Personality and Health in the 1980s: Psychosomatic Medicine Revisited?

This special issue is a sign of a resurgence of interest in the role of personality in health not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s when the promises of the psychosomatic approach to health and illness appeared to be the greatest. This new look at personality and health represented by contributions to this special issue attempts to address the limitations of earlier work in psychosomatic medicine by making more explicit efforts to define personality variables precisely, to distinguish these variables from conceptually related psychological constructs, and to embed them in a body of theory and empirical research. This new work also attempts to remedy methodological limitations of earlier work by placing greater emphasis on prospective research and highlighting distinctions between symptom reports, illness behavior, and actual illness. However, the new work and earlier work in psychosomatic medicine share certain working assumptions, for example, a primary emphasis on the relatively direct impact of personality on disease onset, an assumption that personality variables operate in interaction with stressful events, and a frequent emphasis on general susceptibility to disease. Moreover, this new work frequently risks the same methodological pitfalls that limited scientific progress in psychosomatic medicine. We argue that the rapid rise and decline of psychosomatic medicine is most likely to be repeated in research on personality and health in the 1980s if reasonable criteria for considering personality variables a risk factor for disease are not precisely defined, disease endpoints (the dependent variable) are not assessed precisely, personality variables of interest (the independent variable) are not empirically distinguished from other related psychological variables, and complex relationships among risk factors are not taken into account. It is emphasized that models drawn from personality research cannot be transferred unchanged to the health arena without risking false inferences about the role of personality in health.     

Personality processes and problem behavior

This article introduces the special issue of Journal of Personality on personality and problem behavior. There is growing evidence that various dimensions of personality are associated with a broad range of problem behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, sexual risk-taking, interpersonal violence, and gambling. To date, research on personality and problem behavior has focused almost exclusively on documenting simple, direct associations between personality traits and problem behaviors. This article proposes an expanded research agenda, a second generation of research and theory on the role of personality in problem behavior. The agenda specifies two major classes of second-generation hypotheses. Moderator hypotheses concern the conditions under which the influence of personality on problem behavior is magnified, weakened, or eliminated. Mediator hypotheses concern the causal processes that underlie the influence of personality on problem behavior. Articles in the special issue, which are summarized in this introduction, exemplify the proposed second generation of research on personality and problem behavior.     

Too much of a good thing: curvilinear relationships between personality traits and job performance

The relationships between personality traits and performance are often assumed to be linear. This assumption has been challenged conceptually and empirically, but results to date have been inconclusive. In the current study, we took a theory-driven approach in systematically addressing this issue. Results based on two different samples generally supported our expectations of the curvilinear relationships between personality traits, including Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability, and job performance dimensions, including task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behaviors. We also hypothesized and found that job complexity moderated the curvilinear personality–performance relationships such that the inflection points after which the relationships disappear were lower for low-complexity jobs than they were for high-complexity jobs. This finding suggests that high levels of the two personality traits examined are more beneficial for performance in high- than low-complexity jobs. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the use of personality in personnel selection.     

Dynamic, contextual approaches to studying personality in the social world

This special issue of Journal of Personality, composed of eight original articles, attends to the intersection of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. Articles adopt a contextual approach to personality with attention to the need to belong (and the lack thereof), self-presentation concerns and styles, sexuality, curiosity, self-regulatory strength and strategies, and dynamic methodologies and analyses to study people within relationships. In this introduction, we offer challenges and aspirational goals for personality science. In particular, we discuss the importance of context when conceptualizing and studying personality, the seduction of innovative methodologies and analytic procedures, and the value of focusing on people and heterogeneity in groups instead of simply variables. We hope that this collection of articles deepens personality science and reminds readers that to truly understand human beings, they cannot be divorced from their social milieu.     

Defensiveness and Defense Mechanisms

This introduction to the Journal of Personality's special issue on the topic of defense mechanisms raises the question of why defenses have been largely overlooked in personality research. Although defenses were originally discussed in the context of psychopathology, for the past 60 years psychodynamically oriented psychologists have understood that defenses play an important part in normal psychological development. Recently, psychologists outside the field of personality have incorporated the ideas of unconscious mental processes and of defenses into their research programs. In this issue, personality researchers discuss their ideas about defense mechanisms, organized around three topical areas: current conceptualizations of defense, the measurement of defense mechanisms, and the integration of defense mechanisms into personality research. The issue concludes with a commentary on these articles and provides suggestions for future work.     

