Person x situation interactions: choice of situations and congruence response models

Two models of Person x Situation interaction wee examined. The first model predicts that there is a relation between personality and the situations people naturally choose to be in; the second model predicts that when there is congruence between the situation and personality, a person will experience more positive and less negative affect. These models were investigated by using mood and activity reports gathered on 3,512 occasions sampled randomly from the everyday lives of 42 subjects. Situational dimensions were related to some but not all personality variables investigated. Need for order predicted choice of typical situations and extraversion correlated with time spent recreating socially. However, it was found that individuals did not spend more time in those settings where they experienced more positive emotions nor less time in those situations where they experienced more negative affect. In terms of the affect-congruence model, several predicted relations wee found, but several others did not reach significance. The failure of the affect-congruence model to be consistently supported was probably because the affect of individuals was relatively consistent across situations. The present results suggest that although some theoretically meaningful Person x Situation interactions do occur, they are not necessarily strong or easily predictable.     

Properties of persons and situations related to overall and distinctive personality-behavior congruence

Congruence is the degree to which one’s personality matches one’s behavior in a particular situation. On four separate occasions over several weeks, 202 undergraduate participants described a situation they encountered the previous day and their behavior. Analyses considered overall congruence as well as distinctive congruence, adjusted for the match of personality and behavior to the normative personality and behavior profile. Overall congruence was strongly associated with better psychological adjustment; distinctive congruence was not. Similarly, situation strength and affordances for autonomy, relatedness to others, and competence were strongly linked to overall congruence, but only weakly associated with distinctive congruence. Behaving in accordance with one’s true self is only related to positive psychological outcomes when it is accordance with normative standards.     

Choice in situations of time-based diminishing returns: immediate versus delayed consequences of action.

Pigeons chose between two schedules of food presentation, a fixed-interval schedule and a progressive-interval schedule that began at 0 s and increased by 20 s with each food delivery provided by that schedule. Choosing one schedule disabled the alternate schedule and stimuli until the requirements of the chosen schedule were satisfied, at which point both schedules were again made available. Fixed-interval duration remained constant within individual sessions but varied across conditions. Under reset conditions, completing the fixed-interval schedule not only produced food but also reset the progressive interval to its minimum. Blocks of sessions under the reset procedure were interspersed with sessions under a no-reset procedure, in which the progressive schedule value increased independent of fixed-interval choices. Median points of switching from the progressive to the fixed schedule varied systematically with fixed-interval value, and were consistently lower during reset than during no-reset conditions. Under the latter, each subject's choices of the progressive-interval schedule persisted beyond the point at which its requirements equaled those of the fixed-interval schedule at all but the highest fixed-interval value. Under the reset procedure, switching occurred at or prior to that equality point. These results qualitatively confirm molar analyses of schedule preference and some versions of optimality theory, but they are more adequately characterized by a model of schedule preference based on the cumulated values of multiple reinforcers, weighted in inverse proportion to the delay between the choice and each successive reinforcer.     

Freud's psychology and its organic foundation: sexuality and mind-body interactionism

Although Freud's neurological education had a great impact on his thinking, a review of Freud's early writings reveals that: (1) Freud adhered to a mind-body interactionist position that was not in accord with the mechanistic neurology of his medical school education; (2) Freud saw psychical processes as intentional, not completely determined by mechanical brain processes--but interactive with them; (3) Freud made functional and psychological interpretations freely without accepting a need to "neurologize" his psychological insights by providing specific neuroanatomical or neurophysiological correlates for such interpretations; and (4) Freud sought the organic base for his evolving psychology in sexual physiology, not neuroanatomy or neurophysiology.     

Motive congruence and interpersonal identity status

This article examines the relationship between interpersonal ego identity formation and congruence of self-attributed and implicit affiliation motives. A TAT-type picture-story test, the Personality Research Form, and the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status were administered to 177 participants to assess data on affiliation motivation and interpersonal identity formation. According to a scoring system developed by Winter, the picture stories were coded for need for Affiliation. Analyses revealed that motive congruence is significantly associated with participants' level of identity achievement and identity foreclosure in the interpersonal domain. Such a relationship could not be identified for identity diffusion and moratorium.     

Stimulus congruence and the Simon effect

Summary A standard experimental procedure was implemented with novel response requirements to assess the hypothesis that the Simon effect is attributable not to the irrelevant stimulus-response relationship, but to the congruence between stimulus attributes. The stimulus ensemble consisted of the words LEFT and RIGHT, one of which was presented on each trial to the left or right of a central fixation point. The distinctive feature of the task is that subjects were asked to respond, by laterally placed keys, whether or not the stimulus word was in accord (i. e., congruent) with its location on the display. Asking subjects to judge stimulus congruence directly enables the effect of congruence to be assessed, as well as independent estimates of the two irrelevant S-R relationships that apply in the task — that is, between the response location and (1) the stimulus location (the Simon effect) and (2) the stimulus word (the reverse Simon effect). Marked effects were obtained in all three cases. Stimulus congruence remains in contention as a factor in the explanation of the Simon effect, but the strong effects of irrelevant S-R factors suggest that a more comprehensive account of the Simon effect is needed. An explanation in terms of stimulus salience, based on an interactive activational model, is briefly discussed.     

