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A long-standing problem in the behavioral assessment of personality is the individual specifically of response. Often, different persons externalize the same trait in different responses. One solution to this problem is to aggregate many different responses. The paper compares the power of responses aggregation for predicting self- and other-ratings of personality of personality with two alternative of response selection; the nomothetic strategy of selecting the response with the highest overall predictive power, and the more idiographic strategy of selecting, for each individual, the most extreme response. Seventy subjects were videotaped in a sequence of social situations inducing shyness to various degrees. Five different nonverbal measures of shyness all correlated significantly with the subjects self- or other-rated shyness, and showed low correlations across subjects and a substantial cross-situational consistency of response profiles. Response aggregation and both strategies of response selection were found to be equality powerful in predicting the subjects self- and other-rating of shyness from the five behavioural responses. Therefore, these findings somewhat dampen the hope more respect for the individual case may improve anesthetic assessment procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces the articles published in the June 1988 issue of the "European Journal of Personality." Expansion of the domain of personality language by introducing personality-descriptive verbs; Review of literature on questionnaires used for measuring depression, anxiety and neuroticism; Reminiscence of authors' experiences with the Act Frequency Approach to personality.

Focuses on the significance of studying personality and aggression. Importance of the aggression phenomena from a practical point of view; Attractiveness of aggression as a research domain due to the development of theoretical models and research strategies; Conception of the study of aggression as prototypical for modern personality psychology.

This study proceeds from an earlier one that examined the ‘Big Five’ factors (Peabody & De Raad, 2002). That study considered the substantive nature of five factors from six European psycholexical studies. The results supported Big Five Factor III (Conscientiousness), but Factors I (Extraversion) and II (Agreeableness) often split into two factors. Big Five Factors IV (Emotional Stability) and V (Intellect) often failed to appear in coherent form. The failures might cause the splits, with five factors required. For three factors, the splits might not occur, and the three large (‘Big Three’) factors could appear. The present study pursues this implication, using three factors from the same six studies. The factors that split are now generally unified. This supports the Big Three and not the Big Five. This result is generally confirmed for several additional studies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two issues regarding associations between negative emotions are addressed: (i) whether different types of data imply similar associations and (ii) whether these associations can be accounted for by the overlap between emotion components. In study 1, issue (i) was examined using individual differences covariation, situational covariation, and judged emotion similarity data. Results showed that the associations implied by the different data types were highly similar. Regarding issue (ii), we argue theoretically that component overlap may account for the obtained correspondence. Study 2 empirically demonstrated that the different types of association were strongly related to overlap in appraisals and action tendencies. Similarity judgments, however, seemed to be primarily based on emotion co-occurrence, and were only to a smaller degree directly related to component overlap. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of several personality variables, from both within and beyond the domain of the Big Five personality factors, were used to predict a variety of complex behaviour outcomes of some social and cultural significance (e.g. alcohol consumption and grade point average). Analyses focused on replicated predictions across participants in four countries (Canada, England, Germany, and Finland) and on the relative predictive accuracies of narrow trait predictors versus broad factor predictors. The results indicated substantial consistency in those predictions across cultures for several of the criteria. Furthermore, the narrow traits were able to account for more criterion variance than were the broad factors underlying those traits. Our data contraindicate the increasingly common practice of using only a few personality factor measures to predict complex human behaviours. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent history of personality psychology is rapidly reviewed with the aim of indicating significant cues of the progress which has taken place and of the problems which are still pending. In this regard, a three-stage model of progress provides the arguments which introduce personality psychology into the domain of ‘complexity’. Readmission of individual differences in the investigation of basic processes, attention to marginal perturbances in between non-significant deviations, and use of circumplex models to make sense of multiple facets of phenomena are indicated as viable avenues to the complexity of personality psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

