What is personality? Two myths and a definition

This article addresses the longstanding problem that the field of personality psychology remains in need of a consensus formulation of its core subject matter, that of the nature of “personality” itself. Part 1 of the article presents some reminders about the traditional pre-empirical status of concepts in science. Part 2 introduces and calls into question two widely accepted but nonetheless questionable propositions about the nature of personality: (a) that the term refers to an underlying causal entity within a person, and (b) that the study of personality is the study of the whole person. Part 3 presents a definition of “personality”, discussion elaborating and clarifying this definition, and an explication of the ways in which it differs from previous definitions. Part 4 discusses some benefits that accrue both to having a consensus definition in general, and to acceptance of the present definition in particular.     

Distal predictors of trait driving anger. The influence of attachment styles through the mediation effect of general anger and self-esteem

Trait driving anger has been widely studied in recent years. However, whereas its proximal (personality) correlates have been well established, possible distal variables have not yet been explored. The aim of the current research study was to analyse the association of attachment styles with trait driving anger, by testing the hypothesis that both trait general anger and self-esteem would mediate this relationship. The results revealed positive and significant relationships between preoccupation, self-sufficiency, value of parental authority and parental interference, and trait driving anger. Furthermore, a SEM-based multiple mediation analysis showed that both trait general anger and self-esteem significantly mediated the relationship between preoccupation and trait driving anger, and self-sufficiency and trait driving anger, with a medium effect size (f² = 0.16). Finally, some aspects of the research in this new area are addressed, and both the clinical implications of these results and the limitations of the study are discussed.     

Influence of emotional task relevancy on the temporal dynamic of attentional bias in people with high-trait anxiety

ABSTRACT

It is unknown whether high-trait anxiety (HTA) individuals show facilitated attention or impaired attentional disengagement. In the present study, we have manipulated emotion and task relevance to explore the temporal dynamic of attentional bias in an HTA group via emotional attentional blink (EAB) and emotion-induced blindness (EIB). The results showed that the attentional blink effect was greater in the negative compared to neutral condition. When emotional stimulation was task-irrelevant at lag6, this enhanced effect was only present for the HTA group, indicating impaired attentional disengagement. However, when emotional stimulation was task-relevant at lag4, the enhanced attentional blink was absent for HTA but still present for LTA until lag8, suggesting facilitated attention for HTA. Thus, task relevancy of emotional distractor appears to influence attention biases in HTA individuals. In addition, individual characteristics modulate the magnitude and time window of the attentional blink in the context of EIB and EAB tasks.     

Anger arousal,deindividuation, and aggression

We tested the notion that angered persons' aggression would be increased through a process of excitation transfer when they are deindividuated, but that individuated subjects would be most aggressive in circumstances under which they could use the information that they had ingested an arousing drug as a pretext for their aggression. Sixty-two male undergraduates participated under either deindividuated or individuated conditions, ingested either 350 mg of caffeine or a placebo, were informed that they had either taken a stimulant or a nonarousing drug, and were all angered by a confederate. According to prediction, when deindividuated and aroused by caffeine the amount of noxious stimulation subjects delivered to the provocateur was greater if they believed that the drug they had taken was nonarousing than if they thought it was a stimulant; in contrast, individuated subjects' aggression was greater when aroused subjects believed the drug was a stimulant. The results are discussed in terms of excitation transfer and the effect of aggression inhibition on the use of information about one's arousal.     

领导领域中归因理论的研究述评

领导领域中的归因研究对于把握领导过程、组织绩效评估以及领导成员关系等问题均具有重要的理论与实际意义。文章回顾了自领导归因理论提出以后,领导归因领域中包括有关模型构建、验证与发展、内隐归因在内的相关研究;同时,对归因偏差、归因风格、领导成员关系、人格特质、领导类型、情绪、文化及相关人口学变量等因素与领导归因的关系研究进行了系统梳理;最后,分析、总结了该领域以往研究的不足及今后的研究趋势     

Culture and Causal Cognition

East Asian and American causal reasoning differs significantly. East Asians understand behavior in terms of complex interactions between dispositions of the person or other object and contextual factors, whereas Americans often view social behavior primarily as the direct unfolding of dispositions. These culturally differing causal theories seem to be rooted in more pervasive, culture-specific mentalities in East Asia and the West. The Western mentality is analytic, focusing attention on the object, categorizing it by reference to its attributes, and ascribing causality based on rules about it. The East Asian mentality is holistic, focusing attention on the field in which the object is located and ascribing causality by reference to the relationship between the object and the field.     

Surprise and Motivation of Causal Search: How Are They Affected by Outcome Valence and Importance?

Two studies investigated whether the importance and valence of a target person's achievement outcome affect (a) the intensity of surprise an observer feels about the actual outcome and (b) the role surprise plays in the motivation of the search for a causal explanation for the target's outcome. The present experiments involved conditions controlling for the confounds among outcome valence, importance, and surprise. Both studies revealed that surprise intensity was affected by outcome valence and importance so that an important negative outcome elicits the highest surprise and unimportant success elicited the second highest surprise. Causal search was strong only after (unexpected) important failures. Results are explained in terms of an extended expectancy-disconfirmation approach.     

Self-Reliance and Empathy: The Enemies of Poverty—and of the Poor

Starting with a brief review of why all post-industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution-affect-action model is used to show how dispositional attributes evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people's ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged.     

Do apes and children know what they have seen?

Chimpanzees and young children understand much about what other individuals have and have not seen. This study investigates what they understand about their own visual perception. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5-year-old children were presented with a finding game in which food or stickers were hidden in one of two or three tubes. We varied whether subjects saw the baiting of the tubes, whether subjects could see through the tubes, and whether there was a delay between baiting and presentation of the tubes to subjects. We measured not only whether subjects chose the correct tube but also, more importantly, whether they spontaneously looked into one or more of the tubes before choosing one. Most apes and children appropriately looked into the tubes before choosing one more often when they had not seen the baiting than when they had seen the baiting. In general, they used efficient search strategies more often than insufficient or excessive ones. Implications of subjects' search patterns for their understanding of seeing and knowing in the self are discussed. Accepted after revision: 7 January 2001 Electronic Publication