Individual differences in achieving tendency: Review of evidence bearing on a questionnaire measure

The Mehrabian Achieving Tendency Scale (MATS) provides a broad-scoped assessment of individual characteristics associated with achievement. The MATS is highly reliable and reasonably free of response bias. It correlated negatively with various measures of general (trait) anxiety and fear of success. The MATS successfully predicted performance in situations approximating real-life tests of work and school performance and academic attitudes (e.g., level of aspiration, interest and satisfaction, leadership and initiative). The MATS also predicted occupational choice and occupational/organizational commitment and attractive/appropriate self-presentation. Within a general model of personality and temperament, the MATS was shown to consist primarily of trait dominance and secondarily of trait pleasure. The model successfully predicted relationships of the MATS with a variety of personality measures.     

Interrelationships Among Name Desirability, Name Uniqueness, Emotion Characteristics Connoted by Names, and Temperament

The subjects in Study 1 (the target group) provided their names and data on their own temperaments. The subjects in Study 2 rated the target group's names on uniqueness and desirability. The subjects in Study 3 rated the temperament qualities connoted by the names given by the target group. The name uniqueness and desirability scales had high reliabilities and correlated -0.44, showing that more unique names were less desirable. The qualities of pleasantness and dominance, which were connoted by a person's name, were judged very reliably. Names that connoted psychological health versus maladjustment (pleasant/ unpleasant temperament) were indeed associated with pleasant/unpleasant temperament attributes. The pleasantness and dominance connoted by names enhanced the desirability of those names, whereas greater unpleasantness and submissiveness were connoted by more unique names.     

Comparison of the PAD and PANAS as models for describing emotions and for differentiating anxiety from depression

Positive (PA) and Negative (NA) Affect scales were analyzed using the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) Emotion Model. PA was weighted by high arousal, pleasure, and dominance (listed in order of beta weights), thus approximating exuberance in PAD space. NA and markers of somatic anxiety were weighted by displeasure, high arousal, and submissiveness, approximating anxiety in PAD space. PA (or exuberance) represented only one of four basic variants of positive affect (exuberant, relaxed, dependent, docile) and NA (or anxiety) represented only one of four basic categories of negative affect (hostile, anxious, disdainful, bored). Thus, PA and NA lacked validity as general and balanced measures of positive and negative affect, respectively. Indeed, the counterintuitive mutual independence of PA and NA was possible only because PA (and NA) dealt narrowly with selective aspects of positive (negative) affect. The PAD alternative to the tripartite model showed anxiety and depression shared unpleasant and submissive temperament characteristics but differed because anxiety involved more arousability than depression.     

General relations among drug use, alcohol use, and major indexes of psychopathology

Relations among measures of trait anxiety, depression, panic, somatization, alcohol use, drug use, and treatment for depression were investigated because, typically, studies (a) addressed relations among subsets of only 2 or 3 of the measures and (b) dealt almost exclusively with narrow samples of the population representing extremes on 1 or 2 of the measures. In this study, relations among all 7 measures were assessed with participants representing a wide range of scores on all the measures. The 369 participants (155 men, 214 women) were sampled from the general population. Three replications of the same study consistently yielded hypothesized positive intercorrelations among all 7 scales. Factor 1 (Anxiety-Depression) included Trait Anxiety, Depression, and Panic scales. Factor 2 (Substance Abuse) included Drug Use, Alcohol Use, Treatment for Depression, and Somatization scales. Factor 2 highlighted self-medication as a defining characteristic of somatizers and corroborated findings showing that substance abuse is often a precursor to treatment for depression-like symptoms that can be ameliorated with abstinence. Factors 1 and 2 were significantly intercorrelated (r = .41, df = 367, p < .05), showing a 17% shared variance in two common groupings of psychological dysfunction (anxiety-depression, substance abuse) in the general population. Thus, depending on socioeconomic and demographic variables, a third common form of dysfunction in the general population is represented by a combination of anxiety-depression plus substance abuse.