Text messaging, personality, and the social context

The purpose of this research was to undertake some analyses of how the language used in text messaging varies as a function of personality traits and the interpersonal context. After completing personality questionnaires, participants provided their most recent text messages and indicated their relationship with the message recipient on several dimensions. Correlations between Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) categories and personality traits and relationship status were examined. There were significant correlations between certain LIWC categories and extraversion (e.g., personal pronouns), neuroticism (e.g., negative emotion words) and agreeableness (e.g., positive emotion words), suggesting that personality traits are displayed in how one texts. One of the defining features of texting - linguistic alterations (e.g., abbreviations) - varied as a function of both personality traits and relationship status. Overall, the results provide a snapshot of what text messages look like, and how they reflect the texter’s personality and the interpersonal context.     

A Story About a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact

Media priming refers to the residual, often unintended consequences of media use on subsequent perceptions, judgments, and behavior. Previous research showed that the media can prime behavior that is in line with the primed traits or concepts (assimilation). However, assimilation is expected to be less likely and priming may even yield reverse effects (contrast) when recipients have a dissimilarity testing mindset. Based on previous research on narrative comprehension and experience as well as research on media priming, a short-term influence of stories on cognitive performance is predicted. In an experimental study, participants (N = 81) read a story about a stupid soccer hooligan. As expected, participants who read the story without a special processing instruction performed worse in a knowledge test than a control group who read an unrelated text. Participants with a reading goal instruction to find dissimilarities between the self and the main protagonist performed better than participants who read the story without this instruction. The effects of reported self-activation and story length were further considered. Future inquiries with narratives as primes and contrast effects in media effects research are discussed.     

Adjective Checklist to Assess the Big Five Personality Factors in the Argentine Population

The aim of this work was to develop an adjective checklist to assess the Big Five personality factors in the Argentine population. The new instrument was administered to pilot (n= 112), validation (n= 372), and replication (n= 309) samples. The final version of the checklist included 67 adjectives encompassing its 5 dimensions. Factor analysis results were consistent with the Five-factor model. Internal consistency of scales was very good and convergent correlations with the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) were substantial. Face validity, as evaluated by 2 independent raters, was good. Preliminary evidence of validity for the checklist is presented. Finally, the Adjective Checklist for Personality Assessment and BFI are compared, taking into consideration their psychometric properties in our cultural context. Study limitations and future research are discussed.     

What I like is How I Am: Impact of Alexithymia on Aesthetic Preference

Aim of this work was to explore the impact of alexithymia on art works appreciation, to examine the influence of emotion regulation on art judgment. While observing a painting, the viewer's cognitive structure contains several types of information (semantic, episodic, and strategic) and is the repository of personal traits, motivations, and emotional dispositions that are involved in this interaction. The study of how personal traits influence work of art appreciation, and especially the study of the way emotion regulation impacts on art judgment, was aimed at improving the comprehension of the aesthetic experience costruct. One hundred adults, divided into 2 groups (high and low scores in alexithymia), observed 20 works of art and were then asked to give an evalutative judgment on three dimentions: cognitive, emotional, aesthetic. As hypothesized, the two groups had significant differences in their aesthetic preferences. Although subjects without affective regulation disorders preferred excitation related pictures, subjects with alexithymia appreciated works evoching emotions of pleasure inhibition. These results confirm the impact of personality traits on aesthetic preference and support the need to include emotional regulation in a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience.     

Individual Differences in Accurately Judging Personality From Text

This research examines correlates of accuracy in judging Big Five traits from first‐person text excerpts. Participants in six studies were recruited from psychology courses or online. In each study, participants performed a task of judging personality from text and performed other ability tasks and/or filled out questionnaires. Participants who were more accurate in judging personality from text were more likely to be female; had personalities that were more agreeable, conscientious, and feminine, and less neurotic and dominant (all controlling for participant gender); scored higher on empathic concern; self‐reported more interest in, and attentiveness to, people's personalities in their daily lives; and reported reading more for pleasure, especially fiction. Accuracy was not associated with SAT scores but had a significant relation to vocabulary knowledge. Accuracy did not correlate with tests of judging personality and emotion based on audiovisual cues. This research is the first to address individual differences in accurate judgment of personality from text, thus adding to the literature on correlates of the good judge of personality.     

