Journal of Research in Personality最新文献

To measure narratives, individuals often participate in a life story interview, which bears similarity to a narrative therapeutic approach. Given that clinical interventions were shown to impact change in personality traits and characteristics, the present study explored whether narrating one’s life story is also linked to such changes. The pre-registered study compared 123 life-story-interview participants (M_age = 35.44 years) with 123 control-sample participants (M_age = 35.50 years). We assessed participants’ personality traits, optimism, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and affect before and 1 and 3 years after the interview. The findings suggest that the life story interview does not lead to consistent changes in personality traits and characteristics, indicating that this interview setting developed for measurement is different from an intervention.

Current research provides conflicting views of the relationship between cumulative lifetime adversity and dispositional functioning. We examined this relationship in a sample of adults (N = 1009), conducting the analysis three ways: by utilizing a sum score of adversity across all ages; examining events that occurred before and after age 18 separately; and assessing this relationship using empirically-derived domains of adversity. Results indicate that the type of adversity has a unique impact on future well-being. These findings underscore that adversity’s unique impact on well-being is influenced by the way in which adversity is operationalized, more so than by the timing of adverse events. Results highlight the importance of clarifying the nuanced relationship between adverse life events and mental health in future research.

The accumulation of day-to-day stressors can impact mental and physical health. How people respond to stressful events is a key mechanism responsible for the effects of stress, and individual differences in stress responses can either perpetuate or prevent negative consequences. Most research on daily stress processes has focused on affective responses to stressors, but stress responses can involve more than just affect (e.g., behavior, cognitions). Additionally, most research has studied the role of neuroticism in shaping those responses, but many other individual differences are associated with stress. In this study, we more broadly characterized daily stress processes by expanding the nomological networks of stress responses to include Big Five personality states. We also linked those stress responses to all Big Five traits, as well as individual differences in stress variety, severity, and controllability. We studied a sample of participants (N = 1,090) who reported on stressful events, their appraisal of events in terms of severity and controllability, and their Big Five personality states daily for 8–10 days (N = 8,870 observations). Multi-level structural equation models were used to separate how characteristics of the perceived stressful situation and characteristics of the person play into daily stress processes. Results showed that (1) all Big Five personality states shift in response to perceived stress, (2) all Big Five personality traits relate to average levels of perceived stress variety, severity, and controllability, (3) individual differences in personality and average perceived stress variety and perceived severity relate to the strength of personality state responses to daily stress, albeit in a more limited fashion. Our results point to new pathways by which stressors affect people in everyday life and begin to clarify processes that may explain individual differences in risk or resilience to the harmful effects of stress.

Research finds cross-sectional relationships between mentalizing impairments and maladaptive personality traits. The current study connects mentalizing impairments to dynamic interpersonal processes using a multi-method design. A sample of 218 participants completed the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC; Dziobek et al., 2006) to assess mentalizing ability. Subsequently, participants rated their agentic and communal behavior and their perception of interaction partners’ agentic and communal behavior over 21-days. Mentalizing ability moderated the within-person relationship between behavior and perception for both agency and communion. Worse performance on the MASC was associated with weaker interpersonal complementarity, suggesting that mentalizing impairments lead to deviations from expected patterns of behavior and perception across interpersonal situations. These findings confirm the assumption of Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory that mentalization impairments can disrupt normative interpersonal processes (Cain et al., 2024, Pincus and Hopwood, 2012).

Does an environment of high economic inequality encourage and breed the Dark Triad traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy)? In four studies, using correlational and experimental methods, we sought to elucidate the nexus between economic inequality perception and the Dark Triad. Study 1 (N = 454) indicated that individuals who perceive greater inequality score higher on the Dark Triad traits (except for psychopathy). When living in an economically unequal context, people tend to endorse the behaviors and mindsets of the Dark Triad traits except for psychopathy (Study 2; N = 199). People considered residents in an economically unequal society as high on the Dark Triad traits (Study 3; N = 159). Moreover, the Dark Triad traits (except for psychopathy) are considered as adaptive, allowing people to obtain more benefits in an economically unequal society (Study 4; N = 157). This study extends the determinants of the Dark Triad traits to the economic environment, thus enriching our understanding of the Dark Triad and its distal shaping factor.

