Resilient,Overcontrolled, and Undercontrolled Personality Types: Issues and Controversies

Personality types refer to common or typical configurations of the dispositional attributes that define the individual. Research over the last 20 years has identified a set of three replicable personality types: resilient, overcontrolled, and undercontrolled personalities. Resilient individuals are characterized by self-confidence, emotional stability, and a positive orientation toward others. Overcontrolled individuals are emotionally brittle, introverted, and tense, whereas undercontrolled individuals are disagreeable and lack self-control. In this article, we provide a brief history of current research on the three personality types and identify key areas of controversy. We also outline several directions for future research and discuss the importance of maintaining both attribute- and person-centered perspectives in contemporary personality psychology.     

Gender differences in theories of adolescent sexual activity

This was a study of 1478 adolescents who attended ten private schools located in different areas of this country. The purpose was to determine which concepts from four theories of deviance were useful in explaining male and female sexual intercourse. The sample was 73% White, 6% Chicano, 5% Black, 3% Asian, and 12% other minorities, and was comprised of 1114 females and 364 males. Bivariate analyses showed that the majority (15 of the 21 factors for both males and females) of factors examined were significantly correlated with frequency of sexual intercourse. Few gender differences were observed, and hierarchical regression procedures revealed that the strongest predictor of both male and female sexual intercourse was differential peer association, accounting for 33% of the variance (48% explained) among males and 27% of the variance among females (44% explained).The authors wish to express their appreciation to Dr. Ken Millar for the supportive resources to complete this study, and to the reviewers at Sex Roles for their comments on an earlier draft.     

Plaster or Plasticity: Are Adult Work Experiences Associated with Personality Change in Women?

ABSTRACT The present study tested whether work experiences were associated with personality change across two periods of adulthood (age 21 to 27 and 27 to 43) in a longitudinal sample of women ( N = 81). Two competing theoretical perspectives were tested: the plaster theory, which claims that personality does not change after age 30, and the plasticity theory, which claims that personality can change at any time in adulthood. Evidence was found for both correlational consistency of personality in adulthood and for the socialization effect of work on personality change. Work experiences were not associated with personality change in young adulthood but were associated with changes between young adulthood and midlife. In the period from age 27 to age 43 women who worked more became more agentic, and women who were more successful in their work became both more agentic and more normadhering. This pattern of associations between personality change and work experience provided support for the plasticity model of personality change.     

Toward a Unified Model of Lexical Acquisition and Lexical Access

Much effort has gone into constructing models of how children segment speech and thereby discover the words of their language. Much effort has also gone into constructing models of how adults access their mental lexicons and thereby segment speech into words. In this paper, I explore the possibility of a model that could account for both word discovery by children and on-line segmentation by adults. In particular, I discuss extensions to the distributional regularity (DR) model of Brent and Cartwright (1996) that could yield an account of on-line segmentation as well as word discovery.     

The Lifespan Self-Esteem Scale: Initial Validation of a New Measure of Global Self-Esteem

This article introduces the Lifespan Self-Esteem Scale (LSE), a short measure of global self-esteem suitable for populations drawn from across the lifespan. Many existing measures of global self-esteem cannot be used across multiple developmental periods due to changes in item content, response formats, and other scale characteristics. This creates a need for a new lifespan scale so that changes in global self-esteem over time can be studied without confounding maturational changes with alterations in the measure. The LSE is a 4-item measure with a 5-point response format using items inspired by established self-esteem scales. The scale is essentially unidimensional and internally consistent, and it converges with existing self-esteem measures across ages 5 to 93 (N = 2,714). Thus, the LSE appears to be a useful measure of global self-esteem suitable for use across the lifespan as well as contexts where a short measure is desirable, such as populations with short attention spans or large projects assessing multiple constructs. Moreover, the LSE is one of the first global self-esteem scales to be validated for children younger than age 8, which provides the opportunity to broaden the field to include research on early formation and development of global self-esteem, an area that has previously been limited.     

The mini-IPIP scales: tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality

The Mini-IPIP, a 20-item short form of the 50-item International Personality Item Pool-Five-Factor Model measure (Goldberg, 1999), was developed and validated across five studies. The Mini-IPIP scales, with four items per Big Five trait, had consistent and acceptable internal consistencies across five studies (= at or well above .60), similar coverage of facets as other broad Big Five measures (Study 2), and test-retest correlations that were quite similar to the parent measure across intervals of a few weeks (Study 4) and several months (Study 5). Moreover, the Mini-IPIP scales showed a comparable pattern of convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity (Studies 2-5) with other Big Five measures. Collectively, these results indicate that the Mini-IPIP is a psychometrically acceptable and practically useful short measure of the Big Five factors of personality.