Introduction: Personality Psychology and the Case Study

ABSTRACT This article introduces the Journal of Personality's special issue on the life voyage of Dodge Morgan who, in 1986 at the age of 54, sailed solo around the world in 150 days. Before the voyage, Morgan agreed to participate in an intensive psychological case study, the data for which provide the focus for this special issue. William Nasby and Nancy W. Read have organized the vast array of psychological data obtained from Morgan and produced a complex and illuminating interpretation of his life, drawing liberally from the five-factor trait model of personality and the life-story model of adult identity. This introduction provides a historical and intellectual context for Nasby and Read's study by considering the various ways in which personality psychologists have employed the case study in research and examining the many conceptual and methodological problems and possibilities that arise in the psychological study of the single case.     

Telling a “baby story”: Mothers narrating their pre-schoolers' past across two cultural contexts

Mothers from two middle-class contexts from Berlin, Germany (n = 35), and Delhi, India (n = 28) told a baby story to their 3-year olds about an event that had happened during the children's first year of life. The contexts represented two cultural models: the model of psychological autonomy (Berlin) and the model of autonomy-relatedness (Delhi). We investigated the culture-specific functions of this reminiscing task as reflected in the structure, content and specificity of the stories. The stories in both contexts were minimally interactive and the children contributed few elaborations themselves. Stories told by the Berlin mothers were longer, and more specific. Mothers in both contexts were similarly elaborative relative to being repetitive. The stories were highly child-centred in both contexts but even more child-centred for Delhi. Importantly, maternal narrations from the Berlin context were embedded in a frame story that characterised the child's individual past; stories thus constructed “exclusive baby stories”. Most stories told by the Delhi mothers had no frame story but instead were about what the child used to do as a baby in general; they thus constructed “routine baby stories”. Results are interpreted in the view of the underlying self, social and directive functions of this reminiscing task.     

Victims' Stories: A Call to Care

In her book Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, Diana Meyers offers a careful analysis of victims' stories as a narrative genre, and she argues that stories in this genre function as a call to care: they both depict a moral void and issue a moral demand, thereby fostering the development of a culture of human rights. This article, while finding Meyers's articulation of this idea compelling, questions Meyers's account of how victims' stories do their moral work. Whereas Meyers argues that victims' stories are complete narratives, characterized by a distinctive form of closure, it suggests that the moral power of victims' stories may lie in part in their open‐endedness or lack of closure. In telling their stories, victims engage their audiences in a new moral relationship and implicitly give them a role to play in bringing about the moral (and narrative) closure they seek.     

From pleasure and pride to the fear of decline: Exploring the emotions in older women's physical activity narratives

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to explore the emotion narratives in older women's ageing body and physical activity-related stories.MethodThe study was informed by narrative inquiry. We conducted two semi-structured interviews with 21 women aged 65 to 94 and asked them about their physical activity engagement, and body perceptions, experiences, and management strategies. Using thematic narrative analysis, we analysed the content of participants’ stories pertaining to physical activity, the core patterns within them, and considered the cultural context in which they were embedded.ResultsEmotion narratives of anxiety/fear, shame, guilt, pride, and pleasure permeated the women's stories. Participants feared physical and cognitive decline, and engaged in physical activity to stave off the ageing process. Body-related shame and guilt transected their stories; they were frustrated by their inabilities to engage in certain activities and with their move away from the healthy and physically fit cultural ideal. To negotiate this body-related anxiety/fear, shame, and guilt, the women drew attention to their accomplishments in the physical domain with pride, reinforcing their efforts to take personal responsibility for their health. Participants were also physically active for pleasure, gaining satisfaction from the social connections and mindfulness derived from being active, and through their participation in challenging yet rewarding activities.ConclusionsThe findings are novel as they highlight the importance of cultural age and body norms coupled with complex emotional experiences in shaping later life physical activity experiences, and draw attention to the usefulness of stories to explore emotions in the physical domain.     