Seventy years of research on personality and close relationships: substantive and methodological trends over time

The present review is based on a quantitative analysis of the abstracts for 477 studies published since 1932 on the topic of personality and close (romantic) relationships. This approach enables a "bird's-eye" view of the content and methods that have characterized research in this area and an examination of publication trends over time. Results showed that 60% of all published studies in this area relied exclusively on cross-sectional and self-report methods; that nearly all used convenience samples, though more than half used nonstudent samples; and that more than one-third relied exclusively on data from individuals rather than couples. Few studies appeared to include elaborated networks of constructs in either the personality or relationship domain or to attempt to integrate an elaborated model of personality with an elaborated relationship model. Examination of trends over time revealed a mixed picture, with increasing use of the least informative designs balanced by evidence of increasingly complex conceptual models.     

Linking Proactive Personality to Creative Performance: The Role of Job Crafting and High-Involvement Work Systems

This study proposed that job crafting serves as a mechanism reflecting how proactive personality affects creative performance, and this study explored whether these relationships are moderated by high-involvement work systems. Drawn from the conservation of resources theory to develop a cross-level moderated mediation model, a three-wave longitudinal study was conducted with 346 employees and their supervisors in 27 high technology firms in China. This study found that proactive personality was positively related to creative performance and that job crafting mediated the relationship between proactive personality and creative performance, and an indirect effect of proactive personality on creative performance through job crafting was significant when high-involvement work systems was low but not high. Thus, the research results indicate that when human resource management involves less participatory management, incentive rewards, extensive training and information sharing, proactive employees can draw from their personality to craft their job tasks, relations and cognitions, thereby improving creative performance. The theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.     

Introduction to the special issue on personality assessment in medical settings

This special issue of the Journal of Personality Assessment brings together 3 review articles and 5 research studies on personality assessment in medical settings that should help clinicians become more familiar with the current status of this field. In 1 review article, Sirri, Fabbri, Fava, and Sonino (2007/this issue) summarize evidence of a new approach to the assessment of psychological syndromes in somatizing patients based on the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research (Fava et al., 1995). The other reviews focus on 2 personality constructs widely used in investigations with medical patients. Kupper and Denollet (2007/this issue) review the Type D personality, whereas Lumley, Neely, and Burger (2007/this issue) provide an overview of alexithymia. Of the research articles, 2 also focus on alexithymia, specifically on the factor structure of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Bagby, Parker, & Taylor, 1994), which is the best-validated and most commonly used measure of alexithymia (Bagby, Taylor, Quilty, & Parker, 2007/this issue; Gignac, Palmer, & Stough, 2007/this issue). The other 3 research studies examine the relationship between specific personality dimensions (behavioral problems relevant to medicine, resiliency, and interpersonal sensitivity) and medical outcomes (adherence to treatment, coping with injury, and postsurgical sexual functioning) from medical samples of patients with HIV, spinal cord injury, and prostate carcinoma (Berry, Elliott, & Rivera, 2007/this issue; Cruess, Meagher, Antoni, & Millon, 2007/this issue; Siegel et al., 2007/this issue). Each article touches on the role person variables can play in the expression of medical problems.     

Personality and Coping: Three Generations of Research

ABSTRACT This article introduces the Journal of Personality 's special issue on coping and personality. It first presents a historical overview of the psychological study of how people cope with stress and identifies three generations of theory and research: (a) the psychoanalysts and the ego development school, which tended to equate personality and coping strategies; (b) the transactional approach, which appeared in the 1960s and emphasized situational and cognitive influences on coping while downplaying the role of individual differences; and (c) the most recent, "third generation," whose work is represented in this special issue and focuses on the role of personality in coping while maintaining strong operational distinctions among coping, personality, appraisal, and adaptational outcomes. This introduction concludes with a discussion of unresolved conceptual and methodological issues and a brief orientation to the third-generation articles that follow in this special issue.     

Integrating Diverse Developmental Perspectives on Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation has been studied in diverse ways within different subdisciplines of psychology—most notably social development, personality and individual differences, social psychophysiology, interpersonal relationships, and stress and coping. The goal of this Special Issue is to demonstrate the value of integrating these diverse approaches for building multilevel, lifespan models of emotion regulation. We review each of the contributions to this special issue, highlighting recurring themes and previewing our own perspective on directions for future theory and research.     

Five‐Factor Model of Personality and Job Satisfaction: The Importance of Agreeableness in a Tight and Collectivistic Asian Society

Results from predominantly US‐based research have shown that personality can partly explain job satisfaction. As the issue of globalisation grows in importance for organisations, I researched in this study whether meta‐analytic findings on the relationships between job satisfaction and the Big Five personality traits extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism would hold in a tight and collectivistic Asian society. Additionally, I expected that in a tight and collectivistic society the personality trait agreeableness would have a strong positive relationship with job satisfaction. Study participants were 354 employees from organisations in Singapore. Results confirmed that extraversion, conscientiousness, non‐neuroticism (emotional stability), and also agreeableness were related to job satisfaction. The study advises scholars and practitioners that even in a tight and collectivistic Asian society—despite situations that demand abiding by norms and fulfilling obligations—job satisfaction is related to stable personality traits.     

