Taking a person-centered approach to personality: A latent-profile analysis of the HEXACO model of personality

Our study applies a person-centered approach to the HEXACO model of personality using latent profile analysis (LPA). While the traditional variable-centered approach assumes that the relations among variables within a population are homogenous, the person-centered approach identifies subgroups within samples that have similar scores on several variables of interest, in this case, the six factors of personality. Data from two independent samples were collected at a large North American university. The results of LPA revealed five distinct and interpretable profiles that replicated and were found to be consistent across both samples. We discuss how our findings attest to the meaningfulness of personality profiles, and suggest additional ways in which a person-centered approach might be applied in personality research.     

The architecture of personality

This article presents a theoretical framework for analyzing psychological systems that contribute to the variability, consistency, and cross-situational coherence of personality functioning. In the proposed knowledge-and-appraisal personality architecture (KAPA), personality structures and processes are delineated by combining 2 principles: distinctions (a) between knowledge structures and appraisal processes and (b) among intentional cognitions with varying directions of fit, with the latter distinction differentiating among beliefs, evaluative standards, and aims. Basic principles of knowledge activation and use illuminate relations between knowledge and appraisal, yielding a synthetic account of personality structures and processes. Novel empirical data illustrate the heuristic value of the knowledge/appraisal distinction by showing how self-referent and situational knowledge combine to foster cross-situational coherence in appraisals of self-efficacy.     

Religion, personality, and aging: a life span perspective

A life span model of development provides the framework for examining the relation between religion and personality in aging persons. This article emphasizes the interplay of constancy and change in adult religious life. Important contextual factors that influence religion and personality are noted. A discussion of generativity and ego integrity shows how the maturing personality can embrace religiously motivated acts of justice and mercy as well as a deepening of spiritual life. Also discussed are the ways religion encourages generativity and ego integrative processes. The article concludes with suggestions for future studies of religion, personality, and aging utilizing a life span model of development.     

Qualitative variations in personality inventories: subjective understandings of items in a personality inventory

Most studies using personality inventories do not take individual, subjective understandings of the items into account. The present study is one of the few to have investigated the quality of individuals’ psychological processes when making the Likert-like responses often used in psychological inventories. Respondents were asked to elaborate verbally on their Likert item responses to the 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory. A common assumption about personality inventories is that there is a relatively homogenous understanding of the items and, in particular, the rating scales across respondents. However, our results suggest that the same item responses to a given item can reflect a variety of qualities across individuals’ understandings. At the same time, similar understandings and ways of relating to an item can lead to different item responses. Such findings have substantial implications for quantitative personality studies as well as quantitative survey or questionnaire studies, in general.     

The emerging self: the convergence of mind,personality and thinking styles

This paper aims to integrate research and theorizing about problem solving, self and personality into a comprehensive theory. With this purpose, the paper attempts to answer three questions: how do humans become aware of themselves and how do the products of self-awareness interrelate to produce an integrated self-system, which includes the domains of cognition and personality? How do persons know and influence each other? How do these processes change with development? The answers given to these questions by self, personality and cognitive developmental psychology are critically examined. It is concluded that an overarching model would have to assume a multilevel and multidimensional architecture. This would involve three main levels: the first includes general-purpose processes and functions, such as processing efficiency and working memory, which define current cognitive potentials; the second includes several domain-specific systems directed to different aspects of the environment; the third includes self-oriented processes that register, represent and regulate processes at the other two levels. Each person’s self-concepts result from the application of the third level on the other two and they differentially reflect their condition. Personality reflects the interaction between these self-concepts and dispositions to act in particular ways. Because humans share this architecture they can negotiate and affect each other’s self- and reflected representations. Thus, the formation of mind, self and personality results from a continuous flow of interactions between the levels and domains of mind within and across persons. The article summarizes a series of studies lending support to this general model.     

Social networks in borderline personality disorder

The interpersonal dysfunction that characterizes borderline personality disorder (BPD) has generally been studied using broad global measures, leading to a lack of precision. We report on a novel methodology using social network analysis (SNA) to quantify interactions with others in the patient's social world. We assessed the social networks of 22 clinical patients, diagnosed with either BPD (N = 11) or no personality disorder (No PD; N = 11). The social networks of patients with BPD contained a greater number of former romantic partners, and a greater number of relationships that had been terminated. Mixed model analyses found that the No PD group reported higher levels of positive relationships (e.g., trust, social support) with more central members of their social networks, whereas the BPD group did not discriminate among members of their networks. Results suggest deficits in social cognition for positive relations, but not for negative relations such as interpersonal conflict.     

