Personal Growth and Personality Development: A Foreword to the Special Section Laura A. King University of Missouri, Columbia Two separate and interesting literatures have evolved around the two topics of this special section—personal growth and adult personality development. Personal growth is a frequent topic of popular psychology books. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is a credo of this literature—negative life events can be made meaningful if we can use them to foster personal growth. This notion is represented in the scholarly literature under a number of guises. For instance, the subjective belief that one has grown as a person as the result of an experience has been suggested as a type of coping (e.g., positive reframing, benefit-finding, positive illusion; Affleck & Tennen, 1996; King & Miner, 2000; Taylor & Armor, 1996). More recently, research has begun to address the idea that personal growth through stressful life events may be “real.” For instance, research on stress-related growth has shown that the subjective sense that one has grown as a result of some experience is, in fact, reflected in personality change over time (Park, Cohen, & Murch, 1996). In addition, the idea of self-improvement is represented in research examining goal pursuit and self-discrepancy reduction. Still, the idea that subjective personal growth may indicate “real” development remains largely open for empirical investigation. With regard to adult personality development, a wide literature has evolved demonstrating that life experience is related to adult development in ways that parallel the popular notion of growth via suffering or difficul- ties. Loevinger (1976) described “pacers” as complex interpersonal Journal of Personality 70:1, February 2002. Copyright  2002 by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.