Improving assessment of personality disorder traits through social network analysis

When assessing personality disorder traits, not all judges make equally valid judgments of all targets. The present study uses social network analysis to investigate factors associated with reliability and validity in peer assessment. Participants were groups of military recruits (N=809) who acted as both targets and judges in a round-robin design. Participants completed self- and informant versions of the Multisource Assessment of Personality Pathology. Social network matrices were constructed based on reported acquaintance, and cohesive subgroups were identified. Judges who shared a mutual subgroup were more reliable and had higher self-peer agreement than those who did not. Partitioning networks into two subgroups achieved more consistent improvements than multiple subgroups. We discuss implications for multiple informant assessments.     

Case Study on Together towards Life and Ministerial Formation

When asked over the years why I believe the World Council of Churches is so important to the life of the church, my response has been not so much because of what its programmes do but because of its work in building a common ecumenical vision and bringing the diversity of the world church around that vision. This has been so valuable in shaping the life and ministry of the church ecumenical at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Together towards Life gives us a fresh opportunity to do this again in the area of mission and evangelism.     

Tracking the what and why of speakers’ choices: Prosodic boundaries and the length of constituents

The rational speaker hypothesis (Clifton, Carlson, & Frazier, 2002) claims that speakers are selfconsistent, employing intonation in a manner consistent with their intended message. Preceding a constituent by a prosodic boundary that is not required by the grammar often signals that this constituent is not part of the immediately preceding phrase. However, speakers tend to place prosodic boundaries before and after long constituents. The question is whether prosodic boundaries will have a larger influence on listeners’ choice of an analysis when they flank short constituents than when they flank long ones. The results of two listening experiments indicate that they do, suggesting that listeners attend not just to properties of the input signal, but also to the reasons why speakers produce those properties.     

Prosodic phrasing is central to language comprehension

Words, like musical notes, are grouped together into phrases by their rhythmic and durational properties as well as their tonal pitch. This 'prosodic phrasing' affects the understanding of sentences. Many processing studies of prosody have investigated sentences with a single, grammatically required prosodic boundary, which might be interpreted strictly locally, as a signal to end the current syntactic unit. Recent results suggest, however, that the global pattern of prosodic phrasing is what matters in sentence comprehension, not just the occurrence or size of a single local boundary. In this article we claim that the impact of prosodic boundaries depends on the other prosodic choices a speaker has made. We speculate that prosody serves to hold distinct linguistic representations together in memory.     

Self- and other-reports of traits from the five-factor model: relations to personality disorder

The current study used a psychiatric sample (N = 69) to examine: (1) the correspondence between self- and other-reports of general personality, as measured by the Five-Factor Model (FFM; Costa & McCrae, 1990), and personality disorder (PD) traits, as measured by a structured interview, (2) the relations between these two sets of ratings (FFM and PD traits) and consensus ratings of PD and impairment, and (3) the incremental validity of other-rated personality scores. Agreement between raters for the five domains of the FFM ranged from .23 (agreeableness) to .71 (openness); for the PD traits agreement ranged from .37 (avoidant) to .69 (antisocial). At both the domain and facet level, the personality profiles reflected in the correlations between the FFM scores and PD criteria were consistent across raters with the exception of narcissistic PD. Substantial evidence was found for the incremental validity of other-rated personality scores, with these ratings accounting for an additional 8 to 20% of the overall variance in PD features. The other-rated FFM scores also accounted for more variance in consensus ratings of impairment in the domains of romance, work, and social relations.     

Self- and peer perspectives on pathological personality traits and interpersonal problems

This study compares the relationship between personality disorders and interpersonal problems as obtained by self-report and peer-report measures. Participants (N = 393) were administered self- and peer-report versions of the Peer Inventory for Personality Disorder and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-64. Canonical analyses demonstrated similar relationships between personality disorder features and interpersonal problems as measured by either self or peer. Analyses between self and peer found little shared variance across sources, indicating a large method variance. Results indicate that although similar constructs are identified by self and peers in their understanding of personality pathology and associated interpersonal problems, self-report information overlaps very little with information obtained from peers, underscoring the importance of obtaining multiple sources of information.     

Processing "d-linked" phrases

Linguists draw a distinction between two types of interrogatives: discourse linked (d-linked) phrases such as which man, which implies the existence of a set of contextually determined entities (men) from which the speaker is asking for a choice, and non–d-linked interrogatives such as who, which carry no such implication. Two questionnaires and an on-line reading study showed that readers prefer a d-linked phrase more than a non–d-linked phrase as the antecedent for a pronoun, suggesting that d-linked phrases are immediately instantiated in a discourse representation that is checked during the process of pronoun interpretation. Comparable difficulty is not observed for non–d-linked interrogatives. A questionnaire and an on-line listening study also showed that readers and listeners were more willing to accept a grammatical island violation containing a pronoun when the pronoun's antecendent was a d-linked interrogative than when the antecedent was non–d-linked, suggesting that they check a discourse representation for the pronoun antecedent. All results suggest that d-linked phrases are immediately interpreted in a discourse representation, not just in a syntactic representation.     

Variability in Personality Expression Across Contexts: A Social Network Approach

The current research investigated how the contextual expression of personality differs across interpersonal relationships. Two related studies were conducted with college samples (Study 1: N = 52, 38 female; Study 2: N = 111, 72 female). Participants in each study completed a five‐factor measure of personality and constructed a social network detailing their 30 most important relationships. Participants used a brief Five‐Factor Model scale to rate their personality as they experience it when with each person in their social network. Multiple informants selected from each social network then rated the target participant's personality (Study 1: N = 227, Study 2: N = 777). Contextual personality ratings demonstrated incremental validity beyond standard global self‐report in predicting specific informants' perceptions. Variability in these contextualized personality ratings was predicted by the position of the other individuals within the social network. Across both studies, participants reported being more extraverted and neurotic, and less conscientious, with more central members of their social networks. Dyadic social network–based assessments of personality provide incremental validity in understanding personality, revealing dynamic patterns of personality variability unobservable with standard assessment techniques.     

Intimacy,sport and young refugee men

This article is about research with a group of young refugee men from Sudan and their relationship to football (soccer) as they resettle in Australia. It provides evidence of the resilience, independence and autonomy that such young refugees possess and what these young men's intimate knowledge of these qualities can teach us. In other words, how can we as researchers learn from these young refugees about how they perform these qualities and how may we accommodate this during ethnographic research and in sports-based intervention programs aimed at empowering such young people? Further, the article explores the role of intimacy in this process by accounting for the role of affective connections on and off the sporting field. The argument is that intimacy can help those involved negotiate the power inequities present in sports-based intervention programs and in associated research.