Some Cautions for Research on Personality and Health

This article comments on three conceptualizations of the relationship between personality and disease as they relate to the papers in this issue. Despite the sophistication and promise of recent research in this area, conceptual and methodological difficulties present in earlier psychosomatic research have persisted. In this area, robust and convincing associations between traits and disease remain largely elusive, and stable, valid measures of psychological factors are relatively rare. In addition, the mechanisms relating behavior to health are sometimes sketchy or overstated. We suggest that the most productive research strategies will focus on mechanisms linking behavior to health, rather than merely correlating traits with measures of disease. Needed are continued close attention to these pitfalls by researchers as well as the maintenance of a critical attitude by readers.     

Personality and self-esteem in newlyweds

The current study investigated the relationships between several dimensions of self-esteem and the “Big Five” personality dimensions. Using a sample of 107 newlywed couples, we investigated whether the relationships identified in previous research replicated in this novel sample and whether the relationships between different dimensions of self-esteem (general, physical, social, and intellectual) and standings on the Big Five personality dimensions might be sex-differentiated. The results replicate many of the relationships between different dimensions of self-esteem and standings on the Big Five personality dimensions for both men and women. Previous work indicates that differences in personality between men and women may shape interactions with the environment differently and these different interactions may then shape self-esteem. None of these relationships was reliably sex-differentiated in the current research. Discussion addresses several limitations of this research and highlights directions for future research on the personality-self-esteem interface.     

Willingness to express emotion: The impact of relationship type,communal orientation,and their interaction

This research examines the effects of relationship type (close vs. business), a personality variable (dispositional communal orientation), and the interaction of these two variables on individuals’ willingness to express emotions to relationship partners. Results supported our predictions that (a) people are willing to express more emotion in relationships likely to be high in communal strength than in relationships likely to be low in communal strength, (b) individuals high in communal orientation are willing to express more emotion than those who are low in communal orientation, and (c) relationship type and communal orientation interact to influence willingness to express two emotions that reveal weakness and vulnerability (fear and anxiety). Specifically, communal orientation had little effect on willingness to express fear and anxiety in business relationships, whereas high relative to low communal orientation was associated with willingness to express more fear and anxiety within close relationships.     

Idiothetic inquiry and the toil of Sisyphus

In response to the article by Lamiell and Trierweiler (this issue), we examine the stated epistemological origins of idiothetic proposals for theory and research in personality We argue that the justification for those proposals as advanced by Lamiell and his colleagues is wholely insufficient in view of prior research on the consistency of behavior This assertion together with our identification of problems in scaling personality and personality consistencies lead us to conclude that the pursuit of the idiothetic method is both unwarranted and ineffectual     

Felt Understanding as a Bridge between Close Relationships and Subjective Well-Being: Antecedents and Consequences Across Individuals and Cultures

The literatures on close relationships and subjective well-being have received enormous attention in personality and social psychology over the last two decades. However, despite the well-known link between the quality of social relationships and subjective well-being, these two research traditions have developed relatively independent of one other. Research on felt understanding and misunderstanding attempts to integrate these two related but relatively distinct literatures. To this end, the current review summarizes major recent findings on the antecedents and consequences of felt understanding and misunderstanding and highlights important cultural and individual differences in the processes involving felt understanding and misunderstanding.     

Finding the person in personal relationships

The search for dispositional factors that influence the course and conduct of close relationships has long and popular roots. No cogent theory of interpersonal processes would deny that dispositional factors matter, and, furthermore, both scholarly and lay analyses often emphasize them. Although existing research has made progress in understanding how dispositions affect behavior in ongoing relationships, when all is said and done, this progress has been modest. In this paper, we discuss several interlocking theoretical and methodological principles that may facilitate movement to the next (and more sophisticated) generation of theory and research. We draw particularly on interdependence theory to discuss the concepts of relationship and persons-in-relationship. Central to our analysis is the principle that interaction in relationships is an inherently dynamic, temporal, and thoroughly interdependent process that cannot be properly understood from examination of the static, global dispositions of one of its members. To provide grounding for our analysis, we also discuss several specific implications of these concepts for the conduct of research seeking to understand personality in relationships.     

The vibrant intersection of personality and psychopathology research: A special issue of the Journal of Research in Personality

Personality and psychopathological variation are closely linked, both conceptually and empirically. In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of a new special issue of the Journal of Research in Personality focused on links between personality and psychopathology. Contemplating this corpus of work, we conclude that the nexus of personality and psychopathology constitutes a vibrant and active area of inquiry. Psychopathology research informed by personality science has extensive implications not just for the scientific understanding of human individual differences, but also for applied efforts to ameliorate psychological suffering.