Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Being out of work for a long period of time can fundamentally change a person’s personality, making them less agreeable and less conscientious according to a new study published earlier this month in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

In the study, Dr. Christopher J. Boyce of the University of Stirling and his colleagues explain that no matter what kind of person you are to begin with, prolonged unemployment can have a lasting negative impact on your personality type.

Hard times make you grumpy

The study found that people can be harder to get along with if they’ve been out of work for more than a year, according to Tech Times. This discovery challenges existing assumptions that a person’s personality is “fixed” and cannot be altered due to outside influences.

“External factors such as unemployment can have large impacts on our basic personality. This indicates that unemployment has wider psychological implications than previously thought,” Dr. Boyce, a post-doctoral researcher, explained in a statement.

[STUDY: Unemployment may increase risk of heart attack]

The study looked at nearly 6,800 German adults, 461 of whom had been out of work for various lengths of time, and gave them a personality test on two occasions over the course of four years. Among the personality traits monitored where the participants’ levels of agreeableness, openness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

Men increased in levels of agreeableness during their first two years of unemployment, but after two years their levels decreased below that of the average employed person, the researchers said. Women, on the other hand, experienced a steady decline in agreeableness with each year of unemployment.

The longer men did not have jobs, the less conscientious they became as well– authors attribute this to the link between conscientiousness and the enjoyment of earned income. Women were more conscientious at first, then experienced a decline before rebounding to become more conscientious during the late stages of unemployment. The authors suggest that this could be due to their pursuit of non-work-related activities.

Openness didn’t change for men during the first year of unemployment, and declined steadily thereafter. Women showed sharp reductions in this trait during the second and third years of unemployment before rebounding afterwards.

Wide-reaching effect

The findings, Dr. Boyce claims, indicate that unemployment has more than just an economic effect on people and society.

[STORY: Workers sacrifice sleep, take long commutes to avoid unemployment]

Changes in personality caused by unemployment can also adversely impact a person’s chance of finding a job, according to the researchers. Conscientiousness likely suffers because a person has fewer opportunities for workplace achievement, while a lack of interaction with coworkers can hamper social behaviors such as agreeableness and openness, according to Tech Times.

“Public policy therefore has a key role to play in preventing adverse personality change in society through both lower unemployment rates and offering greater support for the unemployed,” Dr. Boyce concluded. “Policies to reduce unemployment are therefore vital not only to protect the economy but also to enable positive personality growth in individuals.”

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