scholarly journals Integrating Personality Structure, Personality Process, and Personality Development

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 503-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Baumert ◽  
Manfred Schmitt ◽  
Marco Perugini ◽  
Wendy Johnson ◽  
Gabriela Blum ◽  
...  

In this target article, we argue that personality processes, personality structure, and personality development have to be understood and investigated in integrated ways in order to provide comprehensive responses to the key questions of personality psychology. The psychological processes and mechanisms that explain concrete behaviour in concrete situations should provide explanation for patterns of variation across situations and individuals, for development over time as well as for structures observed in intra–individual and inter–individual differences. Personality structures, defined as patterns of covariation in behaviour, including thoughts and feelings, are results of those processes in transaction with situational affordances and regularities. It cannot be presupposed that processes are organized in ways that directly correspond to the observed structure. Rather, it is an empirical question whether shared sets of processes are uniquely involved in shaping correlated behaviours, but not uncorrelated behaviours (what we term ‘correspondence’ throughout this paper), or whether more complex interactions of processes give rise to population–level patterns of covariation (termed ‘emergence’). The paper is organized in three parts, with part I providing the main arguments, part II reviewing some of the past approaches at (partial) integration, and part III outlining conclusions of how future personality psychology should progress towards complete integration. Working definitions for the central terms are provided in the appendix. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Ashton ◽  
Kibeom Lee

The six–dimensional HEXACO model of personality structure and its associated inventory have increasingly been used in personality research. But in spite of the evidence supporting this structure and demonstrating its advantages over five–dimensional models, some researchers continue to use and promote the latter. Although there has been little overt, organized argument against the adoption of the HEXACO model, we do hear sporadic offerings of reasons for retaining the five–dimensional systems, usually in informal conversations, in manuscript reviews, on social media platforms, and occasionally in published works. In this target article, we list all of the objections to the HEXACO model that we have heard of, and we then explain why each objection fails. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology



2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 444-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Rothmund ◽  
Anna Baumert ◽  
Manfred Schmitt

We argue that replacing the trait model with the network model proposed in the target article would be immature for three reasons. (i) If properly specified and grounded in substantive theories, the classic state–trait model provides a flexible framework for the description and explanation of person × situation transactions. (ii) Without additional substantive theories, the network model cannot guide the identification of personality components. (iii) Without assumptions about psychological processes that account for causal links among personality components, the concept of equilibrium has merely descriptive value and lacks explanatory power. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



Author(s):  
Vadim Markovich Rozin ◽  
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Karnozova

This article consists of two parts. The firs parts analyzes the general mechanism of reflection within the framework of the theoretical discourse; while the second part the introduced concepts and schemes of reflection are illustrated on the case of “restorative justice”. The analysis of two other cases (“Confession” by St. Augustine, as well as “Confessions” and “Resurrection” by L. Tolstoy) allows characterizing the two phases of psyche – preceding and accompanying reflection. The first phase represents a “crystallization of distortion subjectivity”, and at times its dissolution. The second phase (situation) launches the personality process, which can be described using the terminology of L. S. Vygotstky as “interiorization" of intersubjective; this is the conscious work that gives a new perspective on the situation and its resolution. Analysis is conducted on the two procedures of reflection itself ‒ reflexive way out to the space of “placelesness” (M. Bakhtin) with the shift of integrity and thingness, and reflexive return (G. Shchedrovitsky). Study of the case of restorative justice demonstrates the organizational-technical attitude towards reflection, communication and ensuring mutual understanding between people separated by crime, as a new moment in comparison with the “individual reflection” as internally determined personality process. The inclusion of reflection into social practices and humanities substantiates the possibility of complementing the concept of subjectivity and its “restoration” with the concept of agency as the proclivity for new actions, acquisition of the “authorial position” in relation to one's personal life and interaction with others.



Author(s):  
Katherine S. Corker ◽  
M. Brent Donnellan

Research on situations has been reinvigorated within social and personality psychology. This chapter argues that a developmental perspective on situations can further enrich understanding of person-situation transactions and generate interesting predictions for future empirical tests. The approach is grounded in life course theory (Elder & Shanahan, 2006), an interactionist approach that considers person-situation dynamics as critical to understanding individual lives. The chapter describes an overarching perspective and reviews principles of personality development before turning to an explicit consideration of how situational characteristics (the Situational Eight DIAMONDS; Rauthmann et al., 2014) may change with age. It then outlines how a developmental tasks perspective and socioemotional selectivity theory can be integrated with the DIAMONDS characteristics. It concludes by describing different kinds of person-situation transactions that promote consistency and change in psychological characteristics across the lifespan and suggests a few future directions for research.