McCrae (1990) has argued that Openness to Experience is a fundamental dimension of personality that is not well represented among English-language trait adjectives. Presumably, then, studies of personality adjectives will inevitably fail to capture at least one fundamental personality dimension. I argue that the language does contain many adjectives referring to Openness, and that recent studies of the language of personality reveal a large factor clearly related to both Openness and Intellect. These studies support both the Openness construct and the questionnaire version of the five basic factors. Lexical and questionnaire methods appear to converge on a single structural framework for basic personality traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was designed to explore the psychological characteristics of individuals how score high on a measure assessing health orientation. The measure was constructed in the framework of the cognitive orientation theory and consists of beliefs of four types (about goals, rules and norms, oneself, and general) referring to themes such as trusting people, control, and enjoyment. The subjects were 176 healthy adults (88 men, 88 women ) in the age range 31–50 (M = 39.4 years) examined in the framework of a health survey. They were administered the Cognitive Orientation of Health Questionnaire and other measures assessing emotions, authoritarianism, locus of control daydreaming, repressiveness, neuroticism, somatic complaints, somatization, and alexithymia. The main results obtained by ANOVA and multiple regression analyses were that high-scores on health orientation also scored higher on love, joy, contentment hostility, jealousy (men only), emotional reactions, positive daydreams, internal control repressiveness, neuroticism, functional—actional self-descriptions, and negative self-references. High0-scorers on health orientation scored lower on depression, anxiety, fear, jealousy (women only), negative daydreams, poor attentional control, somatic complaints, somatization, alexithymia, positive self-references, and self-descriptions that capitalize on body parts, weight, and appearance. The major conclusions refer to the conception of a psychological general health orientation and its manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the lessons that can be learned from the mistakes of the past. After a critical, constructive analysis of current theorizing and research, important directions of future personality psychology are described against the background of a general theoretical framework. It is argued that individual functioning cannot be understood or explained if the environmental factors that are operating in the individual's interactions with the environment and the biological factors that are constantly interacting with the cognitive—emotional system are not considered. Finally, the article focuses on conceptual and methodological issues that are of major importance for further progress in personality psychology, viz. (a ) the match between level of psychological processes and type of data, (b) the nature of psychological phenomena studied in terms of variables, (c) the use of chronological age as the marker of individual development, and (d) the comparison between a variable and a person approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies are reported which sustain the importance of individual differences in the study of aggression. Irritability, emotional susceptibility, dissipation-rumination, tolerance toward violence, and proneness to guilt feelings provide a better understanding of the various forms of aggression. Prosocial behaviour, emotional instability, and physical and verbal aggression proved to be important indicators to children's more general adjustment. To go beyond the traditional paradigm of research on aggression a structural and interactive-interpersonal analysis of aggression is recommended. Aggression as a unitary phenomenon is called into question. Instead, it is stated that the various facets of aggression find an explanation and acquire meaning within the context of global personality development and functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the terms ‘temperature’, ‘character’ and ‘personality’ have been used to refer to what we now mean by the term ‘personality’. Temperature refers to the raw material out of which personality evolves. Personality is a person's coherent manner of interacting with himself/herself and with the environment. The concept of temperament has been prominent with Eastern European psychologist and with development psychologist in North America. A number of developmental theories of temperament are discussed, and differences and similarities between temperament parameters and personality parameters are described. The genetics of personality are presented and evaluated. Mechanistic and dynamic interactions are distinguished, and the multidimensional interaction model of anxiety and relevant research are discussed. A preliminary interaction model of anxiety, stress, and coping is presented. Finally, the temperamental nature of personality is discussed, and for possible rapprochements between personality and temperature are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aggression, as a variable of psychological study, has the halfmarks of a deeply ingrained personality trait. It is related to genetic and physiological factors it emerges early m life but is influence and shaped by a child's life experiences it is consistently associated with gender and is stable or predictable over time told across situations. However, it does not follow that aggression must be viewed as a drive. On the contrary, in this article we argue that aggression is best represented internally as a collection of specific ‘scripts’ for social behaviour, emphasizing aggressive responding, and the associative structure relating these scripts to each other, to external ones, and to outcome experiences. The construction and maintenance of these scripts obey well-understood principles of human information processing. Once established, these networks of scripts may be extremely resistant to change. The result is a set of cognitive structures that promote consistent forms of instrumental and hostile aggression over time and across situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several implications of the cognitive viewpoint on personality are tested and the predictive validity of cognition processing variables is assessed with judgement of parents and friends as a criterion measure. Free recall of items was related to cognitive schemas but reaction time during score recall was not. Ease of faking as well as response latency during faking were not related to cognitive schemas. Intra-individual analysis revealed a consistent non-linear relationship between response latency and item score in all condition of the experiment. Although some cognitive process variables were correclated with the criterion measures, adding these variables to item scores did not always increase the predictive validity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the derivation of taxonomy of personality-description verbs. In the introduction the verb domain is delineated relative to other domains of the language of personality. It is argued that verbs theoretically useful in bridging the gap between trait language and act language, the aim is to provide a representative and effective instrument for registering judgements on personality. In a first study the steps are described that were followed to arrive at a list of personality-descriptive verbs. Both the present authors and layjudges (n=22) took part in this. Five hundred and forty-three verbs resulted from this study. Study 2 (n=200) describes the determination of the internal structions of the domain of verbs through factors analysis of both self- and partner-ratings. By applying a method of rotation to perfectly congruent weights the verb-structure turned out to be invariant under the self- and partner-conditioners. The last part of the study investigates the relationship between personality-descriptive verbs and adjectives. Regressions of verb-rating on the adjective-ratings and of adjective-rating on the verb-ratings were calculated and factor analysis were performed on the residuals matrices. The results show the existence of additional verb-dimensions above those already established in the adjective domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]