Interactionism in personality in the twentieth century

This paper examines the historical development of the interaction model of personality in the twentieth century. The philosophical roots of interactionism can be traced to the writings of Aristotle and Descartes. One of the earliest interactionist positions in psychology can be found in the works of Kantor (1924, 1926). Although theoretical interest in interactionism continued with Lewin (1935), Murray (1938) and Rotter (1954), early empirical research examining interactionism developed independently. The social, political, historical and methodological factors that have influenced the research and theorizing on interactionism in personality are examined. Finally, the development of theinteraction model of personality is traced to the evolution of major personality issues, including: (1) the consistency-specifying controversy; (2) reformulation of definitions of consistency; (3) the distinction between mechanistic and dynamic interaction; and (4) the analysis of situations.     

Interactionism, idiographics, and the social psychological invasion of personality

The present paper discusses three recent developments in the field of Personality: (1) an infusion of social psychologists, (2) a proliferation of interactionist models, (3) the development of methodological strategies combining nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Advantages and disadvantages of these developments are discussed, and three problems associated with them are addressed: (1) an overemphasis on phenomenology, (2) an overemphasis on idiosyncracy, and (3) an unsatisfactory level of theory development. It is concluded that the present developments have had a stimulating effect on the field but they need to be integrated with the traditional personological goals of: (1) developing taxonomy of individuals (as well as a taxonomy of interactions) and (2) developing a more satisfactory theory of the whole organism within which to embed our minitheories. We recommend that such a theory attempt to incorporate the insights of the social learning and social cognition approaches with the recent and exciting developments in evolutionary theory.     

Reflections on the continuing evolution of rational-emotive therapy

Three basic contentions of RET are briefly discussed, with particular emphasis on their implications for psychotherapy. Personal responsibility is seen as a prime directive and the cornerstone of the other two contentions, which involve emphases on the present and on action. The philosophical and dialectical emphases of rational emotive behavior therapy are acknowledged as important aspects of its continuing evolution.     

Reflections on the recent history and the present challenges of personality psychology

The recent history of personality psychology is rapidly reviewed with the aim of indicating significant cues of the progress which has taken place and of the problems which are still pending. In this regard, a three-stage model of progress provides the arguments which introduce personality psychology into the domain of ‘complexity’. Readmission of individual differences in the investigation of basic processes, attention to marginal perturbances in between non-significant deviations, and use of circumplex models to make sense of multiple facets of phenomena are indicated as viable avenues to the complexity of personality psychology.     

The religious person revisited: cross-cultural evidence from the HEXACO model of personality structure

The relationship of religiousness with the HEXACO (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness) model of personality was studied in Iran and the United States. Correlations of personality factors and religiousness were generally similar across the two societies. In both countries, religiousness was associated with higher scores on Honesty-Humility, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The Honesty-Humility factor was one of the strongest correlates of religiousness in both countries. These findings support Saroglou's observation that the main personality characteristics of religiousness are consistent across different religious contexts and personality measures and models.     

Reflections on the idea of personal fate and its psychopathology: Helene Deutsch's "Hysterical Fate Neurosis" revisited

The idea of a psychopathology of fate or what had come to be called a fate neurosis has failed to retain any established place in the structure of psychoanalytic thought. The clinical observations and theoretical formulations, to which the idea of a fate neurosis answered, have been subsumed in the course of things by more fundamental and systematic conceptualizations. A review of Helene Deutsch's (1930) paper, "Hysterical Fate Neurosis," is therefore bound to be largely an excursion into an area of intellectual history. However, such history never fails to shed light on certain ongoing clinical and theoretical problems that may have lost too much to current developments in psychoanalytic thought. It is with this historical purpose that the present study of Deutsch's classic paper on a fate neurosis is undertaken.     

The role of Broca's area in speech perception: evidence from aphasia revisited

Motor theories of speech perception have been re-vitalized as a consequence of the discovery of mirror neurons. Some authors have even promoted a strong version of the motor theory, arguing that the motor speech system is critical for perception. Part of the evidence that is cited in favor of this claim is the observation from the early 1980s that individuals with Broca’s aphasia, and therefore inferred damage to Broca’s area, can have deficits in speech sound discrimination. Here we re-examine this issue in 24 patients with radiologically confirmed lesions to Broca’s area and various degrees of associated non-fluent speech production. Patients performed two same-different discrimination tasks involving pairs of CV syllables, one in which both CVs were presented auditorily, and the other in which one syllable was auditorily presented and the other visually presented as an orthographic form; word comprehension was also assessed using word-to-picture matching tasks in both auditory and visual forms. Discrimination performance on the all-auditory task was four standard deviations above chance, as measured using d′, and was unrelated to the degree of non-fluency in the patients’ speech production. Performance on the auditory–visual task, however, was worse than, and not correlated with, the all-auditory task. The auditory–visual task was related to the degree of speech non-fluency. Word comprehension was at ceiling for the auditory version (97% accuracy) and near ceiling for the orthographic version (90% accuracy). We conclude that the motor speech system is not necessary for speech perception as measured both by discrimination and comprehension paradigms, but may play a role in orthographic decoding or in auditory–visual matching of phonological forms.     

