The Development of the Telic Dominance Scale

The development of a 42-item measure of a number of personality features derived from the theory of psychological reversals is reported. These personality features are (a) the extent to which a person is serious-minded, (b) the extent to which a person plans ahead and organizes himself in the pursuit of goals, and (c) the extent to which a person seeks to avoid arousal. These features together are seen to constitute a personality trait which is described as telic dominance. Data concerning the test-retest reliability, criterion-related and construct validity of the Telic Dominance Scale are presented, together with the scale and scoring key.     

The relationship between personality,ability to draw a person and the content of drawings

Seventy boys (aged 11 and 12) participated in an experiment designed to investigate the relationship between personality, drawing ability and the content of drawings. They were first asked to complete the Junior EPQ (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1973) then to draw a person and finally to draw anything at all. Three independent raters assessed the quality and bizarre content of the ‘person’ drawings; both drawings were then considered together and the judges rated the extent to which they were aggressive, imaginative, comic and sexually daring. The main finding was a significant correlation between ‘Psychoticism’ and bizarre content.     

The covariation of trait anger and borderline personality: a bivariate twin-siblings study

Anger can be defined as an emotion consisting of feelings of variable intensity, from mild irritation or annoyance to intense fury and rage. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by impulsivity and instability of interpersonal relationships, of self-image, and of negative affects. Borderline personality and trait anger are often observed together. The present study examined the extent to which a genetic association explains the covariation between a trait measure of borderline personality and trait anger. To this end, self-report data of 5,457 twins and 1,487 of their siblings registered with the Netherlands Twin Register and the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey were analyzed using genetic structural equation modeling. A significant phenotypic correlation was observed between the two traits (rP = .52). This correlation was explained by genetic (54%) and by environmental influences (46%). A shared genetic risk factor is thus one of the explanations for the covariation of borderline personality and trait anger.     

The impact of personality on cognitive, behavioral, and affective political processes: the effects of need to evaluate

Need to evaluate (NE) is a personality trait that reflects a person's proclivity to create and hold attitudes; people high in NE are especially likely to form attitudes toward all sorts of objects. Using data from the 1998 National Election Survey Pilot and the 2000 National Election Survey, NE was shown to predict a variety of important attitude-relevant cognitive, behavioral, and affective political processes beyond simply holding attitudes: NE predicted how many evaluative beliefs about candidates a person held, the likelihood that a person would use party identification and issue stances to determine candidate preferences, the extent to which a person engaged in political activism, the likelihood that a person voted or intended to vote, the extent to which a person used the news media for gathering information, and the intensity of emotional reactions a person felt toward political candidates. Thus, NE appears to play a powerful role in shaping important political behavior, emotion, and cognition.     

A Factor-Analytic Model for Assessing Individual Differences in Response Scale Usage

This article proposes a factor-analytic model, intended for graded-response or continuous-response personality and attitude items, which includes an additional multiplicative person parameter that models the individual's response mapping process. The model, which is a modification of Spearman's (1904) factor analysis (FA) model, is parameterized as both an FA model and an item response theory (IRT) model and is fully developed to the extent that it can be used in applications. Procedures for (a) calibrating the items and assessing data fit, (b) obtaining individual estimates of both person parameters, (c) determining measurement precision, and (d) assessing differential predictability are proposed and discussed. The potential advantages of the proposal, its practical relevance, and its relations with other approaches are also discussed. Its functioning is assessed with a simulation study and 3 empirical examples in the personality domain.     

Determinants of diagnostic prototypicality judgments of the personality disorders

We evaluated the impact of three factors that have been suggested to be important determinants of the diagnostic process pertaining to personality disorders: (a) the number of features representative of a personality disorder category; (b) the extent to which those features are typical of the category, and (c) the dominance or proportion of category features to the total number of features. Thirty-two clinical psychologists evaluated 12 profiles of hypothetical patients in which these factors were varied factorially. The results revealed strong effects of typicality and dominance, but no effects for number. Implications for the assessment and classification of personality disorders are discussed.     

Essentialist beliefs about personality and their implications

Two studies examine implicit theories about the nature of personality characteristics, asking whether they are understood as underlying essences. Consistent with the hypothesis, essentialist beliefs about personality formed a coherent and replicable set. Personality characteristics differed systematically in the extent to which they were judged to be discrete, biologically based, immutable, informative, consistent across situations, and deeply inherent within the person. In Study 1, the extent to which characteristics were essentialized was positively associated with their perceived desirability, prevalence, and emotionality. In Study 2, essentialized characteristics were judged to be particularly important for defining people's identity, for forming impressions of people, and for communicating about a third person. The findings indicate that people understand some personality attributes in an essentialist fashion, that these attributes are taken to be valued elements of a shared human nature, and that they are particularly central to social identity and judgment.     