Belongingness as a core personality trait: how social exclusion influences social functioning and personality expression

People have a fundamental need for positive and lasting relationships. This need to belong is rooted in evolutionary history and gave rise to the development of traits that enable individuals to gain acceptance and to avoid rejection. Because belongingness is a core component of human functioning, social exclusion should influence many cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes and personality expression. This article summarizes recent evidence that social exclusion causes an assortment of outcomes, many of which depend on whether the excluded can gain acceptance or forestall possible distress. It highlights common overlap in physical and social pain systems and how a physical painkiller can reduce the pain of social exclusion. Finally, it shows how social exclusion moderates the effects of traits on cognition, emotion, and behavior. To appreciate personality processes in social contexts, scientists should consider how people respond to social exclusion and how the need to belong influences personality expression.     

Taking offense: effects of personality and teasing history on behavioral and emotional reactions to teasing

This study investigated how global personality traits and teasing history are related to participants' emotional and behavioral reactions to an actual teasing event. College undergraduates (N = 108) worked on a task with a same-sex confederate. While interacting, the confederate either teased participants about how slowly they were working on the task or made a benign comment about the nature of the task. Analyses revealed that even mild teasing can generate negativity towards the teaser and interaction. More interestingly, however, personality moderated reactions to teasing, as teasing condition interacted with each of the Big Five personality domains in theoretically meaningful ways. Childhood teasing history also moderated reactions to teasing, as frequent victims and frequent teasers responded in different ways.     

Temperament, personality, and developmental psychopathology as childhood antecedents of personality disorders

To contribute to the case for a dimensional conceptualization of psychopathology in general and maladaptive personality or personality disorders in particular, the present paper reviews the evidence for a dimensional representation of childhood temperament and personality. The review of temperament and variable-centered as well as person-centered approaches to childhood personality leads us to propose five broadband dimensions that capture individual differences in children and adolescents: extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness/intellect. Our analysis of the CBCL (Achenbach, 1991) and the DIPSI (currently under development at Ghent University), two dimensional models for childhood psychopathology, suggests two common broadband factors, internalizing and externalizing. The relations between the dimensional representation of childhood temperament/personality and psychopathology are documented with data from general population and clinical samples of children and adolescents. The article concludes with a proposal on how the higher-order dimensions emerging from studies of adaptive and maladaptive individual differences in childhood could be integrated in a common dimensional model.     

Temperament and personality: origins and outcomes

This article reviews how a temperament approach emphasizing biological and developmental processes can integrate constructs from subdisciplines of psychology to further the study of personality. Basic measurement strategies and findings in the investigation of temperament in infancy and childhood are reviewed. These include linkage of temperament dimensions with basic affective-motivational and attentional systems, including positive affect/approach, fear, frustration/anger, and effortful control. Contributions of biological models that may support these processes are then reviewed. Research indicating how a temperament approach can lead researchers of social and personality development to investigate important person-environment interactions is also discussed. Lastly, adult research suggesting links between temperament dispositions and the Big Five personality factors is described.     

Individuality and the prejudiced personality

Many researchers maintain that individual psychological processes related to our human evolutionary inheritance, a person's particular genetic make-up, and/or childhood learning and socialisation patterns are a root cause of prejudice. The effects of collective processes on the individual are considered to be largely in the past, producing individual personalities and social attitudes that are relatively fixed and enduring. There is, however, an alternative perspective on the impact of the collective embodied in self-categorization theory (SCT). From the SCT perspective, the self is both personal and collective, and shifts in the nature of self-categorisation produce qualitative shifts in judgements of oneself and others. Through one's identity as a group member, contemporary social forces can shape the psychology of the person. This analysis not only has direct implications for how we understand the relationship between personality and prejudice, but also offers an alternative way of thinking about personality itself. What emerges from our own and related research on prejudice is a more complex analysis of individuality, one that is ineluctably embedded in contemporary intragroup and intergroup identities and the societal and ideological realities that define group life as well as in past learning and maturation.     

Factorial structure of pathological personality as evaluated by peers

This study explored how individuals apply features of personality disorders (PDs) to peers. Members of groups nominated peers who exhibited symptoms for each of the 10 PDs in the DSM-IV. Data were gathered in 2 samples: 1st-year college students (n = 1,440) and Air Force recruits (n = 2,075). The peer method reliably identified group members exhibiting specific PD features. Factor analyses identified a clearly interpretable structure relevant to the pathological personality constructs being assessed. The structure replicated well across samples and showed expected relationships to broader models of normal personality. However, cross-method correlations of factor scores were only moderate, suggesting that peer reports are reliably different from self-reports regarding the presence of pathological personality traits.     

Mood, personality, and self-monitoring: negative affect and emotionality in relation to frontal lobe mechanisms of error monitoring

A fundamental question in frontal lobe function is how motivational and emotional parameters of behavior apply to executive processes. Recent advances in mood and personality research and the technology and methodology of brain research provide opportunities to address this question empirically. Using event-related-potentials to track error monitoring in real time, the authors demonstrated that variability in the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN) is dependent on mood and personality variables. College students who are high on negative affect (NA) and negative emotionality (NEM) displayed larger ERN amplitudes early in the experiment than participants who are low on these dimensions. As the high-NA and -NEM participants disengaged from the task, the amplitude of the ERN decreased. These results reveal that affective distress and associated behavioral patterns are closely related with frontal lobe executive functions.     

