Individual response profiles in the behavioral assessment of personality.

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]