Disability,inclusive adventurous training and adapted sport: Two soldiers' stories of involvement

ObjectivesTo generate insights into the personal meaning and value of an inclusive adventurous training and adapted sport course for military personnel who have experienced physical disability as a result of injuries sustained during active service.DesignNarrative storytelling approach based on collaboratively written creative nonfictions.MethodFirst-person stories were constructed with two male soldiers on the basis of informal interviews and conversations across five days of a residential adventure training and sport course.ResultsThe stories portray the personal benefits, meaning, and value of adventurous training and sport by illuminating each individual's experiences since injury/trauma, his experiences while on the course, and how these interact to shape psychological wellbeing and future life horizons. They reveal a complex interplay between physical, psychological, and social disability among some military personnel.ConclusionsThe story as analysis expands current understanding of the psychological effects of physical activity for injured military personnel through: (i) providing an alternative analytical approach; (ii) revealing subjectivities, personal meaning, and biographical connections to generate a holistic understanding of the individual; (iii) preserving the complexity and ambiguity that characterize lived experience to support plural understandings; (iv) sharing an embodied representation as an ethical act of witnessing another's life. We suggest these kinds of understandings are necessary for physical activity practitioners who wish to support military personnel who have sustained a disability.     

Reducing the gap between pro-environmental disposition and behavior: The role of feeling power

Environmental issues are some of the most pressing threats the world is facing nowadays. In this context, motivating individual pro-environmental behavior becomes highly relevant. One strategy is to harness people's pro-environmental dispositions (e.g., biospheric values, pro-environmental attitudes). Although acknowledging the need to behave pro-environmentally lies at the core of these dispositions, the extent to which they are reflected in day-to-day pro-environmental practices fluctuates to a great extent. How to bridge this gap between dispositions and behaviors in pro-environmentalism? This research tests a novel psychological solution, that is, to heighten subjective feelings of power. Power depicts people's control over their own and others’ outcomes. Two studies (total N = 338, with n = 200 in Study 1 and n = 138 in Study 2) manipulated people's situational sense of high versus low power (by recalling and writing about relevant incidents), measured pro-environmental dispositions (biospheric values in Studies 1 and 2; attitude toward a specific environmental cause in Study 2), and examined their effects on pro-environmental behaviors (spending time on environmental persuasion in Study 1 and spending money on environmental donation in Study 2). Overall, both studies revealed that pro-environmental dispositions predicted pro-environmental behaviors, but only when the actors were prompted to experience a high instead of a low sense of power. The findings illuminate power as an important and viable communication tactic—to orient people toward their dispositions and practice what they preach in pro-environmentalism.     

How Lloyd Morgan's canon backfired

Lloyd Morgan's Canon is usually represented as a brave step towards mechanistic behaviourism. Morgan himself, however, was convinced that the behaviour of animals and humans could only be treated in intentionalist terms. In fact, not only the spirit but the details of his Canon have been consistently misunderstood. It was turned around by Neo-Cartesians within psychology and evolutionary biology to attack the very ground that Morgan shared with Darwin—the assumption that organisms are “no mere puppets in the hand of circumstances.” Morgan did not formulate his Canon in “revolt” against Romanes's anthropomorphic approach to comparative psychology. An examination of Morgan's early views reveals that his Canon represented a move towards, not against, Romanes's idea of an animal psychology. Before the Canon, Morgan had denied the very possibility of a comparative psychology.     

Flat intentions – crazy dispositions?

Future-directed intentions, it is widely held, involve behavioral dispositions. But of what kind? Suppose you now intend to Φ at future time t. Are you thereby now disposed to Φ at t no matter what? If so, your intention disposes you to Φ even if around t you will come to believe that Φ-ing would be crazy. And would not that be a crazy intention to have? – Like considerations have led Luca Ferrero and others to believe that only intentions with strong internal conditions are capable of rationality. This paper explores in how far a broadly dispositional view of intention supports their claims. Its first point will come as a surprise: Intentions indeed involve dispositions toward follies in plenty. Natural objections against this bizarre-sounding claim are shown to fail, and standard counterfactual analyses of disposition locutions are shown to underpin it further. However, since the dispositions at issue are pro tanto dispositions, the consequences are not as odd as might be expected: When hedged by reasonable habits to reconsider one’s intentions, dispositions toward follies do not entail any actual crazy behavior. On balance, unconditional intention is therefore found rational after all. Dispositions toward crazy actions need not be crazy dispositions.     

