scholarly journals Serendipity as chaos or discovery – exploring the role of personality and sense of coherence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jannica Heinström ◽  
◽  
Eero Sormunen ◽  

Introduction. Individual differences have long been said to influence serendipity. Empirically, however, robust evidence is lacking for this connection. This study addressed this research gap by linking serendipity to personality traits and sense of coherence. Method. Data from 140 respondents was collected by an online survey. The survey measured the five-factor model personality traits, sense of coherence and serendipitously found useful and interesting information. Analysis. The data was analysed by a general linear model regression analysis. Results. Only 7% of variance of serendipity/usefulness and 10% of serendipity/interest could be explained by personality and sense of coherence. Usefulness was linked to sense of coherence (low comprehensibility), while interest was linked to personality (extraversion, agreeableness and low negative emotionality). Conclusions. Individual differences in serendipity was found both related to a negative cognitive experience of information chaos and a positive affective-behavioural experience of discovery. Lack of control over the information flow could lead to a sense that acquisition of useful information is governed by chance rather than conscious efforts. Activity, social connectedness and positive emotionality, in turn, would increase the likelihood to discover interesting information.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Efrat Barel ◽  
Yonathan Mizrachi ◽  
Maayan Nachmani

Background: The present study investigated the role of temperament and attachment security in predicting individual differences in the five factor personality traits among adults. As previous studies suggested the potential moderating role of attachment in the association between temperament and personality traits, the present study sought to examine an interactionist model combining attachment and temperament in explaining individual differences in personality traits. Methods: A sample of 1871 participants (1151 women and 719 men) completed self-report measures of adult attachment style (the Relationships Questionnaire—RQ), temperament dimension (the Fisher Temperament Inventory—FTI), and personality domain (the Five Factor Model—FFM). Results: Partial correlational analyses revealed associations between attachment security and each of the five domains of the FFM, and few associations between some temperament dimensions and several domains of the FFM. Moderated regression analyses showed that attachment security moderated the associations between temperament dimensions and the Agreeableness domain of the FFM. Among secure individuals, those with higher scores on the Curious/Energetic, Cautious/Social Norm Compliant and Prosocial/Empathetic scales exhibited higher Agreeableness scores, whereas among insecure individuals, those with higher scores on the Analytic/Tough-minded scale exhibited lower scores on the Agreeableness scale. Conclusion: Overall, the current study provides evidence in support of the substantive role of social-environmental factors (Adult Attachment) as a moderating element bridging temperament-related personality elements and a number of their FFM manifestations.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. e0251097
Author(s):  
Anahita Shokrkon ◽  
Elena Nicoladis

The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) epidemic was first detected in China in December 2019 and spread to other countries fast. Some studies have found that COVID-19 pandemic has had adverse mental health consequences. Individual differences such as personality could contribute to people’s behaviors during a pandemic. In the current study, we examine how personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion (using the Five-Factor Model as our framework) are related to the mental health of Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from an online survey with 1096 responses, this study performed multiple regression analysis to explore how personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion predict the effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of Canadians. The results showed that personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion are associated with the current mental health of Canadians during COVID-19 pandemic, with extroversion positively related to mental health and neuroticism negatively related to it. Results contribute to the management of individual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and could help public health services provide personality-appropriate mental health services during this pandemic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Aitken Schermer ◽  
Georg Krammer ◽  
Richard D. Goffin ◽  
Michael D. Biderman

The differentiation of personality by intelligence hypothesis suggests that there will be greater individual differences in personality traits for those individuals who are more intelligent. Conversely, less intelligent individuals will be more similar to each other in their personality traits. The hypothesis was tested with a large sample of managerial job candidates who completed an omnibus personality measure with 16 scales and five intelligence measures (used to generate an intelligence g-factor). Based on the g-factor composite, the sample was split using the median to conduct factor analyses within each half. A five-factor model was tested for both the lower and higher intelligence halves and were found to have configural invariance but not metric or scalar invariance. In general, the results provide little support for the differentiation hypothesis as there was no clear and consistent pattern of lower inter-scale correlations for the more intelligent individuals.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Stern ◽  
Christoph Schild ◽  
Benedict C Jones ◽  
Lisa Marie DeBruine ◽  
Amanda Hahn ◽  
...  

Research on links between peoples’ personality traits and their voices has primarily focused on other peoples’ personality judgments about a target person based on a target person’s vocal characteristics, particularly voice pitch. However, it remains unclear whether individual differences in voices are linked to actual individual differences in personality traits, and thus whether vocal characteristics are indeed valid cues to personality. Here, we investigate how the personality traits of the Five Factor Model of Personality, sociosexuality, and dominance are related to measured fundamental frequency (voice pitch) and formant frequencies (formant position). For this purpose, we conducted a secondary data analysis of a large sample (2,217 participants) from eleven different, independent datasets with a Bayesian approach. Results suggest substantial negative relationships between voice pitch and self-reported sociosexuality, dominance and extraversion in men and women. Thus, personality might at least partly be expressed in people’s voice pitch. Evidence for an association between formant frequencies and self-reported personality traits is not compelling but remains uncertain. We discuss potential underlying biological mechanisms of our effects and suggest a number of implications for future research.


