weight and height, we also tested whether personality shared similar relations with three other adiposity measures: waist circumference, hip circumference, and body fat. We then move beyond concurrent associations to examine the longitudinal relations between personality and BMI in two ways. First, we used over 50 years of staff-assessed weight and height to test whether personality was associated with the rate of change of BMI across the adult lifespan. With up to 32 assessments of height and weight, data from the BLSA offer a unique opportunity to examine the trajectory of BMI across the adult lifespan and to test predictors of that trajectory. Second, because weight tends to fluctuate, we used this longitudinal data to test whether personality is associated with oscillations in weight. Fluctuations in weight and the trajectory of BMI are two different ways of quantifying weight change over time. Differential patterns of association between personality traits and these two longitudinal measures of BMI may reveal different consequences of processes inherent to the traits. Finally, we examine whether adiposity is associated with the rate of change of personality traits across the adult lifespan. With up to 16 assessments of personality, we test whether BMI predicts the trajectory of