Person, personality, self, and identity: a philosophically informed conceptual analysis

Who is the person, or self, associated with personality disorder and its treatment? How are we to account for a self conceptualized in terms of schemas and representations, that at the same time--as self--scrutinizes these schemas and representations (as in cognitive therapy for personality disorders)? Five approaches to personhood are examined: metaphysical, empirical, transcendental, hermeneutical, and phenomenological. An elementary sense of selfhood is tied to all one's experiences and activities; this sense of self is experientially irreducible and conceptually connected to a primordial form of self-relatedness. After examining these issues, I formulate four provisional conclusions: (a) the separation between person and roles (functions, personality features) is a modern fiction--persons are not neutral bearers of roles and functions; (b) the concept of personality in DSM-IV refers to nonhomogeneous behaviors such as feelings, moods, inclinations, temperaments, and habits, and these behaviors differ with respect to their distance to the core self; (c) there exists an enormous variety of ways of self-relating and this variety may affect the contents of the core self under certain circumstances; and (d) the concept of person may be primitive; that is, irreducible and referring to a background of unity and integrity.     

Levels and Domains In Personality: An Introduction

ABSTRACT This special issue is centered around the problem of levels and domains in personality functioning. What kind of constructs—and at what levels and in what domains—are needed to understand what a person is like? To account for the complexity and scope of human lives, personality psychologists have traditionally put forth lists and taxonomies of factors, features, and variables that must be taken into consideration in formulating an adequate psychological portrait of the whole person. The five-factor model of personality traits has recently been offered as a comprehensive framework; however, critical analyses of the trait concept have revealed the limitations of a trait-based model of personality. Recognizing that the concept of trait is indispensable to a vital psychology of personality, this special issue aims to (a) communicate recent developments and organizational frameworks for understanding the person at multiple levels and in varied domains, and (b) articulate and elaborate units of analysis that, when combined with trait assessments, yield a psychology of personality that is commensurate with the complexity of individual functioning and that offers greater potential for the attainment of the original goals of the discipline.     

Effects of purpose on the organization and recall of information in person perception1

The first study investigated how the purpose for which information about a person is to be used affects the way a perceiver organizes the information. Subjects were asked to categorize and label episodes which described the behavior of a fictional person “Jill” in 64 different situations, and to summarize what each category meant to them. Half of the episodes were easily categorized according to the traits that Jill manifested, half according to features of the situations. One group (personality impression) expected later to describe Jill's personality, a second group (prediction) expected to make predictions about Jill's behavior, and a third group (recall) expected to be tested on their recall of the episodes. The results indicated that subjects in the behavior prediction group categorized the episodes primarily in terms of the personality characteristics Jill portrayed, just as the personality impression group did. In contrast, only the categories formed by the recall group paralleled the built-in structure of the episodes, i.e., they were as often based on features of the situation as on Jill's personality characteristics. A second study showed that the categorization strategies of the recall subjects actually did produce higher recall than those of the personality impression and behavior prediction subjects. The results were interpreted as suggesting that when making behavioral predictions, just as when forming impressions, the layman, like the traditional trait psychologist, prefers to organize information in terms of personality constructs rather than in a way that facilitates retrieval of everything that happened in specific situations. The cognitive costs as well as the gains produced by this strategy merit further scrutiny.     

决策中个体差异研究现状述评

决策中个体差异的研究有助于进一步检验和深化传统决策理论。文章回顾了近十年决策个体差异研究的主要变量（人格、认知能力、认知风格和年龄）和研究结果,并简要总结了该类研究的背景、研究范式和理论意义。这些研究一致发现个体差异变量对决策过程、决策表现等具有影响作用,说明个体差异与决策加工中复杂的人-情境间联系有关。文章提出,未来研究应该综合考虑决策情境、情绪和决策主体的理论模型,以期对个体差异在决策中的作用做出更好解释     

Personality reflected in a coherent idiosyncratic interplay of intra- and interpersonal self-regulatory processes

This article discusses a framework that conceptualizes personality in terms of a unique pattern of interacting intra- and interpersonal self-regulatory mechanisms employed in the service of constructing and maintaining a desired self. These personal goals motivate the individuals' self-construction efforts and give direction, organization, and coherence to the self-regulatory dynamics--both within the person and in the social world in which they play out. The framework is illustrated through research on construct validation of the narcissistic personality type and extended by brief applications to dependency and rejection sensitivity to show how it may help us understand the complex signatures that are the expressions of a personality type. It offers a guide for where to look for and how to organize the unique features and idiosyncratic dynamics of different self-construction types and to make sense of their otherwise often seemingly paradoxical expressions. In so doing, the framework speaks to basic goals of personality psychology by providing an approach for capturing trait-like individual differences while simultaneously shedding light on the psychological mechanism that underlies them.     