Reflections on the Reflections

Pastoral Psychology -     

Prototypicality and personality: Effects on free recall and personality impressions

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that it is easier to process information about characters who fit well with and are, therefore, “prototypical” of shared beliefs about various personality types. Character prototypicality was manipulated in a free recall and personality impression paradigm through variations in the consistency of a character's identification with preexisting beliefs about two personality-type categories—extraversion and introversion. Subjects also were given information about each character that varied in degree of abstraction from traits to concrete behavior. As predicted, both the amount and nature of the information correctly recalled were significantly affected by the consistency of the character's identification with extraversion or with introversion. Character consistency also significantly affected the amount of material written in the personality impressions and the tendency to qualify the generality of the impressions. The results support a model in which incoming data about personality are coded, structured, elaborated, and remembered according to the quality of their match with preexisting beliefs about various personality types.     

State of the aRt personality research: A tutorial on network analysis of personality data in R

Network analysis represents a novel theoretical approach to personality. Network approaches motivate alternative ways of analyzing data, and suggest new ways of modeling and simulating personality processes. In the present paper, we provide an overview of network analysis strategies as they apply to personality data. We discuss different ways to construct networks from typical personality data, show how to compute and interpret important measures of centrality and clustering, and illustrate how one can simulate on networks to mimic personality processes. All analyses are illustrated using a data set on the commonly used HEXACO questionnaire using elementary R-code that readers may easily adapt to apply to their own data.     

Traditional minicomputers: A continuing role in the laboratory

The traditional laboratory minicomputer was programmed in assembler, in a home-built language, or in a fast, compiled language with access to assembler-coded subroutines. This software strategy remains useful on inexpensive, microcomputer-based hardware for many applications in which the computer must respond to external events within a few milliseconds. The benefits of rapid response and sometimes lower hardware expense may require the cost of increased software development complexity and time.     

Beliefs in personality disorders: a test with the personality disorder belief questionnaire

The hypothesis that each personality disorder (PD) is characterized by a specific set of beliefs was tested in a sample of 643 subjects, including non-patient controls, axis-I and axis-II patients, diagnosed with SCID-I and -II interviews. Beliefs of six PDs (avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, histrionic, borderline) were assessed with the Personality Disorder Belief Questionnaire (PDBQ). Factor analyses supported the existence of six hypothesized sets of beliefs. Structural equation modeling (SEM) supported the hypothesis that each PD is characterized by a specific set of beliefs. Path coefficients were however in the medium range, suggesting that PDs are not solely determined by beliefs. Nevertheless, empirically derived cutoff scores of the six belief subscales were reasonably successful in classifying subjects, percentages ranging form 51% to 83%. It appeared that there was a monotonical increase in scores on each belief subscale from non-patient controls, to patients without any PD, to patients with PDs (other than the pertinent PD), to patients with the pertinent PD. This suggests that PD-related beliefs are at least partly associated with (personality) psychopathology in general. Another explanation is that many patients' position on the underlying dimensions is not high enough to lead to a DSM PD diagnosis, but high enough to lead to an elevated belief score.     

Relative weight and personality: analyses with the personality research form

A sample of 311 West German women and 254 men aged from 16 to 84 yr was investigated in order to examine the relationship between relative body weight (as an indicator of adequate/inadequate nutrition habits) and personality traits as measured by the Personality Research Form (PRF). To control for sex all analyses were done separately for men and women. A larger number of significant (linear and non-linear) relationships was found when sociodemographic factors (age and education) were not controlled. The univariate and multivariate relationships between relative weight and personality became practically insignificant, however, after statistical control of both factors. Personality types formed by cluster analysis also did no longer differ in mean relative weight when the values were adjusted for the effects of age and education. The conclusion is drawn that the individual degree of deviation from a medical or aesthetic body-weight norm is practically independent of the personality traits measured by the PRF (as long as the degree of obesity is not a severe one).