Factor analytic approaches to personality item-level data

Factor analysis models have played a central role in formulating conceptual models in personality and personality assessment, as well as in empirical examinations of personality measurement instruments. Yet, the use of item-level data presents special problems for factor analysis, applications. In this article, we review recent developments in factor analysis that are appropriate for the type of item-level data often collected in personality. Included in this review are discussions of how these developments have been addressed in the context of two different (but formally related) statistical models item response theory (IRT: Hambleton, Swaminathan, & Rogers, 1991) and structural, equation modeling (Bollen 1989) for item-level data. We also discuss the relevance of item scaling in the context of these models. Using the restandardization data for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Scale (cf. Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989), we show brief examples of the utility of these approaches to address basic questions about responses to personality scale items regarding: (a) scale, dimensionality and general item properties, (b) the "appropriateness" of the observed responses, and (c) differential item functioning across subsamples. implications for analyses of personality item-level data in the IRT and factor analytic traditions are discussed.     

Individual differences and reasoning: A study on personality traits

Personality can play a crucial role in how people reason and decide. Identifying individual differences related to how we actively gather information and use evidence could lead to a better comprehension and predictability of human reasoning. Recent findings have shown that some personality traits are related to similar decision‐making patterns showed by people with mental disorders. We performed research with the aim to investigate delusion‐proneness, obsessive‐like personality, anxiety (trait and state), and reasoning styles in individuals from the general population. We introduced personality trait and state anxiety scores in a regression model to explore specific associations with: (1) amount of data‐gathered prior to making a decision; and (2) the use of confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence. Results showed that all our independent variables were positively or negatively associated with the amount of data collected in order to make simple probabilistic decisions. Anxiety and obsessiveness were the only predictors of the weight attributed to evidence in favour or against a hypothesis. Findings were discussed in relation to theoretical assumptions, predictions, and clinical implications. Personality traits can predict peculiar ways to reason and decide that, in turn, could be involved to some extent in the formation and/or maintenance of psychological disorders.     

人格特质及脑功能连接对社交网络的影响

采用网络分析的方法, 本研究从个体受欢迎程度和个体间亲密程度两方面探究了人格特质对社交网络的影响, 并在此基础上进一步探究了个体间大脑静息态功能连接相似性和社交网络的关系。结果发现：(1)高尽责性的个体在需要“值得信任”特质的社交网络中更受欢迎, 高宜人性的个体在需要“共享时光”的社交网络中更受欢迎; (2)在需要“相同兴趣”特质的社交网络中, 个体间人格相似性和社会距离呈显著负相关关系; (3)同样在需要“相同兴趣”特质的社交网络中, 个体间部分功能连接相似性与社会距离呈显著负相关关系, 这些功能连接主要集中在额顶控制网络以及背侧注意网络; 同时, 部分节点功能连接相似性与社会距离呈显著正相关关系, 这些功能连接主要集中在默认网络。研究结果揭示了人格特质对不同社交网络结构的影响, 以及个体间人格特质相似性和静息态脑网络相似性与社会距离的关系。本研究对理解社交网络的结构, 形成规律以及其中的信息传播规律有着重要启示意义。     

Experimental analysis of individual differences and personality

In psychological studies individual differences that result in variability in data and thus mask the effects under investigation have been reduced or eliminated in two ways: (1) through the use of large numbers of subjects and statistical manipulations, or (2) through extensive and controlled studies of individual subjects. The latter, behavior-analytic, method is scientifically better because it permits identification of the variables that result in individual differences. This paper advocates the direct study of individual differences and personality rather than indirect study through experimental control procedures. Some data are presented showing that individual differences in response patterns have orderly characteristics. Extension of the experimental analysis of behavior to the study of individual differences and personality is likely to be important both scientifically and for the future growth of behavior analysis.     

Thinking bigger: The Cronbachian paradigm & personality theory integration

Personality theories largely mirror disparities between fundamental paradigms that guide most psychology: one based upon Galton’s emphasis on inter-individual differences and the lexical hypothesis; the other inspired by Wundt is focused upon intra-individual processes, such as temperament and Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. Previous integrations of personality models using these paradigms failed to account for observed variance, suggesting model incommensurability. We propose that a broader conception—developed from Cronbach and colleagues’ generalisability theory—provides an effective integrating framework, and show how Galtonian and Wundtian models may be assimilated within Cronbachian approaches. Additionally, Cronbachian models have novel practical implications. Application of the Cronbachian paradigm to personality will be challenging, but provides an opportunity to achieve genuine coherence in personality research.     

Suicide, suicide litigation, and borderline personality disorder

In the category of malpractice liability affecting mental health practitioners of all disciplines, malpractice based on suicide is the leading claim by a significant margin. Our discussion here will be organized in two sections. First, we consider the theory, practice, and psychology of malpractice litigation itself in relation to suicide. Second, we describe how those basic principles apply to patients with borderline personality disorder.