Emotional stressor reactivity and recovery from stressors are associated with the personality trait neuroticism. We examined whether higher extraversion or openness might buffer these associations in daily life. Participants from two age-heterogeneous samples (lifespan: n = 364, aged 14–88 years; late adulthood: n = 170, aged 66–89 years) answered personality questionnaires and reported their momentary negative affect (NA) and stressors six times per day over nine or seven days, respectively. Higher neuroticism was associated with higher overall NA in both samples, but with more pronounced stressor reactivity only in the late adulthood sample. Neither extraversion nor openness moderated associations between neuroticism and stressor reactivity or recovery. We discuss the role of different personality traits in stress processes for different age groups.

Is a psychologically rich life a more cognitively complex one? In two studies, we explored whether individual differences in happiness, meaning in life, and psychological richness would be differentially associated with information processing styles such as attributional complexity, holism, and essentialism. In Study 1 (N = 436), we found that psychological richness was associated with greater attributional complexity, holism, and less essentialism, whereas happiness was associated with less attributional complexity. Meaning was also associated with attributional complexity but unrelated to holism and essentialism. In Study 2 (N = 516), a pre-registered replication, we again found that psychological richness was associated with more attributional complexity and holism, and marginally less essentialism. In contrast, happiness and meaning were unrelated to attributional complexity, holism, and essentialism. Across two studies, then, psychological richness was consistently associated with more attributional complexity and holism, whereas happiness and meaning were not. The key findings remained largely the same after controlling for all the Big Five personality traits and demographic variables.

This pre-registered study assessed actual donations to two groups of victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria in February 2023 while considering various theoretically-relevant contextual and personality factors as determinants of donations. In a diverse German online sample (N = 496), most participants (62.9 %) donated something, and only few (24.0 %) were selective in their donations, donating more to one group of victims than to the other. Dispositional honesty-humility added to the prediction of donation behavior beyond contextual factors. Selective donations, however, were largely driven by (contextual) perceptions of need. Overall, our findings provide novel insights into donation behavior and highlight the importance of personality in understanding individual differences in donations.

This study tested whether dispositional emotionality and personality traits moderated the emotion a person experienced when engaging in mind wandering. Participants (n = 264) completed measures of dispositional emotionality and personality. Then on two separate days they completed a 24-hour ecological momentary assessment protocol, responding every 30 min during wake times if they were mind wandering, and how angry, sad, anxious, and happy they felt, for a total of 8,530 assessments. Using multilevel models, we found the following when mind wandering versus not: trait anger predicted more anger, depressive symptomatology more sadness, openness to experience less sadness, neuroticism more anger, and conscientiousness less happiness. Results indicate a synchrony between emotions experienced while mind wandering to one’s dispositional emotionality and personality.

Sense of purpose refers to the extent to which one feels that they have personally meaningful goals and directions guiding them through life. Though this construct predicts a host of benefits, little is known regarding the extent to which sense of purpose fluctuates within an individual and the affective changes tied to those fluctuations. The current study uses daily diary data to addresses this gap by exploring (1) how much sense of purpose and different components of purpose fluctuate from one day to the next, (2) the extent to which these fluctuations correlate with positive and negative affect, and (3) whether dispositional sense of purpose and age correlate with greater variability. Participants (N = 354) reported on their sense of purpose and positive and negative affect every day for 10 days. Results suggest that approximately 45–61 % of the variability in sense of purpose scores occurs between-person depending on how it is assessed. Furthermore, the within-person variability in sense of purpose is more strongly correlated with changes in positive affect relative to negative affect. Finally, higher levels of dispositional sense of purpose and age do not appear to be associated with how much variability an individual experiences in their purposefulness from one day to next. The discussion focuses on what these findings mean for the trait-like nature of sense of purpose, short-term sense of purpose measurement, lifespan development, and intervention efforts.