The shaping of personality: genes, environments, and chance encounters

I started my career as a clinical psychologist with an interest in personality assessment. But a loss of faith in psychoanalytic theory, projective tests, and clinical case studies in general led to a shift in my interests to personality research. Subsequent jobs at research institutes and universities allowed me to indulge in science. I developed the trait-state concept and its application in tests for affect measurement. For 10 years I did experimental research in the field of sensory deprivation. The sensation seeking idea and tests evolved from this work but soon expanded to many other areas. Research in the biological basis of sensation seeking started with genetic and psychophysiological research, but research conducted in other laboratories also pointed to a psychopharmacological basis for the trait. Over the last several decades, I have formulated a psychobiological model for personality. I have used factor analysis and the biosocial model to develop an "alternative-five" factorial trait structure for personality.     

Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: same problem, different solutions-evidence from Dutch

This paper focuses on verb movement in agrammatism and child language. We present data from a sentence completion experiment with 6 Dutch agrammatic aphasics and 21 Dutch-speaking children. The experiment compares completion of matrix clauses (which require verb movement) and embedded clauses (where such movement is not required) in these two populations. The results reveal a clear asymmetry: Both agrammatics and children do very well with embedded clauses but fail in 50% with the matrix clauses. It is concluded that the problem which both populations are facing is one of verb movement rather than verb inflection. An error analysis of the responses reveals that, although both agrammatics and children try to avoid movement, they apply different strategies to achieve this goal.     

Building the perfect curse word: A psycholinguistic investigation of the form and meaning of taboo words

Taboo words represent a potent subset of natural language. It has been hypothesized that “tabooness” reflects an emergent property of negative valence and high physiological arousal of word referents. Many taboo words (e.g., dick, shit) are indeed consistent with this claim. Nevertheless, American English is also rife with negatively valenced, highly arousing words the usage of which is not socially condemned (e.g., cancer, abortion, welfare). We evaluated prediction of tabooness of single words and novel taboo compound words from a combination of phonological, lexical, and semantic variables (e.g., semantic category, word length). For single words, physiological arousal and emotional valence strongly predicted tabooness with additional moderating contributions from form (phonology) and meaning (semantic category). In Experiment 2, raters judged plausibility for combinations of common nouns with taboo words to form novel taboo compounds (e.g., shitgibbon). A mixture of formal (e.g., ratio of stop consonants, length) and semantic variables (e.g., ± receptacle, ± profession) predicted the quality of novel taboo compounding. Together, these studies provide complementary evidence for interactions between word form and meaning and an algorithmic prediction of tabooness in American English. We discuss applications for models of taboo word representation.