A comparative study of personality in Ugandan and English subjects

Nine hundred and twenty-one males and 555 females in Uganda completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. Indices of factor comparison indicated that the personality dimensions of P, E, N and L were virtually identical in Uganda and England. Some item changes were required to establish satisfactory reliabilities (alpha) for all factors. Sex differences revealed that males scored higher than females on E but lower on N, which is the usual finding. Strikingly, however, there was no sex difference for P and L, there being, in fact, a very slight tendency for females to score above males on P and below them on L. Cross-cultural comparisons, using only items both Ugandan and English scoring keys had in common, showed Ugandan Ss to score higher on L than their English counterparts, Ugandan males also scoring higher on E and N and Ugandan females scoring higher on P.     

Extraversion, arousal, and speed of retrieval from secondary storage.

Fifty-two subjects were assigned to one of four groups on the basis of scores on the Extraversion scale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory and on the General Activation scale of the Activation-Deactivation Adjective Check List. The subjects learned two lists composed of categorically related groups of words, with the number of categories and the number of words per category varied. Memory was probed by simultaneously presenting the subject with a category name and an item-position cue, and recording the recall latency. The major finding was that activation and extraversion interactively determined the recall latency for both category and item recall. The results were considered in light of arousal theory.     

Anxiety, learning, and memory: A reconceptualization

A new theoretical framework for work on anxiety and memory is proposed. Anxious subjects engage in task-irrelevant processing which preempts processing resources and some of the available capacity of working memory. They typically attempt to compensate for the adverse effects of this task-irrelevent processing on task performance by increased effort. It follows from these theoretical assumptions that anxiety will have differential effects on performance efficiency (i.e., the quality of performance) and on processing effectiveness (i.e., performance efficiency/effort). Anxiety will always reduce processing effectiveness, but will not impair performance efficiency if there is sufficient effort expenditure. Consequently, reliance on measures of performance efficiency will often obscure the detrimental effects of anxiety on processing effectiveness.     

Psychoticism and response to treatment in neurotic patients

A study is reported of neurotic patients at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, who were given the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and who were rated by their doctors for prognosis and final assessment after treatment. The results indicated that those patients who had elevated psychoticism scores took longer to improve and that doctors rated them harder to treat at final assessment. It is suggested that early knowledge of patients with a poor prognosis, in the form of their Psychoticism score, might prove helpful to psychiatrists and psychologists, both for diagnosis and (primarily) for choice of appropriate treatment.