When Seemingly Irrelevant Details Matter: Hidden Covariation Detection Reexamined

Hidden covariation detection (HCD) theory states that when personality characteristics are surreptitiously associated with irrelevant features, these features obtain heuristic value for future evaluations of personality characteristics. According to the theory, subjects are not consciously aware of using such heuristics in their evaluations. We tested these hypotheses by confronting participants with statements that were said to belong to separate individuals, in which the apparent level of intelligence was associated with an irrelevant feature of the person who allegedly made these statements. In line with HCD theory, participants appeared to use this association, unconsciously, to guide their subsequent evaluations. Implications of these findings for HCD theory are discussed.     

Accounting for job satisfaction: Examining the interplay of person and situation

In the present study, we investigate the interplay of personality traits (i.e., person) in frontline care staff in nursing homes and the way they relate to the residents (i.e., situation) to account for their job satisfaction. Participants completed a survey including Mini‐IPIP tapping the five‐factor model of personality, Individualized Care Inventory tapping four aspects of person‐centered care and job satisfaction. The results revealed that staff scoring high on neuroticism experienced less job satisfaction. This relationship was partly accounted for by resident autonomy, suggesting that part of the adverse influence of neuroticism on job satisfaction may be mitigated by organizations providing a supportive care environment. In contrast, staff scoring high on agreeableness experienced higher job satisfaction. This relationship was accounted for by another aspect of person‐centered care, that is, knowing the person. This suggests that agreeableness in a sense facilitated adjustment of acts of care toward the unique needs and preferences of residents and this partly explained why the more agreeable the staff was the more they felt satisfied at work. In sum, effects of personality traits on job satisfaction in care staff are partially mediated by the perception of working conditions and care policy and to the extent that a certain personality trait affects whether the staff have a positive or negative perception of the way they relate to the residents, they will experience, respectively, higher or a lower job satisfaction. This finding has implications for how to combine a focus on delivering person‐centered care with improving personal job satisfaction.     

Person theories: their temporal stability and relation to intertrait inferences

This article tests whether individual differences in inferring one trait from another (intertrait inferences) can be linked to lay beliefs about the malleability of personality (person theories). It finds that holding the belief that personality is malleable (incremental theory) rather than fixed (entity theory) at the time of inferences is associated with less extreme inferences involving semantically related (but not unrelated) traits. Although person theories have been assumed to be stable over time, existing short-term test-retest coefficients do not capture their instability over a longer period. These results can illuminate interrater discrepancies in assessments of personality pathology and job performance, enrich understanding of such phenomena as stereotyping and impression formation, refine the interpretation of past research involving person theories, and inform research planning.     

The effects of base rates and individuating information on judgments about another person

Past research suggests that in judging a person's category membership, people largely ignore the population frequency of membership in the category (base rates) in favor of individuating information about the particular person. This study tested the hypothesis that base rates will be utilized to the extent that the usefulness of the individuating information for diagnosing category membership is diminished. Subjects were given problems in which both base rates of membership in each of two categories and individuating information about a target person were presented. Then, in each case, they were asked to assess the probability that the target person belonged to each category. In three sets of problems, the diagnostic usefulness of the individuating information (personality characteristics) was diminished by including individuating information that was either inconsistent or irrelevant, or by increasing the similarity of the two alternative membership categories. In a fourth set of problems, the individualistic information included consistent, relevant personal characteristics and the membership categories were dissimilar. As expected, base rates were used in each of the first three sets of problems but were ignored in the fourth set. The results were interpreted in terms of informational factors that induce a shift away from a habitual, spontaneous reliance on a source of information (e.g., personality traits) for which one has well-developed rules (e.g., intuitive personality theories), and toward a more controlled, deliberate mode of thinking wherein other sources of information (e.g., base rates) are attended to and incorporated into judgment through less frequently used rules (e.g., sampling rules).