Cantankerous creativity: Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and the HEXACO structure of creative achievement

Creativity research has suggested that creative people are low in agreeableness. To explore this issue, we applied the HEXACO model of personality structure, which offers an expanded representation of interpersonal traits, particularly a distinction between Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness. A sample of 1304 adults completed the HEXACO-60 and several measures of creative achievement and activities. Latent variable models found that Agreeableness had no relationship with creativity, but Honesty-Humility did: people lower in Honesty-Humility had higher creativity scores, consistent with past work on arrogance and pretentiousness among creative people.     

Do academically gifted and nongifted students differ on the Big-Five and adaptive status? Some recent data and conclusions

This study examined a representative sample of academically gifted (N = 374) and non-gifted (N = 428) Israeli high-school students in order to compare these different student populations on the Big-Five and adaptive outcomes. Consistent with prior research, gifted students scored higher than non-gifted peers on Openness to Experience but scored lower on Neuroticism. In addition, gifted students scored lower on state anxiety facets and were not reliably different from their nongifted counterparts on mental distress or subjective well being. Overall, the empirical data are consistent with recent research suggesting that when gifted students are compared with nongifted students on various socio-emotional and personality characteristics, the results are not unfavorable to gifted students.     

Moral disengagement mechanisms in interactions of human drivers with autonomous vehicles: Validation of a new scale and relevance with personality,driving style and attitudes

The introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the road transportation systems raises questions with respect to their interactions with human drivers’, especially during the early stages. Issues such as unfamiliarity or false assumptions regarding the timid and safe behaviour of AVs could potentially result in undesirable human driver behaviours, for instance “testing” AVs or being aggressive towards them. Among other factors, morality has been determined as a source of aggressive driving behaviour. Following previous approaches on moral disengagement, the current paper argues that moral standards during interactions of human drivers with AVs could potentially blur, leading to the disengagement of self-regulation mechanisms of moral behaviour. The study investigates the impact of moral disengagement on the intention of human drivers to be aggressive towards AVs. To that end, an online survey was conducted including a newly developed survey of moral disengagement, adapted to the context of AVs. Moreover, measures of personality, driving style, attitudes towards sharing the road with AVs and perceived threats were collected. A confirmatory factor analysis provided support for the concept of moral disengagement in the context of AVs. Moreover, relationships between personality, driving style and attitudes towards sharing the road with AVs were found, via a structural equation modelling approach (SEM). The results could have implications in the future driver training and education programmes, as it might be necessary to not only focus on driving skills but also on the development of procedural skills that will improve the understanding of AVs’ capabilities and ensure safer interactions. Efforts on improving attitudes towards AVs may also be necessary for improving human driver behaviour.     

Perceived parental pressure and perceived coach pressure in adolescent and adult sport

ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to investigate whether adolescent and adult athletes’ perceptions of interpersonal perfectionistic performance pressures from parents and coaches differ as a function of athlete age.DesignA cross-sectional repeated-measures design was employed.MethodA total of 1544 youth sport athletes (M age = 15.44 years; SD = 2.12) and 1706 adult sport athletes (M age = 20.80 years; SD = 2.09) provided self-report levels of perceived parental pressure (PPP) and perceived coach pressure (PCP) in sport.ResultsStatistically significant interaction effects (ps < .001) were obtained from two repeated-measures analyses of variance. Interaction effects indicated that PPP tended to be lower in older/adult sport athletes than younger/adolescent sport athletes, whereas PCP tended to be higher in older/adult sport athletes than younger/adolescent sport athletes. Significant main effects (ps < .001) also revealed that, regardless of age and whether athletes competed in youth sport or adult sport, athletes had a tendency to perceive more pressure from coaches than parents.ConclusionResults highlight the need to differentiate between parents and coaches as potential sources of interpersonal perfectionistic pressures in sport. Results also demonstrate that athletes’ perceptions of parent and coach pressure surrounding performance expectations and standards in sport can differ as a function of athlete age. Future research that examines perfectionism in sport from a developmental perspective is recommended.     

Incremental criterion prediction of personality facets over factors: Obtaining unbiased estimates and confidence intervals

Many researchers have argued that higher order models of personality such as the Five Factor Model are insufficient, and that facet-level analysis is required to better understand criteria such as well-being, job performance, and personality disorders. However, common methods in the extant literature used to estimate the incremental prediction of facets over factors have several shortcomings. This paper delineates these shortcomings by evaluating alternative methods using statistical theory, simulation, and an empirical example. We recommend using differences between Olkin–Pratt adjusted r-squared for factor versus facet regression models to estimate the incremental prediction of facets and present a method for obtaining confidence intervals for such estimates using double adjusted-r-squared bootstrapping. We also provide an R package that implements the proposed methods.     

Self-esteem,personality and Internet Addiction: A cross-cultural comparison study

Previous work from Germany and Austria highlighted the importance of personality and excessive private Internet usage for Internet Addiction (IA). In a cross-cultural approach we tried to replicate a negative association between IA and the personality trait of self-directedness in Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Colombia, China, Taiwan and Sweden and as well the finding that persons with a damaged self-esteem have a higher proclivity for becoming Internet addicted in Bulgaria, Spain, Germany and Colombia. In total N = 989 took part in the study. Results show that the personality dimension self-directedness was negatively correlated to the IA score of the participants in all samples. In contrast, no interaction effect between implicit and explicit self-esteem on IA could be observed.     

Italian Adaptation and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Full and the Short Form of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory

This study was designed to adapt and to assess the reliability and factor structure of an Italian translation of the full and short form of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory. A sample of 1,244 Italian adults who had experienced a range of adverse life events participated in this study. Five models of the underlying structure of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory were tested via confirmatory factor analyses. Analyses of both the short and full form of the PTGI provided support for the original correlated five-factor structure. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported the invariance of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory across gender.     

How did I get here? Individual differences in perceived retrospective personality change

People's beliefs about their own past personality development are associated with current and future self-concepts. Here, we report on 2 studies designed to elucidate the way people think about retrospective changes to their own personality. We found that incremental theories of personality were associated with greater perceived retrospective personality change and that perceived retrospective personality change was associated with the belief that specific volitional and situational causes were involved. In addition, we found that across all Big-5 personality traits and agency, higher current standing (in the socially desirable direction) was positively associated with greater perceived retrospective personality change. This research demonstrates how people vary in their beliefs about retrospective personality change.     

Are our samples representative? Understanding whether temperament influences infant dropout rates at 3 and 7 months

In this study, we examined whether infant temperament predicted study dropout at 3.5 and 7 months and whether dropout was stable across time. Dropout was measured across four experimental tasks (free-play, ERP, still-face, and eye tracking). Temperament was not related to dropout at either timepoint. Dropout was not stable across time, nor was it stable across tasks. These findings suggest that individual differences in temperament are not systematically related to study completion across experimental tasks with varied requirements. These findings additionally suggest that dropout is not consistent across tasks, which may support the utility of multi-study data collection methods.     

Personality and space: Introversion and seclusion

Two studies examined whether extraversion was associated with different types of geographical preferences. During the first study, participants were given free time and directed to return to the designated location after 45 min, where they completed a questionnaire. This study found that extraversion is inversely associated with the seclusion level of the space in which participants preferred to spend this free time. In Study 2 participants in various university campus locations completed a personality questionnaire. Extraversion was positively associated with the openness of the location, and inversely associated with the distance from the center of the campus. These findings suggest that extraversion is systematically associated with different space preferences and use.