Conceptions of states and traits: dimensional attributes with ideals as prototypes

Traits and states are concepts that people use to both describe and understand themselves and others. We show that people view these concepts as prototype-based categories that have a graded internal structure and fuzzy boundaries and identify a set of attributes that define the prototypical cores of two categories: traits and states. Prototypical traits are stable, long-lasting, and internally caused. Prototypical states are temporary, brief, and caused by external circumstances. These prototypes are not defined by averages, as the family-resemblance principle would suggest, but by ideal (or extreme) attribute values. Like other ideal-based categories, traits and states serve particular goals. Trait concepts permit people to predict the present from the past; state concepts identify those behaviors that can be controlled by manipulating the situation. These two complementary schemas are part of the extensive theory of psychological causality that is implicit in language. Abstract social concepts differ from object categories in their category standards, the nature of their attributes, and the interrelations among those attributes.     

Personality in adulthood: a six-year longitudinal study of self-reports and spouse ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory

Previous longitudinal studies of personality in adulthood have been limited in the range of traits examined, have chiefly made use of self-reports, and have frequently included only men. In this study, self-reports (N = 983) and spouse ratings (N = 167) were gathered on the NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985b), which measures all five of the major dimensions of normal personality. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses on data from men and women aged 21 to 96 years showed evidence of small declines in Activity, Positive Emotions, and openness to Actions that might be attributed to maturation, but none of these effects was replicated in sequential analyses. The 20 other scales examined showed no consistent pattern of maturational effects. In contrast, retest stability was quite high for all five dimensions in self-reports and for the three dimensions measured at both times in spouse ratings. Comparable levels of stability were seen for men and women and for younger and older subjects. The data support the position that personality is stable after age 30.     

Role of visual information in ball catching

The present study is concerned with the perceptual information about the body and space underlying the act of catching a ball. In a series of four experiments, subjects were asked to catch a luminous ball under various visual conditions. In general, catching in a normally illuminated room was contrasted with catching the luminous ball in an otherwise completely dark room. In the third and fourth experiments, intermediate conditions of visual information were included. The results suggest that it is possible to catch a ball with one hand when only the ball is visible, but performance is better when the subject has the benefit of a rich visual environment and two hands. The second experiment indicated that subject performance does improve with practice in the dark, but time spent in the darkened room itself doesn't result in a significant decrement in performance. Results of the third study suggest that vision of one's hand does not aid in the performance of this task whereas the presence of a minimal visual frame appears to aid performance. The final study examined the relation between catching performance and body sway under similar visual conditions. Results of this experiment imply that persons who exhibit relatively little postural sway in full-room lighting performed better at this catching task.     

Specific forms of facial EMG response index emotions during an interview: from Darwin to the continuous flow hypothesis affect-laden information processing

Previous research has demonstrated that mild negative emotional imagery and unpleasant sensory stimuli lead to greater electromyographic activity over the brow muscle region than mild positive imagery and stimuli, even in the absence of significant changes in visceral and general facial EMG activity. Previous research has not addressed whether electromyographic responses over the brow region are a sensitive and specific index of emotions, however, since a multiplicity of events lead to changes in brow activity. In this research, facial electromyographic and audiovisual recordings were obtained while individuals were interviewed about themselves. Afterwards, individuals were asked to describe what they had been thinking of during specific segments of the interview marked by distinctive electromyographic responses over the brow region in the context of ongoing but stable levels of activity elsewhere in the face. The results are interpreted in terms of a continuous flow hypothesis of affect-laden information processing.     

Major life events, hassles, and adaptation in adolescence: confounding in the conceptualization and measurement of life stress and adjustment revisited

Prior work has suggested that methodological and conceptual confounding may play a role in the associations obtained between stressful life events, social resources, and adaptive outcome. Of particular concern in our work were (a) the source and method of assessment; (b) conceptual overlap between life stress and resource items and symptoms of disorder; and (c) induced response bias through the instructional sets of the stress measures. A second goal was to extend our understanding of the life stress-adjustment linkage in groups for whom little data of this type exist. By using multi-trait-multimethod procedures we found that both distal major life events and proximal daily stressors had important degrees of unique and shared variance with adaptive functioning, whereas the effects for social support were inconclusive. Further, the importance of considering possible sources of potential confounding in producing quite different levels of association between life stress and adaptation was underscored by the results.     

Shared knowledge about infants among fathers and mothers

Evidence for the exchange of parenting information between low-income White mothers and fathers of infants was found. Mothers had more accurate expectations for normative development than fathers, but more accurate fathers had spouses who were also more accurate--even when education was controlled. Though few significant differences were evident in help-seeking behavior when infant problems were encountered, fathers turned to fewer helpers than mothers and were somewhat more likely to rely solely on their spouse. These data indicate that researchers must consider the exchange of information between spouses, particularly when studying the socialization of parenting among fathers at this stage in the life cycle of the family.     

Effects of a structured behavior modification treatment program on locus of control in behaviorally disturbed children

The effect of a 10-day behavior modification treatment program on locus of control was investigated. The subjects were children (N = 130; 6 to 12 years old) with severe behavioral disorders who were predominantly from low socioeconomic backgrounds, from broken homes, and socially deprived. Pre- and post-testing was done with the Nowicki-Strickland Preschool and Primary Internal-External Control Scale (Nowicki & Duke, 1974) and the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale for Children (Nowicki & Strickland, 1973). Children between the ages of 10 and 12 responded to therapy with a significant increase in internality, but younger children did not.     

Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect

Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.     

Perceptual sensitivity to dimensional and similarity relations in free and rule-governed classifications

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perceptual primacy of dimensional and similarity relations in the stimulus classifications of younger and older subjects. In Experiment 1, 4- and 10-year-olds were given free classifications in which they could group stimuli according to overall similarity or identities in size, color, or orientation. Both age groups classified stimuli most frequently according to identities on separate dimensions. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds and adults were given free classifications followed by rule-governed classifications which required them to group stimuli according to specific relations. In the free classifications, a majority of subjects in both age groups classified the stimuli most frequently according to identities on separate dimensions. In the rule-governed classifications, both age groups were more accurate when a single separate relation was required for solution than when overall similarity was required. These results support a differential-sensitivity view of perceptual development, which asserts that individuals at all ages primarily perceive and use separate relations.