On the relationship between mobbing factors,and job content,social work environment,and health outcomes

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between mobbing, job characteristics, social environment variables, and psychological ill-health. The Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terrorization (LIFT) was factor analysed and led to seven factors in two samples of mobbing victims (N = 50 and N = 99): Mobbing by organizational measures, social isolation, attacking the victim's private life, attacking the victim's attitudes, physical violence, verbal aggression, and rumours. Mobbing was correlated with bad job content, a bad social environment, and psychological ill-health. The findings suggest that the more social support supervisors gave, the less the victims reported being shouted at, being constantly criticized, and receiving verbal threats. In contrast, the more social support the victims received from their colleagues the less they reported being socially isolated or being ridiculed with regard to their private life. Moreover, having private life attacked showed the strongest correlation with psychological ill-health. The data suggest that organizational factors are potential causes of mobbing at work.     

Augustine's On the Good of Marriage and Infused Virtue in the Twelfth Century

In the history of ethics, it remains remains unclear how Christians of the Middle Ages came to see God‐given virtues as dispositions (habitus) created in the human soul. Patristic works could surely support other conceptions of the virtues given by grace. For example, one might argue that all such virtues are forms of charity, so that they must be affections of the soul, or that they consist in what the soul does, not anything the soul has. Scholars usually assume that the explanation lies in the impact of Aristotle's philosophy on medieval theology. This essay argues that the dispositional account of God‐given virtues was already entrenched by the end of the twelfth century and probably owes more to the influence of Augustine's treatise On the Good of Marriage.     

Empathic Accuracy

ABSTRACT People are motivated to understand each other's psychological states as well as each other's personality traits. As a consequence, the more traditional study of accuracy in trait inference can be complemented by, and potentially benefit from, the insights provided by the more recent study of empathic accuracy. Findings in this area suggest that future research should devote more attention to (a) the history of the perceiver-target relationship; (b) the perceiver's desired future relationship with the target; (c) the possibility that perceivers have little or no “metaknowledge” regarding their own empathic ability; and (d) the possibility that, under certain conditions, perceivers might be motivated to be inaccurate, rather than accurate, in their inferences about other people's dispositions.     

Personality and Daily Experience: The Promise and the Challenge

This special issue of the Journal of Personality is devoted to personality and daily experience. Through historical analysis of the daily event literature, empirical inquiry, and methodological and statistical commentary, the contributors to this issue convey both the possibilities and the problems of studying everyday life. These articles demonstrate how people's dispositions, goals, and commitments can influence daily emotional well-being and health, their inner experience, their reactions to events, and perhaps even which events they encounter. The introduction of personality to the study of daily experience holds the promise of enriching our studies of both.     

A UNIFIED THEORY OF QUOTATION

Abstract: This paper offers a theory of quotation by uniting two apparently disparate extant theories, Recanati's pragmatic theory and Washington's identity theory. Recanati draws a distinction between open and closed quotations, and contends that open quotations do not refer. Washington argues that closed quotations refer to various expression types, not just orthographic and/or phonetic types. By combining these views, this paper proposes a theory, according to which quotations, open or closed, may be tokens of semantico‐physical types (i.e., meaningful expressions), and while those types are mentioned (or referred to) by closed quotations, they are used in open quotations.     

