Be yourself,believe in yourself,and be happy: Self‐efficacy as a mediator between personality factors and subjective well‐being

Strobel, M., Tumasjan, A. & Spörrle, M. (2011). Be yourself, believe in yourself, and be happy: Self‐efficacy as a mediator between personality factors and subjective well‐being. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52, 43–48. Research has shown close connections between personality and subjective well‐being (SWB), suggesting that personality traits predispose individuals to experience different levels of SWB. Moreover, numerous studies have shown that self‐efficacy is related to both personality factors and SWB. Extending previous research, we show that general self‐efficacy functionally connects personality factors and two components of SWB (life satisfaction and subjective happiness). Our results demonstrate the mediating role of self‐efficacy in linking personality factors and SWB. Consistent with our expectations, the influence of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness on life satisfaction was mediated by self‐efficacy. Furthermore, self‐efficacy mediated the influence of openness and conscientiousness, but not that of neuroticism and extraversion, on subjective happiness. Results highlight the importance of cognitive beliefs in functionally linking personality traits and SWB.     

Spontaneous categorizers retain more than spontaneous alphabetizers

Immediate and delayed free recall of unstructured verbal materials were assessed for alphabetizers and categorizers after varying study times. Alphabetizers and categorizers did not differ in immediate recall, but retention following a 6-day interval was consistently higher for categorizers than for alphabetizers. Both immediate and delayed recall increased with study time, which did not interact with learning strategy. In the next experiment alphabetizers and categorizers learned two lists, the second of which was categorically structured or unstructured. No retroactive interference on first-list recall was produced by the learning of the structured list, but the learning of the unstructured list produced retroactive interference for the alphabetizers only. It was suggested that, although both alphabetizers and categorizers probably use their respective strategies for other verbal tasks, the categoric strategy should create less interference because specific 'categories are rarely encountered in successive tasks.