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emorie D Beck

This is a show on the science of how people are different from one another, where these differences come from, how they develop, and why they matter. The podcast's hosts are Lisanne de Moor, René Mõttus, and Rebekka Weidmann, three personality researchers. It is a collaboration of the European Journal of Personality and the European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP), and sponsored by EAPP. www.personalitypsychologypodcast.com. In this episode, we hear a presentation by Emorie Beck on her research on nomothetic and idiographic approaches to personality structure and change, couched in a historical perspective.



2000 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-624
Author(s):  
Sally Walters

Not all of the studies cited in the target article as evidence that fluctuating asymmetry (FA) predicts male mating success demonstrate that the observed asymmetry is, in fact, FA. FA is a population-level pattern of differences between sides. Unless the population-level distributional criteria of bilateral traits are reported, the meaning of asymmetry in individuals is unknown.



2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 312-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eranda Jayawickreme ◽  
Laura E. R. Blackie

This target article focuses on the construct of post–traumatic growth—positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. Prominent theories of post–traumatic growth define it in terms of personality change, and as a result, this area of research should be of great interest to personality psychologists. Despite this fact, most of the research on this topic has not been sufficiently informed by relevant research in personality psychology, and much of the extant research suffers from significant methodological limitations. We review the literature on post–traumatic growth, with a particular focus on how researchers have conceptualized it and the specific methodological issues associated with these conceptualizations. We outline some ways in which personality science can both be enriched by the study of this phenomenon and inform rigorous research on post–traumatic growth and provide a series of guidelines for future research of post–traumatic growth as positive personality change. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology



2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 917-943
Author(s):  
Ronald Fischer ◽  
Johannes Alfons Karl ◽  
Markus Luczak–Roesch ◽  
Velichko H. Fetvadjiev ◽  
Adam Grener

We present a new method for personality assessment at a distance to uncover personality structure in historical texts. We focus on how two 19th century authors understood and described human personality; we apply a new bottom–up computational approach to extract personality dimensions used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to describe fictional characters in 21 novels. We matched personality descriptions using three person–description dictionaries marker scales as reference points for interpretation. Factor structures did not show strong convergence with the contemporary Big Five model. Jane Austen described characters in terms of social and emotional richness with greater nuances but using a less extensive vocabulary. Charles Dickens, in contrast, used a rich and diverse personality vocabulary, but those descriptions centred around more restricted dimensions of power and dominance. Although we could identify conceptually similar factors across the two authors, analyses of the overlapping vocabulary between the two authors suggested only moderate convergence. We discuss the utility and potential of automated text analysis and the lexical hypothesis to (i) provide insights into implicit personality models in historical texts and (ii) bridge the divide between idiographic and nomothetic perspectives. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology



2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 655-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Columbus ◽  
Isabel Thielmann ◽  
Daniel Balliet

Individual differences in prosocial behaviour are well–documented. Increasingly, there has been a focus on the specific situations in which particular personality traits predict prosocial behaviour. HEXACO Honesty–Humility—the basic trait most consistently linked to prosocial behaviour in prior studies—has been found to predict prosociality most strongly in situations that afford the exploitation of others. Importantly, though, it may be the subjectively perceived situation that affords the behavioural expression of a trait. Following this reasoning, we tested the proposition that Honesty–Humility would predict prosocial behaviour more strongly in situations characterised by, and perceived to contain, two dimensions of interdependence that can afford exploitation: high conflict and high power. However, across a series of incentivised economic games and two large experience sampling studies, we only found inconsistent evidence for the association between Honesty–Humility and prosocial behaviour. Furthermore, the link between Honesty–Humility and prosociality was neither conditional on objective interdependence nor on subjective perceptions of interdependence. Nonetheless, perceptions of conflict and power tracked objective properties of economic games and were related to prosocial behaviour in the lab and field. Future research should take individuals’ subjective understanding of situations into account, which may also help understand the (generalisability of the) effect of Honesty–Humility on prosocial behaviour. © 2019 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology



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