeed, the basic finding that religiousness is negatively related to Eysenckian psychoticism (i.e., sex-adjusted correlations in the neighborhood of-.30; e.g., Francis et al., 1995) and essentially …