The State,Not the Trait,of Nostalgia Increases Creativity

Nostalgic experience evokes emotions and activates the cognitive process of recalling and reconstructing information in memory. This study investigated the effects of nostalgia on creativity using experiments and questionnaires. Two-hundred-and-eighty university students were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups, in which participants received and completed different writing tasks (nostalgic experience vs. common life experience). They also responded to questionnaires measuring personality, nostalgia proneness, and creativity. Results showed that participants who were primed with nostalgic experience demonstrated higher creativity than the control group. In both groups, women demonstrated higher creativity than men. When specific aspects of the nostalgic experience were used to predict creativity, results showed that: (a) nostalgia triggered by social interaction and negative affect was positively related to creativity; (b) nostalgic experience containing tangibles positively predicted creativity; (c) the total number of triggers and the amount of, but not the positivity or salience of self in, nostalgia narrative contributed positively to creativity; and (d) higher agreeableness and openness, but not nostalgia proneness or other personality traits, were associated with higher creativity. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.     

Personality and its links to quality of life: Mediating effects of emotion regulation and self-efficacy beliefs

We investigated the relationship between personality and quality of life (QoL) considering emotion regulation and self-efficacy beliefs as mediating factors. A total of 409 participants from the French-speaking regions of Switzerland and from France completed questionnaires on personality, emotion regulation, self-efficacy beliefs, and QoL. Our findings revealed that specific personality traits have significant direct and indirect effects on QoL, mediated by emotion regulation and self-efficacy. Particularly, neuroticism was strongly and negatively related to emotion regulation and QoL, but not significantly linked to self-efficacy, whereas extraversion and conscientiousness were positively associated with all variables. This is the first study to demonstrate that both emotion regulation and self-efficacy are important mechanisms that link specific personality traits to QoL, suggesting that they channel and modulate the personality effects. However, more work is needed to understand these relationships in more detail (e.g., how the personality traits concurrently influence each other as well as emotion regulation and self-efficacy).     

Adjective checklist to assess the big five personality factors in the Argentine population

The aim of this work was to develop an adjective checklist to assess the Big Five personality factors in the Argentine population. The new instrument was administered to pilot (n= 112), validation (n= 372), and replication (n= 309) samples. The final version of the checklist included 67 adjectives encompassing its 5 dimensions. Factor analysis results were consistent with the Five-factor model. Internal consistency of scales was very good and convergent correlations with the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) were substantial. Face validity, as evaluated by 2 independent raters, was good. Preliminary evidence of validity for the checklist is presented. Finally, the Adjective Checklist for Personality Assessment and BFI are compared, taking into consideration their psychometric properties in our cultural context. Study limitations and future research are discussed.     

Do readers mentally represent characters' emotional states?

Abstract

Subjects read stories that described concrete actions, such as a main character stealing money from a store where his best friend worked and later learning that his friend had been fired. Following each story, subjects read a target sentence that contained an emotion word that either matched the emotional state implied by the story (e.g. guilt) or mismatched that emotional state. In Experiment 1, target sentences were read more slowly when the mismatched emotion words were the perceived opposites of the emotional states implied by the stories (e.g. pride). In Experiment 2, target sentences were read more slowly when the mismatched emotion words shared the affective valence of the implied emotional state; therefore, readers must represent more than simply the affective valence of the emotional states. Instead of reading target sentences that contained matching versus mismatching emotion words, subjects in Experiment 3 simply pronounced matching versus mismatching emotion words. Mismatching emotion words were pronounced more slowly. These experiments suggest that readers form explicit, lifelike, mental representations of fictional characters' emotional states, and readers form these representations as a normal part of reading comprehension.     

Callous-unemotional traits,borderline personality,and self-injury in gothic subculture

The present study investigates individual characteristics of a sample of young adults from gothic subculture, in terms of personality traits (i.e., borderline personality and callous-unemotional traits), prevalence and functions of non-suicidal self-injury behaviours (i.e., internal emotion regulation, external emotion regulation, social influence, and sensation seeking). Fifty-one young adults (28 girls and 23 boys, mean age = 26.20, SD = 4.61) were recruited at a gothic meeting in Italy. They completed self-report questionnaires related to self-injury behaviours and self-injury functions, along with measures of borderline personality disorder and callous-unemotional traits. The results indicated that nearly 65% of the participants reported having committed self-injury at least once. Moreover, both bivariate and multivariate analyses indicated that self-injury behaviours were related to borderline personality and internal emotion regulation function. Lastly, association between considered personality traits and self-injury functions were investigated. Overall, results indicated that in gothic subculture self-injury has the function of regulating emotion to maintain the integrity of the Self and is related to the perception of a traumatic reality in which derealization coexists with extreme self-directed aggression.     

Personality Change from Life Experiences: Moderation Effect of Attachment Security

This study focused on effects of life experiences on change in personality and moderation effects of attachment security on the life experience influences. With a sample of Japanese university students (N = 1,000; 679 female; M = 19.72; SD = 1.26; age range, 18–25 years), the Big Five personality traits were assessed twice. The assessment interval was 20 weeks. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses revealed that there were large between‐individual differences in change and stability of the Big Five personality traits, which were accounted for by the amount of daily positive and negative life experiences during the interval period. Moreover, multi‐group HLM analyses indicated that the life experience effects were moderated by participants' attachment security at Time 1. These findings suggest that the accumulation of small daily experiences may work for the personality development of university students and that environmental influences may vary by individual susceptibility to experiences, like attachment security.     

