Journal of Personality最新文献

Objective: Test whether global self-reports of urgency moderated the within-person associations of affect and impulsive behaviors.

Background: Negative urgency is a personality trait that is a risk factor for a range of psychopathology. Although it is assumed that global self-reports of urgency measure individual tendencies to act more impulsively in the face of negative emotions, evidence from ecological momentary assessment studies is mixed.

Method: In this Registered Report, we used ecological momentary assessment data from a large sample of young adults (n = 496, age 18-22, 5 surveys per day for 40 days).

Results: All forms of momentary impulsivity were impaired in moments when people reported more intense negative emotions, but global self-reports of urgency did not explain individual differences in this association. Moreover, averaged affective states, rather than specific dimensions, affective circumplex, or appraisals, best predicted impulsive states.

Conclusions: Results suggest that face-valid interpretations of global self-report of urgency are inaccurate, and it may be important to understand how some people come to understand themselves as high on urgency rather than assuming that people's self-reports of their motivations are accurate. Momentary experiences of emotions globally impact multiple weakly to moderately associated impulsive behaviors, and future research should seek to understand both when and for whom these associations are strongest.

Introduction: People low in trait distress tolerance are at higher risk for harmful patterns of substance use. Some evidence suggests that maladaptive motives for substance use account for this correlation. However, the generality of these associations remains in doubt because virtually all available data come from North American samples.

Method: Using data from 7 countries (total N = 5858; U.S., Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, South Africa, Canada, and England), we examined distress tolerance's association with alcohol- and cannabis-related problems in young adults. On an exploratory basis, we examined how distress tolerance related to different substance-use motivations.

Results: We found that distress tolerance was inversely related to problematic alcohol and cannabis use (rs = -0.14 and - 0.13). There was notable variation across countries in the magnitude of these effects, particularly for cannabis-related problems. Additionally, exploratory analyses revealed statistically significant (cross-sectional) indirect effects of distress tolerance on substance-related problems via substance-use motivations related to neutralizing negative emotions.

Conclusions: Distress tolerance's role in substance-use problems appears to generalize beyond North America, although effect sizes were generally small and varied notably across geographical regions. Distress tolerance's connection with negative reinforcement processes (e.g., coping motives) warrants attention as a possible mediator of its association with problematic substance use.

Objective/background: Conservative ideology, broadly speaking, has been widely linked to greater happiness and meaning in life. Is that true of all forms of a good life? We examined whether a psychologically rich life is associated with political orientation, system justification, and Protestant work ethic, independent of two other traditional forms of a good life: a happy life and a meaningful life.

Method: Participants completed a questionnaire that assessed conservative worldviews and three aspects of well-being (N = 583 in Study 1; N = 348 in Study 2; N = 436 in Study 3; N = 1,217 in Study 4; N = 2,176 in Study 5; N = 516 in Study 6).

Results: Happiness was associated with political conservatism and system justification, and meaning in life was associated with Protestant work ethic. In contrast, zero-order correlations showed that psychological richness was not associated with conservative worldviews. However, when happiness and meaning in life were included in multiple regression models, the nature of the association shifted: Psychological richness was consistently inversely associated with system justification and on average less political conservatism, suggesting that happiness and meaning in life were suppressor variables.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that happiness and meaning in life are associated with conservative ideology, whereas psychological richness is not.

Background: Does experiencing adversity engender kindness, and if so, for whom? Two studies tested the hypothesis that adversity predicts increased pro-social outcomes, and that this relationship is strongest for individuals who view others as good and trustworthy, or benevolent.

Method: In Study 1, a cross-sectional survey design was utilized, and in Study 2 a longitudinal survey was conducted.

Results: In Study 1 (N = 359), the number of lifetime adverse life events was associated with increased volunteering, empathic concern, and self-reported altruism. The association of adversity and altruism was stronger for those with greater benevolence beliefs. In Study 2 (N = 1157), benevolence beliefs were assessed, and in subsequent years, adverse life events were reported. The number of past-year adverse life events predicted more volunteering and charitable involvement, but only among people with high benevolence beliefs.

Conclusion: Exposure to adversity may be associated with increased pro-social behavior among those with higher benevolence beliefs. In part, this could be due to benevolence beliefs increasing the expectation that one's efforts will be appreciated and reciprocated.

Objective and background: According to a recently proposed theoretical framework, different personality traits should explain pro-social behavior in different situations. We empirically tested the key proposition of this framework that each of four "core tendencies" (i.e., the shared variance of related traits) specifically predicts pro-social behavior in the presence of a different situational affordance.

Methods: We used a large-scale dataset (N = 2479) including measures of various personality traits and six incentivized economic games assessing pro-social behavior in different social situations. Using bifactor modeling, we extracted four latent core tendencies and tested their predictive validity for pro-social behavior.

