Personality at midlife: stability, intrinsic maturation, and response to life events

Although developmental theories and popular accounts suggest that midlife is a time of turmoil and change, longitudinal studies of personality traits have generally found stability of rank order and little or no change in mean levels. Using data from 2,274 men and women in their 40s retested after 6 to 9 years, the present study examined two hypotheses: (a) that retest correlations should be no higher than about .60 and (b) that there should be small decreases in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness, and small increases in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The study also explored the effects of recalled life events on subsequent personality scores. Results did not support the first hypothesis; uncorrected retest correlations uniformly exceeded .60. This was true for all personality traits, including facets of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness not previously included in longitudinal studies. The hypothesized decreases in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness were found, but Conscientiousness showed a small decrease instead of the predicted increase. Life events in general showed very little influence on the levels of personality traits, although some effects were seen for changes in job and marital status that warrant further research.     

The Logic of Pragmatic Truth

The mathematical concept of pragmatic truth, first introduced in Mikenberg, da Costa and Chuaqui (1986), has received in the last few years several applications in logic and the philosophy of science. In this paper, we study the logic of pragmatic truth, and show that there are important connections between this logic, modal logic and, in particular, Jaskowski's discussive logic. In order to do so, two systems are put forward so that the notions of pragmatic validity and pragmatic truth can be accommodated. One of the main results of this paper is that the logic of pragmatic truth is paraconsistent. The philosophical import of this result, which justifies the application of pragmatic truth to inconsistent settings, is also discussed.     

Identifying Causes of Disagreement Between Self-Reports and Spouse Ratings of Personality

Self-reports and spouse ratings of personality traits typically show less-than-perfect agreement, but powerful moderators of agreement have not yet been identified. In Study 1, 47 married couples completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory to describe themselves and their spouses. Extent of agreement was not consistently moderated by response sets; the age, intelligence, or education of the respondent; or the length or quality of the relationship. In Study 2 these couples were interviewed about reasons for substantial disagreements, and an audiotape was content-analyzed. Sixteen reasons were reliably coded, including idiosyncratic understanding of items, reference to different time frames or roles, and unavailability of covert experience to the spouse. Faking good, assumed similarity, and other variables prominent in the psychometric literature were relatively unimportant. Findings (1) suggest that attempts to improve the validity of self-reports and ratings may need to be refocused and (2) underscore the desirability of routinely obtaining multiple sources of information on personality.     

Do Parental Influences Matter? A Reply to Halverson

ABSTRACT Halverson (1988) raises many objections to the retrospective method, but only some of them are applicable to our study (McCrae & Costa, 1988), further, Halverson fails to distinguish between random error and bias in retrospective data We argue that retrospective accounts can provide one useful source of evidence when the probable effects of biases are taken into account The small associations between recalled parent-child relations and adult personality that we reported were probably exaggerated rather than masked by retrospective bias, we took this into account in reaching our conclusions Rather than dismiss the method, psychologists should question the entrenched belief that child-rearing is a major determinant of adult personality
Tram up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it—Proverbs 22 6     

Cross-sectional studies of personality in a national sample: 2. Stability in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness

Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) Epidemiologic Followup Study were used to examine age differences in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience. Cross-sectional analyses of data from 10,063 respondents showed that older subjects were slightly lower in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness; that age trends were not curvilinear; and that there were no differences in personality scores that might be attributable to a mild-life crisis or transition. Comparison with data from 654 participants in the Augmented Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (ABLSA) showed that the ABLSA sample was lower in extraversion and higher in openness than the national sample, although the differences were small in magnitude. Results were interpreted to mean that sampling and attrition in this longitudinal sample did not seriously bias results on these personality variables, and that cross-sectional findings from a large probability sample support the conclusion that personality is predominantly stable in adulthood.     

Measuring parental and family efficacy beliefs of adolescents' parents: Cross‐cultural comparisons in Italy and Portugal

The goal of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Perceived Parental Self‐Efficacy (PPSE) and Perceived Family Collective Efficacy (PFCE) revised scales in the Portuguese and Italian contexts. To this aim two studies were conducted: the first reported the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with Portuguese samples, whereas the second addressed the cross‐cultural invariance of PPSE and PFCE (Portugal and Italy). Results of the first study showed the appropriate fit of the unifactorial model of both scales to Portuguese data. The invariance analyses performed in the second study attested to the PPSE and PFCE's configural, metric and scalar invariance in both countries. The correlations of PPSE and PFCE with communication, management of conflict and children's school achievement further attested to their construct and practical validity. Thus, PPSE and PFCE proved to be suitable to further use in research and psychological assessment fields.     