Stem-Cell Spin: Covering the Hwang Affair in Science and Nature

In 2006 the South Korean cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang was found guilty of fraud and scientific misconduct. The scandal reached far beyond Hwang's own laboratory, encompassing national pride, geopolitics and global discussions of stem-cell research. But the Hwang affair was also a case of fierce competition between two of the world's leading scientific journals. Individually, Science and Nature used the Hwang affair and their unique positions to air specific and conflicting agendas resulting in completely different narratives as the scandal unfolded. In Science, where Hwang's fraudulent papers were published, the readers learned about a caring and concerned South Korean research director. Science was true to this narrative over a two-year period until finally, around Christmas 2005, there was no longer any doubt about Hwang's misbehaviour. In Nature, on the other hand, Hwang was, from the very beginning, treated with suspicion and framed as a cynical director of a cloning factory. Media studies of science and technology tend to focus almost exclusively on how this framing process works in the mass media and ignore that this process is already well under way in scientific journals that then feed into mass media news stories. Thus the news coverage of the Hwang affair in Science and Nature demonstrates that these two leading scientific journals frame their news stories in important ways that reflect (and are reproduced by) mass media reporting.     

Laws of Nature Don't Have Ceteris Paribus Clauses,They Are Ceteris Paribus Clauses

Laws of nature are properly (if controversially) conceived as abstract entities playing a governing role in the physical universe. Dispositionalists typically hold that laws of nature are not real, or at least are not fundamental, and that regularities in the physical universe are grounded in the causal powers of objects. By contrast, I argue that dispositionalism implies nomic realism: since at least some dispositions have ceteris paribus clauses incorporating uninstantiated universals, and these ceteris paribus clauses help to determine their dispositions' ranges of manifestation, there are indeed abstracta which play a governing role in the physical universe. After addressing several objections (including the objection that such ‘laws’ lack sufficient independence/externality from the dispositions to count as genuinely governing), I go on to consider some broader implications of this conclusion for other debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. ¹      

Relational Science: A Synthesis

A synthesis of the two primary theory structures in Robert Rosen’s relational complexity, (1) relational entailment mapping based on category theory as described by Rosen and Louie, and (2) relational holism based on modeling relations, as described by Kineman, provides an integral foundation for relational complexity theory as a natural science and analytical method. Previous incompatibilities between these theory structures are resolved by re-interpreting Aristotle’s four causes, identifying final and formal causes as relations with context. Category theory is applied to introduce contextual entailment algebra needed to complete the synthesis. The modeling relation is represented as a recursive four-cause hierarchy, which is a unit of both whole and part analysis (a ‘holon’) that relates realized and contextual domains of nature as complementary inverse entailments between structure and function. Context is a non-localized domain of distributed potentials (models) for existence, as contrasted with the realized domain of localized interactive and measurable events. Synthesis is achieved by giving modeling relations an algebraic form in category theory and by expanding relational analysis to include contextual entailments. The revised form of analysis is applied and demonstrated to examine Rosen’s M-R diagram, showing that structure–function relations imply adaptive interaction with the environment, and that contextual relations imply three forms of the M-R entailment corresponding with the generally known three forms of life; Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota, which can be represented by their holon diagrams. The result of this synthesis is a consistent foundation for relational science that should have important implications in many disciplines.     

Psychometric Evaluation of the Meaningful Life Measure

The 23-item Meaningful Life Measure (Morgan and Farsides 2008) comprises five subscales, each designed to assess a distinct component of personal meaning: purposeful life; valued life; accomplished life; principled life; and exciting life. In addition to providing a comprehensive composite meaning measure, this instrument presents the possibility of measuring these components separately in future research applications. To demonstrate the utility of their separate measurement, the present study therefore aimed to show differential patterns of correlation between these five subscales and meaning correlates identified in the literature. The MLM’s factor structure and internal reliability were replicated on the present sample. Evidence was then provided for the MLM’s convergent validity, and it was demonstrated that its five subscales were indeed differently predicted by the meaning correlates from the literature. Findings attest to the practical utility of a five-factor conceptualisation of meaning in life. In addition to identifying people who score low and high on different factors of meaning in life, the MLM facilitates the further investigation of specific antecedents and consequences of different meaning components.