Contextualizing personality psychology

The issue of how to contextualize personality psychology constructively has been a longstanding dilemma. This special issue brings together personality, social, self, clinical, and cultural psychologists who have attempted to contextualize the self, personality, attachment, and cultural constructs in an integrative fashion, with a focus on broader situations, such as social roles. In this introductory essay, I describe the potential advantages of integrating traditional concepts in personality psychology with social roles and provide an overview of the contributions made to the special issue.     

Social laws in alternating time: effectiveness,feasibility, and synthesis

Since it was first proposed by Moses, Shoham, and Tennenholtz, the social laws paradigm has proved to be one of the most compelling approaches to the offline coordination of multiagent systems. In this paper, we make four key contributions to the theory and practice of social laws in multiagent systems. First, we show that the Alternating-time Temporal Logic (atl) of Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman provides an elegant and powerful framework within which to express and understand social laws for multiagent systems. Second, we show that the effectiveness, feasibility, and synthesis problems for social laws may naturally be framed as atl model checking problems, and that as a consequence, existing atl model checkers may be applied to these problems. Third, we show that the complexity of the feasibility problem in our framework is no more complex in the general case than that of the corresponding problem in the Shoham–Tennenholtz framework (it is np-complete). Finally, we show how our basic framework can easily be extended to permit social laws in which constraints on the legality or otherwise of some action may be explicitly required. We illustrate the concepts and techniques developed by means of a running example. This paper was presented at the Social Software conference in May 2004, Copenhagen, organised by PHILOG. We thank the organisers for providing the opportunity, and the participants for their useful feedback.     

A prospective investigation of the impact of attachment style on stress generation among clinically depressed individuals

The present study sought to determine if attachment style contributed to the generation of stressful life events among clinically depressed individuals during the course of treatment. Participants (N=68) were interviewed about life stressors experienced during a 3-month treatment protocol using a contextual approach (Life Events and Difficulties Schedule; [Brown, G. W., & Harris, T. O. (1978). Social origins of depression: A study of psychiatric disorder in women. New York: Free Press]). Results suggested interactive effects between severity of depression and attachment style on stress associated with future sociotropic and dependent life events. Mildly depressed individuals who reported a dismissing attachment style (higher levels of avoidant attachment and lower levels of anxious attachment) or preoccupied style (lower levels of avoidant attachment and higher levels of anxious attachment) experienced higher levels of stress associated with sociotropic events. Likewise, a dismissing attachment style predicted stress associated with dependent events among mildly depressed individuals. These effects were not present among our more severely depressed participants.     

Predicting the counterproductive employee in a child-to-adult prospective study

The present research tested the relations between a battery of background factors and counterproductive work behaviors in a 23-year longitudinal study of young adults (N = 930). Background information, such as diagnosed adolescent conduct disorder, criminal conviction records, intelligence, and personality traits, was assessed before participants entered the labor force. These background factors were combined with work conditions at age 26 to predict counterproductive work behaviors at age 26. The results showed that people diagnosed with childhood conduct disorder were more prone to commit counterproductive work behaviors in young adulthood and that these associations were partially mediated by personality traits measured at age 18. Contrary to expectations, criminal convictions that occurred prior to entering the workforce were unrelated to counterproductive work behaviors. Job conditions and personality traits had independent effects on counterproductive work behaviors, above and beyond background factors.     

Social investment and personality: a meta-analysis of the relationship of personality traits to investment in work, family, religion, and volunteerism.

Investing in normative, age-graded social roles has broad implications for both the individual and society. The current meta-analysis examines the way in which personality traits relate to four such investments -- work, family, religion, and volunteerism. The present study uses meta-analytic techniques (K = 94) to identify the cross-sectional patterns of relationships between social investment in these four roles and the personality trait domains of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. Results show that the extent of investment in social roles across these domains is positively related to agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and low psychoticism. These findings are more robust when individuals are psychologically committed to rather than simply demographically associated with the investment role.     

Relationships Between Attitudes Toward Organizations and Performance Appraisal Systems and Rating Behavior

Data collected in seven separate samples in three countries (the USA, Canada and Israel) were used to examine the relationships between perceptions of one’s organization (climate, commitment), beliefs about appraisal systems (self‐efficacy, uses of appraisal) and raters’ orientations to appraisal systems (confidence and comfort) and specific rating behaviors. We obtained good fits for structural models suggesting that attitudes and beliefs accounted for substantial variance in raters’ likelihood of giving high or low ratings, willingness to discriminate good from poor performers, and willingness to discriminate among various aspects of job performance when completing actual performance ratings. Proximal attitudes and beliefs (i.e., those directly related to the performance appraisal system) appear to have stronger links to rating behavior than do more distal attitudes (i.e., attitudes toward the organization in general).     

A biochemical analysis of people with chronic fatigue who have Irlen Syndrome: speculation concerning immune system dysfunction.

This study investigated the biological basis of visual processing disabilities in adults with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The study involved 61 adults with symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome who were screened for visual processing problems (Irlen Syndrome) and divided into two groups according to the severity of symptoms of Irlen Syndrome. Significant variations were identified in blood lipids and urine amino and organic acids of the two groups, which may be indicative of activation of the immune system due to some infective agent. It was suggested that metabolic profiling may help the development of more valid diagnostic categories and allow more investigation of immune system dysfunction as a possible causal factor in a range of learning and behaviour disorders.