Are Trait–State Fit and State–Situation Fit Informative of Within-Person Processes of Personality State Expression?

Choosing the right behavior can oftentimes be an act of balance between one’s own preferences or tendencies and momentary situational affordances. How do people navigate these potentially different requirements? One way would be to choose the behavior that makes one feel good. Specifically, we argue that fit between personality traits and personality states and fit between personality states and situation characteristics should be associated with positive affect. Thereby, fit may provide feedback to within-person processes of personality state expression. In two experience sampling studies (Study 1: N = 194, 4,244 observations; Study 2: N = 254, 7,667 observations), we employed moderated multilevel polynomial regressions and response surface analysis to examine whether trait–state fit and state–situation fit were associated with state affect. We found a consistent pattern of interactions between personality traits, personality states, and situation characteristics predicting state affect, but did not find evidence for the hypothesized trait–state fit patterns or state–situation fit patterns. These findings have two main implications. First, the results suggest that fit patterns are not involved in associations between personality traits, personality states, situation characteristics, and state affect. However, because theories proposing fit are often imprecise regarding the operationalization of fit, it is difficult to draw concrete conclusions about these theories. Second, the large number of interactions between personality traits, personality states, and situation characteristics suggests that these three constructs should be studied together. The specific role of these interactions for personality processes needs to be further determined in future research.

Economic Games: An Introduction and Guide for Research

Prosocial behaviors constitute vital ingredients for all types of social interactions and relationships as well as for society at large. Corresponding to this significance, the study of prosocial behaviors has received considerable attention across scientific disciplines. A striking feature of this research is that most disciplines rely on economic games to measure actual prosocial behavior in controlled experimental settings. However, empirical research often fails to fully exploit the richness of this class of paradigms. The current work aims to overcome this issue by providing a theory-driven overview of and introduction to the variety of economic games for researchers in psychology and beyond. Specifically, we introduce prominent theories of games (Game Theory and Interdependence Theory) and show how the concepts from these theories can be integrated in a unifying theoretical framework considering games as providing specific situational affordances for behavior. Additionally, we describe several games in detail, including their structural features, the affordances they involve, the social motives that may guide behavior, the flexibility they entail to manipulate specific situational aspects and, thus, affordances, and typical research findings. We conclude that tailored selection and combination of games and game variants allows to obtain a unique understanding of the underlying psychological processes involved in prosocial behavior. As a practical tool for researchers, we also provide standardized game instructions and guidelines for the implementation of games in future research. Ultimately, the review can foster optimal use of economic games in future work and thereby set the stage for high-class, replicable, and innovative research on human prosociality.

Situational Affordances for Prosocial Behaviour: On the Interaction between Honesty–Humility and (Perceived) Interdependence

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

Integrating Personality Structure, Personality Process, and Personality Development

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

Visual context modulates action perception in 10-month-old infants

Research on early action perception has documented infants’ astounding abilities in tracking, predicting, and understanding other people’s actions. Common interpretations of previous findings tend to generalize across a wide range of action stimuli and contexts. In this study, ten-month-old infants repeatedly watched a video of a same-aged crawling baby that was transiently occluded. The video was presented in alternation with videos displaying visually either dissimilar movements (i.e., distorted human, continuous object, and distorted object movements) or similar movements (i.e., delayed or forwarded versions of the crawling video). Eye-tracking behavior and rhythmic neural activity, reflecting attention (posterior alpha), memory (frontal theta), and sensorimotor simulation (central alpha), were concurrently assessed. Results indicate that, when the very same movement was presented in a dissimilar context, it was tracked at more rear parts of the target and posterior alpha activity was elevated, suggesting higher demands on attention-controlled information processing. We conclude that early action perception is not immutable but shaped by the immediate visual context in which it appears, presumably reflecting infants’ ability to flexibly adjust stimulus processing to situational affordances.