Does Acquisitive Self‐Presentation in Personality Self‐Ratings Enhance Validity? Evidence from two experimental field studies

The aim of the present research was to demonstrate that acquisitive self‐presentation in personality scales is not a barrier to their criterion‐related validities in human resource contexts, but rather a means to improve them. A pilot study (Study 1) with 96 job incumbents provided preliminary positive evidence. In Study 2, in the experimental group (n=99), the instructions asked job incumbents to work on a Big‐Five personality inventory (BFI‐K) as if they took part in a personnel selection procedure for a personally very attractive position. In the control group (n=93) of Study 2, job incumbents were asked to answer the inventory items honestly. As expected, the correlation between the self‐ratings of the motive to get along (i.e., which comprises emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness) and contextual performance assessments was significantly higher in the experimental group than in the control group in Study 2. Additionally, the correlation between the self‐ratings of the motive to get ahead (i.e., which comprises extraversion and openness to experience) and task performance and leadership assessments was significantly higher in the experimental group than in the control group in Study 2. It is proposed that responding to a personality inventory in a human resource decision situation should be conceptualized as a workplace simulation.     

Empathy,emotion dysregulation,and enhanced microexpression recognition ability

The present study examined empathy and emotion dysregulation, two individual traits related to the perception and experience of others’ emotions, and the recognition of both spontaneous and standardized microexpressions of emotion. Ninety-three participants viewed a stimulus set of natural (spontaneous) microexpressions in addition to completing a standardized test of microexpression recognition ability, as well as completing questionnaires on empathy and emotion dysregulation. Results indicate that emotion dysregulation is associated with enhanced microexpression recognition, particularly recognition of anger microexpressions, but that this enhanced recognition was only observed for standardized microexpressions. Empathy was associated with increased recognition of anger microexpressions in the natural stimulus set only, and was not associated with overall microexpression recognition accuracy in either the natural stimulus set or the standardized test. The present findings inform understanding of intrapersonal affective traits in subtle emotion recognition, and theoretical and practical implications are discussed in both clinical and deception detection contexts.     

The mediating role of values between personality and religiosity

The aim of this work was to examine the relationships between Eysenck’s personality traits (psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism), Schwartz’s values, and religiosity. To this purpose a sample of Italian teenagers (N = 343; mean age 15.43, SD = 1.023) were asked to fill out a battery of questionnaires and, a structural equation model was tested, where the mediating role of Schwartz’s values between personality traits, and religiosity was accurately analysed. Results showed that all personality traits considered had relevant direct and/or indirect effects on religious experience, mediated by values.     

老年人日常人际问题解决中的悲伤情绪体验和情绪调节策略: 年龄和人格特质的作用

考察了日常人际问题解决中老年人的悲伤情绪体验和情绪调节策略与青年人的差异,以及年龄和人格特质的作用。共45名老年人和59名青年人接受半结构化访谈和人格特质测量。结果表明：（1）以教育水平为协变量的方差分析表明,老年人和青年人的悲伤情绪体验没有显著差异。老年人的被动情绪调节策略的使用和青年人存在显著差异;（2）老年人的被动情绪调节策略不但与年龄有关,而且与悲伤情绪体验有关。悲伤情绪体验可以显著预测其被动情绪调节策略使用;（3）老年人的悲伤情绪体验与人格特质神经质维度存在显著正相关;（4）老年人与年轻人的被动情绪调节策略都与悲伤情绪有关,但老年人的被动情绪调节策略不能由人格特质显著预测,而青年人的被动调节策略还可以由人格特质内外向维度显著预测。人格特质的内外向维度对老年人和青年人的前摄性情绪调节策略的预测效应是一致的。最后针对老年人的悲伤情绪体验和情绪调节策略的意义进行了讨论。     

