Do People Know How Their Personality Has Changed? Correlates of Perceived and Actual Personality Change in Young Adulthood

Abstract How much do we think our personality changes over time? How well do our perceptions of change correspond with actual personality change? Two hundred and ninety students completed measures of the Big Five personality traits when they first entered college. Four years later, they completed the same measures and rated the degree to which they believed they had changed on each dimension. Participants tended to view themselves as having changed substantially, and perceptions of change showed some correspondence with actual personality change. Perceived and actual change showed theoretically meaningful correlations with a host of variables related to different aspects of college achievement and adjustment.     

Nonverbal behavior and the vertical dimension of social relations: a meta-analysis

The vertical dimension of interpersonal relations (relating to dominance, power, and status) was examined in association with nonverbal behaviors that included facial behavior, gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, touch, vocal behaviors, posed encoding skill, and others. Results were separately summarized for people's beliefs (perceptions) about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and for actual relations between verticality and nonverbal behavior. Beliefs/perceptions were stronger and much more prevalent than were actual verticality effects. Perceived and actual relations were positively correlated across behaviors. Heterogeneity was great, suggesting that verticality is not a psychologically uniform construct in regard to nonverbal behavior. Finally, comparison of the verticality effects to those that have been documented for gender in relation to nonverbal behavior revealed only a limited degree of parallelism.     

How General is Generalized Scientific Essentialism?

I look at a recent argument offered in defense of a doctrine which I will call generalized scientific essentialism. This is the doctrine according to which, not only are some facts about substance composition metaphysically necessary, but, in addition, some facts about substance behavior are metaphysically necessary. More specifically, so goes the argument, not only is water necessarily composed of H₂O and salt is necessarily composed of NaCl, but, in addition, salt necessarily dissolves in water. If this argument is sound, and if the statement that necessarily salt dissolves in water is a statement of a law of nature, then one conclusion of the argument is that there is at least one metaphysically necessary law of nature. My paper examines the extent to which this kind of argument could be generalized to provide a case for a full-blown scientific essentialism: the doctrine according to which all of the laws of nature are necessary. Or, in terms of dispositions, it is the doctrine according to which natural kinds have all of their powers, capacities and propensities as a matter of necessity.     

Mood-congruent attentional bias in dysphoria: maintained attention to and impaired disengagement from negative information

Attentional bias to negative information has been proposed to be a cognitive vulnerability factor for the development of depression. In 2 experiments, the authors examined mood-congruent attentional bias in dysphoria. In both experiments, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed an attentional task with negative, positive, and neutral word cues preceding a target. Targets appeared either at the same or at the opposite location of the cue. Overall, results indicate that dysphoric participants show maintained attention for negative words at longer stimulus presentations, which is probably caused by impaired attentional disengagement from negative words. Furthermore, nondysphoric participants maintain their attention more strongly to positive words. These results are discussed in relation to recent developments in the pathogenesis and treatment of depression.     

Welfare,Justice, and Pareto Efficiency

In economic analysis, it is usually assumed that each individuals well-being (mental welfare) depends on her or his own resources (material welfare). A typology is provided of the ways in which one persons well-being may depend on the material resources of other persons. When such dependencies are taken into account, standard Paretian analysis of welfare needs to be modified. Pareto efficiency on the level of material resources need not coincide with Pareto efficiency on the level of well-being. A change in economic conditions that is Pareto efficient in the standard sense, i.e., with respect to material resources, may nevertheless sacrifice one persons well-being to that of another. It is shown that under plausible assumptions, Pareto efficiency on the level of well-being may require the reduction of inequality on the level of material resources.     