Results: We found mixed support for the theoretically derived, preregistered hypotheses. The core tendency of beliefs about others' pro-sociality predicted pro-social behavior in both games involving dependence under uncertainty, as expected. Unconditional concern for others' welfare predicted pro-social behavior in only one of two games providing a possibility for exploitation. For conditional concern for others' welfare and self-regulation, in turn, evidence relating them to pro-social behavior in the presence of a possibility for reciprocity and temporal conflict was relatively weak.

Conclusion: Different features of social situations may activate different personality traits to influence pro-social behavior, but more research is needed to fully understand these person-situation interactions.

Entringer, T. M., Gebauer, J. E., & Kroeger, H. (2023). Big Five personality and religiosity: Bidirectional cross-lagged effects and their moderation by culture. Journal of Personality, 91(3), 736–752.

After publication of the article “Big Five personality and religiosity: bidirectional cross-lagged effects and their moderation by culture” (2023), Richard Lucas and Julia Rohrer have made us aware that our cross-lagged panel models were not entirely specified as we had intended. Specifically, those models specified synchronous correlations among the Big Five traits at the first and last waves, but not at the two waves in-between. We are thankful to Lucas and Rohrer for bringing this issue to our attention (we had intended to include synchronous correlations among the Big Five traits for all waves, but accidently used inappropriate lavaan code to specify those correlations).

All results of our cross-lagged panel models when synchronous correlations among the Big Five traits were specified for all four waves can be accessed here: https://osf.io/gn8xa/?view_only=27038964954d4485a2d418dd3a469838

We apologize for this error.

Objective: Researchers have called for an approach that examines the conditions under which perfectionistic strivings (PS) may be beneficial or detrimental to psychological functioning. We adopted a self-regulation perspective and tested whether individual differences in self-regulation (procrastination, emotion regulation) moderate PS's relationships with achievement and well-being in an academic/work-related achievement context.

Method: A sample of 183 preservice teachers participated in a study that combined "traditional" longitudinal assessment (six performance situations over a 9-month period) with repeated ambulatory assessment (measuring well-being, procrastination, and emotion regulation during a total of 910 preparation phases that preceded performance situations).

Results: Mean levels of achievement, well-being, and emotion regulation were found to be stable over time, whereas procrastination decreased on average across preparation phases. Results from latent variable interaction models indicated that individual differences in intraindividual change in procrastination over time moderated the relationship between PS and well-being (but not achievement) in the expected direction: The less individuals decreased in procrastination over time, the more negative the relationship between PS and well-being was. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence of a moderating effect of emotion regulation.

Conclusion: The study contributes to a nuanced perspective on the adaptiveness of PS.

Objective: Myriad psychological research evinces a negative association between self-control and aggression with some arguing for self-control failure as a cause of aggression. Recent literature suggests that the relationship between aggression and self-control is likely more complex and even positive in some cases. One source of such conflict in the literature could be the presence of unaccounted for random item slopes in commonly used measures of self-control which may inflate the likelihood of Type I errors. This study (N = 1386) tested the hypothesis that self-control would share random item slopes with the facets of trait aggression using random item slope regression.

Method: We measured trait aggression and self-control via two common self-reports: the Buss-Perry Questionnaire and the Brief Self-Control Scale.

Results: Our analyses revealed that the facets of trait aggression shared significant random item slopes with self-control and that many of these slopes were positive, rather than negative. We also found that Type I error inflation was evident in models that did not account for these random slopes.

Conclusions: These findings may in part explain some of the conflicting results in the literature and that researchers interested in studying self-control and aggression should test for random item slopes.

Objective: To examine longitudinal associations among stressful life events and identity processess in emerging adults while accounting for within-person and between-person effects.

Background: Theoretical perspectives suggest that stressful life events may impact one's identity (i.e., coherent sense of self), but few studies have considered how changes in stressful life events are associated with changes within an individual's identity development over time (within-person effects).

Methods:  Recent stressful life events (i.e., academic problems, friendship problems, romantic problems, and time pressure) and the processes through which identity develops (e.g., exploring in breadth and depth) were examined longitudinally (T1-T3) in a sample of emerging adults (N = 1125, M_age = 17.96 years).

Results: Random-intercept cross-lagged modeling demonstrated that at the between-person level, emerging adults with greater academic and friendship problems, as well as more time pressures (relative to their counterparts), tended to engage in greater ruminative exploration. Further, those with more academic problems tended to demonstrate weaker commitment-making and exploration in breadth and depth (relative to their counterparts). Within-person increases in romantic problems predicted lower commitment-making and higher ruminative exploration over time.

Conclusion: Findings suggest that romantic problems may predict within-person changes in identity processes, whereas academic problems, friendship problems, and time pressure may be more concurrently related to identity development.