Author(s):  
Amanda A Sesker ◽  
Páraic S O’Súilleabháin ◽  
Ji Hyun Lee ◽  
Damaris Aschwanden ◽  
Martina Luchetti ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective This study investigates the association between childhood socioeconomic status (cSES) and risk of cognitive impairment in older adulthood, and whether Five Factor Model personality traits mediated this association. Methods A sample of 9,995 participants (mean age = 67.01 years) from the Health and Retirement Study were followed every two years from 2006 to 2018. cSES was tested as a predictor of risk of dementia and risk of cognitive impairment not dementia (CIND). Personality was tested as a mediator of these associations. Models were adjusted for age, gender, ethnicity, race, education, and baseline year. Results Although effect sizes were modest, results indicated that lower cSES was associated with higher risk of dementia (HR=0.88, [0.775, 0.985]). Higher cSES was also associated with higher Conscientiousness and lower Neuroticism. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism each accounted for 7.9% of the total effect of cSES on dementia. Results were similar for CIND. Conclusions Early childhood socioeconomic factors may contribute to cognitive impairment in older adulthood, an association mediated, in part, through adult personality traits.


2019 ◽  
pp. 135910531988459
Author(s):  
Urszula Barańczuk

The aim of the study was to evaluate the relation between the big five personality traits and sense of coherence. Data for the meta-analysis were collected from 19 studies which included 24 independent samples, 133 effect sizes, and 19,960 participants. Lower neuroticism and higher extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were associated with total sense of coherence as well as comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness, and reflection dimensions. Personality traits were not linked to balance. There were no moderating effects on these relationships. The study extends current knowledge on the associations between personality traits and sense of coherence.


2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172091156
Author(s):  
Philip Chen ◽  
Scott Pruysers ◽  
Julie Blais

Personality traits are one piece in the larger puzzle of political participation, but most studies focus on the Five-Factor Model of personality. We argue that the normative implications of the influence of personality on politics are increased when the personality traits being studied correlate with negative social behaviors. We investigate the role of the Dark Triad on political participation as mediated through political beliefs such as interest and knowledge. We find that Psychopathy and Narcissism are positively associated with political interest, but Narcissism is also negatively associated with political knowledge. In addition, both Psychopathy and Narcissism exert a direct, positive influence on participation. Our results imply that individuals exhibiting higher levels of Narcissism are not only less knowledgeable but also more interested in politics and more likely to participate when given the opportunity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Suzuki ◽  
K. D. Novak ◽  
B. Ait Oumeziane ◽  
D. Foti ◽  
D. B. Samuel

Abstract Psychophysiological measures have become increasingly accessible to researchers and many have properties that indicate their use as individual difference indicators. For example, the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential (ERP) thought to reflect error-monitoring processes, has been related to individual differences, such as Neuroticism and Conscientiousness traits. Although various tasks have been used to elicit the ERN, only a few studies have investigated its variability across tasks when examining the relations between the ERN and personality traits. In this project, we examined the relations of the ERN elicited from four variants of the Flanker task (Arrow, Social, Unpleasant, and Pleasant) that were created to maximize the differences in their relevance to personality traits. A sample of 93 participants with a history of treatment for psychopathology completed the four tasks as well as self-report measures of the general and maladaptive five-factor model (FFM) traits. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) of ERN amplitudes indicated that three of the four tasks (Arrow, Social, and Unpleasant) were unidimensional. Another set of CFAs indicated that a general factor underlies the ERN elicited from all tasks as well as unique task-specific variances. The correlations of estimated latent ERN scores and personality traits did not reflect the hypothesized correlation patterns. Variability across tasks and the hierarchical model of the ERN may aid in understanding psychopathology dimensions and in informing future endeavors integrating the psychophysiological methods into the study of personality. Recommendations for future research on psychophysiological indicators as individual differences are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Mõttus ◽  
Timothy Charles Bates ◽  
David M Condon ◽  
Dan Mroczek ◽  
William Revelle

Among the main topics of individual differences research is the associations of personality traits with life outcomes. Relying on recent advances of personality conceptualizations and drawing parallels with genetics, we propose that representing these associations with individual questionnaire items (markers of personality “nuances”) can provide incremental value for predicting and explaining them—often even without further data collection. For illustration, we show that item-based models trained to predict ten outcomes out-predicted models based on Five-Factor Model (FFM) domains or facets in independent participants, with median proportions of explained variance being 9.7% (item-based models), 4.2% (domain-based models) and 5.9% (facet-based models). This was not due to item-outcome overlap. Instead, personality-outcome associations are often driven by dozens of specific characteristics, nuances. Outlining item-level correlations helps to better understand why personality is linked with particular outcomes and opens entirely new research avenues—at almost no additional cost.


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