Self-focusing situations and depression

The author examined the situations in which people turn their attention to the self and investigated differences between depressed and nondepressed persons in self-focusing situations. He developed a Self-Focusing Situation List containing 58 items and administered the list to 436 Japanese undergraduates. He also administered a depression scale to part of the sample (n = 365). A factor analysis extracted 6 factors, and cluster analyses of these 6 factors scores yielded 5 clusters. The participants who preferred self-focusing when alone and avoided self-focusing after positive events (Cluster 5) scored higher on the depression scale than did the participants in Clusters 1, 2, 3, and 4.     

Gender identity,interactionism, and politics: A reply to Rogers and Walsh

This article is a reply to a recent article by Rogers and Walsh (Sex Roles, 1982, 8, 269–281). We disagree with some of their interpretations and criticisms of the psychomedical research on the development of sex differences. Thus, there is a discussion of the reasoning and strategies of the biological approach in this research area. However, we also support and extend some of their suggestions relevant to gender and sex.     

The evidence for interactionism in psychology: a reply to Furnham and Jaspars

In a critical review of the person-situation debate, Furnham and Jaspars (1983) presented a reanalysis of nearly all the published studies in the field which they claimed provided strong support for the interactionist position. This paper contests that claim by arguing that the statistics computed do not constitute a proper test for interactions. A discussion of the interactionist position suggests other methods are appropriate for detecting interactions in future research.     

Intuitive interactionism in person perception: effects of situation--behavior relations on dispositional judgments

To examine the effects of the relationships between behavior and the situation in which it occurs, we manipulated such relations and exposed subjects to them. Impressions were similar when based on the behaviors presented with situations unspecified (e.g., child hits) or when the situations in which they naturally occurred were specified (e.g., child hits when provoked). However, when situations were specified, subjects' impressions more accurately predicted individual differences in the children's actual levels of overall aggressive behavior. When the veridical situation-behavior relations were increasingly altered, the targets were perceived as being less plausible and increasingly maladjusted and odd, and correlations decreased between the perceived level of the children's aggressiveness and their actual aggressive behavior. Thus, both personality impressions and predictive accuracy were influenced by the relations between the target's behaviors and their situational contexts.     

Consistent curricular choice and congruence of subsequent changes

Curriculum choices of 324 male and 157 female liberal arts students who took the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) during freshman orientation were classified as congruent or incongruent on the basis of rated correspondence between three-letter codes derived from (SCII) Holland theme scales and expressed curricular choice. The choices of those subjects reporting one or more changes in five semesters were examined for level of congruence using a two-way analysis of variance with repeated measures. While serious methodological limitations are noted, analysis of variance procedures indicated that congruent subjects tended to be more stable, more differentiated, and more academically oriented than incongruent subjects. Among subjects who reported one or more changes, Artistic subjects decreased in congruence while Investigative subjects showed no overall change. Results are discussed in terms of recent theory and previous research.     

Partnership longevity and personality congruence in couples

Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost 5000 of these couples were tracked over a five-year period with personality assessed at the beginning and end of this time, which allowed us to investigate the relationship between personality congruence and marriage duration longitudinally. Using this data, we investigated (a) whether personality congruence is predictive for partnership longevity and whether congruence therefore differs between subsequently stable and unstable couples, (b) if stable couples become more congruent, and (c) if separated couples become less congruent with regard to their personality over time. The results provide initial evidence of personality congruence as a predictor for partnership longevity: the more congruent couples are in the personality domain of Openness, the more stable their partnership. In addition, we found no indications of an increase in personality congruence over time within the stable couples; within the separated couples, however, a strong decrease in congruence was detectable.     

Attention,extraversion, and stimulus-personality congruence

In this study Ss classified as extraverts, ambiverts or introverts on the Maudsley Personality Inventory looked at photographs rated as extravert, ambivert, or introvert for as long as they wished. It was hypothesized that there would be a tendency for Ss to look relatively longer at pictures congruent with their personality characteristic. Support for this hypothesis was found in a significant picture by personality interaction. Extraverts clearly looked longer at extravert pictures and introverts showed a very slight preference for introvert pictures. Ambivert pictures were looked at the longest by all groups. This high looking time for ambivert pictures and the small difference between the looking time at extravert and introvert pictures by introvert Ss is explained in terms of greater complexity of the ambivert and extravert pictures used in this experiment.