Working memory and early numeracy training in preschool children

Many factors influence children’s performance in mathematical achievement, including both domain-specific and domain-general factors. This study aimed to verify and compare the effects of two types of training on early numerical skills. One type of training focused on the enhancement of working memory, a domain-general precursor, while the other focused on the enhancement of early numeracy, a domain-specific precursor. The participants were 48 five-year-old preschool children. Both the working memory and early numeracy training programs were implemented for 5 weeks. The results showed that the early numeracy intervention specifically improved early numeracy abilities in preschool children, whereas working memory intervention improved not only working memory abilities but also early numeracy abilities. These findings stress the importance of performing activities designed to train working memory abilities, in addition to activities aimed to enhance more specific skills, in the early prevention of learning difficulties during preschool years.     

Two notions of epistemic validity

How to accept a conditional? F. P. Ramsey proposed the following test in (Ramsey 1990). (RT) ‘If A, then B’ must be accepted with respect to the current epistemic state iff the minimal hypothetical change of it needed to accept A also requires accepting B. In this article we propose a formulation of (RT), which unlike some of its predecessors, is compatible with our best theory of belief revision, the so-called AGM theory (see (Gärdenfors 1988), chapters 1–5 for a survey). The new test, which, we claim, encodes some of the crucial insights defended by F. P. Ramsey in (Ramsey 1990), is used to study the conditionals epistemically validated by the AGM postulates. Our notion of validity (PV) is compared with the notion of negative validity (NV) used by Gärdenfors in (Gärdenfors 1988). It is observed that the notions of PV and NV will in general differ and that when these differences arise it is the notion of PV that is preferable. Finally we compare our formulation of the Ramsey test with a previous formulation offered by Gärdenfors (GRT). We show that any attempt to interpret (GRT) as delivering acceptance conditions for Ramsey's conditionals is doomed to failure.     

Does the Illness Behavior Questionnaire measure abnormal illness behavior?

Abnormal illness behavior (AIB) has been proposed as a construct measuring the inappropriate or maladaptive modes of responding to one's state of health, and the Illness Behavior Questionnaire (BQ; Pilowsky, 1975) was designed to measure this construct. Previous studies using small samples have failed to agree on the factor structure of this questionnaire. The present paper examines the factor structure of the Illness Behavior Questionnaire and critically evaluates the interpretation of its dimensions as well as the construct of AIB. A factor analysis of responses from 1,061 health care and nonhealth care seeking subjects yielded six interpretable factors which substantially replicated Pilowsky's previous results. Six scales were calculated and correlated with several personality measures. The results indicated that the Illness Behavior Questionnaire is saturated with neuroticism, a dimension known to be related to excessive medical complaints. But excessive medical complaints cannot be equated with hypochondriasis or AIB in the absence of objective medical information. In the absence of evidence for the discriminant validity of the IBQ, its use as a diagnostic device is unwarranted. Treating elevated IBQ scores as indicators of abnormal illness behavior without corroborating medical information may be more misleading than accepting patients' symptom reports at face value.     

Joint factors in self-reports and ratings: Neuroticism,extraversion and openness to experience

Although most dimensional theories of personality assume that the same traits can be assessed in either ratings or self-reports, joint factor analyses of data from these two methods have seldom provided clear evidence in support of this position. Previous analyses have found a preponderance of within-method factors, or have had to transform variables or use unorthodox rotational procedures in order to control the effects of method variance. The present study argues that recent conceptual and technical advances should now make it possible to show joint factors at the second-order level using standard factor techniques. The NEO Inventory and NEO Rating Form, which measure 18 traits in the domains of Neuroticism, Extraversion and Openness to Experience, were administered to a sample of 281 men and women. Varimax rotation of three principal components clearly showed the hypothesized structure within and across self-reports and spouse ratings. Convergent and discriminant validity of the joint factors with the EPI scales was also shown. The results suggest that the effects of method variance can be minimized if well-qualified raters use psychometrically adequate instruments to provide ratings of clearly conceptualized traits. In addition, they provide strong evidence for the validity of the proposed three-domain model of personality.