Something from nothing: exploring dimensions of children's knowing through the repeated reading of favourite books

Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio explore some of the dimensions of knowing that children, teachers and parents may engage together during story‐time. They reflect on some of their own long‐term relationships with children and children's books, especially Phoebe Gilman's Gilman P 1992 Something from nothing (New York, NY, Scholastic Inc)  [Google Scholar] Something from nothing (published in 1992) and Simms Taback's Taback S 1999 Joseph had a little overcoat (New York, NY, Viking‐Penguin)  [Google Scholar] Joseph had a little overcoat, published in 1999. The authors probe issues such as why children ask to hear a favourite story over and over and why they suddenly abandon all interest and move on to a new book. They explore the meaning of the silences that sometimes arise during story‐time, pooling around the young listeners as the last words of the book are read. Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio remind us of the value of literature in the lives of children and they affirm that the reading and re‐reading of favourite stories enables the understanding of complex human issues and contributes significantly to social, emotional and spiritual growth.     

Update Semantics of Security Protocols

We present a model-theoretic approach for reasoning about security protocols, applying recent insights from dynamic epistemic logics. This enables us to describe exactly the subsequent epistemic states of the agents participating in the protocol, using Kripke models and transitions between these based on updates of the agents’ beliefs associated with steps in the protocol. As a case study we will consider the SRA Three Pass protocol and discuss the Wide-Mouthed Frog protocol.     

Effects of ontogeny on performance of rats in a novel object-recognition task

The current experiment investigated ontogenetic forgetting on a novel object-recognition task similar to that of Besheer and Bevins. 18-day-old pups (n = 49) and adult (n = 29) rats were tested at two retention intervals (1 min. or 120 min.). By employing exclusion criteria which demanded minimum amounts of object exploration at training and test, the performance of 18-day-old pups but not that of adults was significantly impaired at 120 min. relative to 1 min. Analysis indicated that the ontogeny of the learning and memory measured in novel object recognition follows a developmental trend similar to that of other forms of learning, with older animals remembering more and thus performing better than younger animals. Unfortunately, given the extreme variability inherent to the task and large N necessary to achieve significance, the use of this task in studies of learning, memory, and development is discouraged.     

Beliefs in personality disorders: a test with the personality disorder belief questionnaire

The hypothesis that each personality disorder (PD) is characterized by a specific set of beliefs was tested in a sample of 643 subjects, including non-patient controls, axis-I and axis-II patients, diagnosed with SCID-I and -II interviews. Beliefs of six PDs (avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, histrionic, borderline) were assessed with the Personality Disorder Belief Questionnaire (PDBQ). Factor analyses supported the existence of six hypothesized sets of beliefs. Structural equation modeling (SEM) supported the hypothesis that each PD is characterized by a specific set of beliefs. Path coefficients were however in the medium range, suggesting that PDs are not solely determined by beliefs. Nevertheless, empirically derived cutoff scores of the six belief subscales were reasonably successful in classifying subjects, percentages ranging form 51% to 83%. It appeared that there was a monotonical increase in scores on each belief subscale from non-patient controls, to patients without any PD, to patients with PDs (other than the pertinent PD), to patients with the pertinent PD. This suggests that PD-related beliefs are at least partly associated with (personality) psychopathology in general. Another explanation is that many patients' position on the underlying dimensions is not high enough to lead to a DSM PD diagnosis, but high enough to lead to an elevated belief score.     

General self-efficacy,dental anxiety and multiple fears among 20-year-olds in Norway

This paper examines the extent to which low general self-efficacy and painful dental and medical experiences are related to dental anxiety, multiple fears and to avoidance of dental care. A total of 754 20-year-olds completed a series of questionnaires, including the General Self-efficacy Scale (GSE), Geer Fear Scale (GFS) and Dental Fear Survey (DFS). Females had lower self-efficacy, higher dental anxiety and higher scores on the GFS than males. Multivariate analyses (linear stepwise regression) indicated that painful dental experiences, a high score on the GFS and negative opinions about own dental health explained 37% of the variance in DFS scores. Self-efficacy had no predictive power for dental anxiety, and only dental anxiety had predictive power for dental avoidance behavior. Thirty-eight percent of the total variance in GFS scores was explained by the following variables: being a female, high dental anxiety (DFS), low general self-efficacy (GSE) and low educational level of the mother.