Pathological personality facets and emotion (dys)regulation in gambling disorder

A number of researches showed high prevalence of personality disorders among addicted gamblers. However, there are still few studies investigating the role of pathological personality facets in Gambling Disorder (GD). Moreover, the nature of the relationship between GD and pathological personality is not clear. We administered to a group of addicted gamblers (N = 79) and a group of healthy participants (N = 101) a battery of self-report questionnaires encompassing the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), The Personality Inventory for DSM-V (PID-5), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Analyses of variance showed that addicted gamblers, compared to healthy participants, scored higher on most of the subscales of the DERS, on the Suppression Dimension of the ERQ and on the five main domains of the PID-5 whereas they obtained lower scores on the Reappraisal subscale of the ERQ. Moreover, multiple regression analyses indicated that some specific facets of pathological personality, emotion dysregulation and lack of cognitive reappraisal, significantly predict GD's severity. Finally, emotion dysregulation levels and lack of cognitive reappraisal partially mediated the relationship between these and GD's severity. Our results confirmed the central roles played by both pathological personality and deficit in emotion regulation capacities in GD. Specifically, Impulsivity, Lack of Perseverance and Suspiciousness may be important predictors of GD severity. Moreover, emotion dysregulation and lack of adaptive emotion regulation strategies partially explained such relationship. As such, training for emotion regulation abilities appears strategically useful in the treatment of addicted gamblers with pathological personality traits.     

Experimental Studies of the Relation Between Rate of Reading and Speed of Association

Three groups of Ss read a five-paragraph story. One group read the middle paragraph under conditions of .2-second DAF. The other two groups functioned as control groups. Both an immediate and a delayed oral recall were obtained. The usual changes in reading rate were observed. Immediate memory for the material presented under DAF was severely impaired. Delayed retention showed a marked relative increase, but not enough of an absolute increase to eliminate the significant difference between the experimental and the control groups.     

The Formation of Attitudes Toward New Immigrant Groups1

People often receive information about new immigrant groups prior to any direct contact with group members. However, it is not clear how this information shapes attitudes toward the groups. To explore this issue, 204 subjects were told about an unknown immigrant group that was presented as high or low in personal relevance. Subjects were then given positive or negative consensus information about the emotions that group members elicit from others, group members' personality traits, and group members' values. As expected, results indicated that the presentation of positive information about emotional reactions, personality traits, and values caused attitudes to be more favorable than did the presentation of negative information. Importantly, however, the combined impact of the emotion and personality trait information depended on whether the group was perceived to be of high or low personal relevance. Specifically, when the information about emotions and personality traits was similarly valanced (i.e., both were positive or both were negative), attitudes toward the group tended to be less favorable in the high personal relevance condition than in the low personal relevance condition. In contrast, when mixed information was presented (i.e., positive emotions and negative personality traits or negative emotions and positive personality traits), attitudes tended to be more favorable in the high personal relevance condition. In addition, attitudes, once formed, predicted further perceptions of the group and behavioral intentions toward group members. The implications of the findings for the reduction of prejudice toward new immigrant groups are discussed.     

Personality trait inferences of Turkish immigrant and neutral targets: An experimental study

Sandal, G. M. Bye, H. H. & Pallesen, S. (2012). Personality trait inferences of Turkish immigrant and neutral targets: An experimental study. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 528–533. The study investigated whether personality traits attributed to immigrant targets differ from personality inferences made for a neutral target, and whether trait attributions differ for assimilated and integrated immigrant targets. Participants (n = 340) were randomized to one of three conditions in which they read the same story about a person, but where the person was described as either: (a) an assimilated Turkish immigrant; (b) an integrated Turkish immigrant; or (c) neutral (no nationality or religious practice indicated). Subsequently, they rated the personality of the described person on the NEO‐Five Factor Inventory (observer rating version) and completed the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (Impression Management scale) with reference to themselves. Both immigrant targets were rated as significantly higher on extraversion and lower on neuroticism than the neutral target. The integrated target was rated as more open than the neutral target, and as higher than the assimilated target on neuroticism when controlling for impression management.     

Olympic coaching excellence: A quantitative study of psychological aspects of Olympic swimming coaches

ObjectivesResearchers investigating the psychological aspects of Olympic coaching have studied coaches as a homogenous group, and the effect of coaches' psychological characteristics on performance-related outcomes remains unclear. The objective of this research, therefore, was to examine whether psychological factors discriminate between world-leading (i.e., Olympic gold medal winning) and world-class (i.e., Olympic non-gold medal winning) coaches.MethodSelf-reported psychometric questionnaires were completed by 36 Olympic coaches who had collectively coached 169 swimmers to win 352 Olympic medals, of which 155 were gold medals. The questionnaires assessed 12 variables within the Big Five personality traits, the dark triad, and emotional intelligence, and the data was analyzed using three one-way multivariate analysis of variance and follow-up univariate F-tests.ResultsThe results showed that the 21 world-leading coaches were significantly more agreeable, had greater perception of emotion, were better at managing their own emotion, and were less Machiavellian and narcissistic than the 15 world-class coaches. The groups of coaches showed no differences in levels of conscientiousness, openness to experience, extraversion, neuroticism, psychopathy, managing other emotion, or utilization of emotion.ConclusionsPsychological factors discriminate between world-leading and world-class coaches. The implications of these differences are discussed for psychology researchers and practitioners operating in Olympic sport.