Bartók, Biography, and the Violin

Biography takes the scant facts of a life that are available to scrutiny, like the waypoints on a journey to be mapped, and attempts to form a coherent narrative from them. That coherence is, to at least some degree, contingent upon the ideological position of the author and as Michael Benton has noted, “the biographical subject is a textual creation as much as a historical recreation.” While fully acknowledging that one cannot “read back” from the works of an author to their life, Benton has described the substance of literary outputs as “quasi-facts” to be set beside “historical facts” and argued that these “can be seen as reflecting some contemporary events or as sublimating some experiences in the writer’s past or mirroring some authorial state of mind.” This article draws on the First Violin Sonata as such a quasi-fact of Bartók’s life to question whether biographical information can or should impact the ways that we understand and perform his music. The article additionally considers whether the content of individual works as mental products may have something tangible to impart about their composer’s personality. Given the broad consensus around the so-called “Five-Factor Model” of personality measurement within the field of psychology, it speculates whether this might offer a tool to refine our portrait of Bartók through analysis of his music.

MSA: The forgotten index for identifying inappropriate items before computing exploratory item factor analysis

Kaiser’s single-variable measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) is a very useful index for debugging inappropriate items before a factor analysis (FA) solution is fitted to an item-pool dataset for item selection purposes. For reasons discussed in the article, however, MSA is hardly used nowadays in this context. In our view, this is unfortunate. In the present proposal, we first discuss the foundation and rationale of MSA from a ‘modern’ FA view, as well as its usefulness in the item selection process. Second, we embed the index within a robust approach and propose improvements in the preliminary item selection process. Third, we implement the proposal in different statistical programs. Finally, we illustrate its use and advantages with an empirical example in personality measurement.

New Approach of Measuring Human Personality Traits Using Ontology-Based Model from Social Media Data

Human online activities leave digital traces that provide a perfect opportunity to understand their behavior better. Social media is an excellent place to spark conversations or state opinions. Thus, it generates large-scale textual data. In this paper, we harness those data to support the effort of personality measurement. Our first contribution is to develop the Big Five personality trait-based model to detect human personalities from their textual data in the Indonesian language. The model uses an ontology approach instead of the more famous machine learning model. The former better captures the meaning and intention of phrases and words in the domain of human personality. The legacy and more thorough ways to assess nature are by doing interviews or by giving questionnaires. Still, there are many real-life applications where we need to possess an alternative method, which is cheaper and faster than the legacy methodology to select individuals based on their personality. The second contribution is to support the model implementation by building a personality measurement platform. We use two distinct features for the model: an n-gram sorting algorithm to parse the textual data and a crowdsourcing mechanism that facilitates public involvement contributing to the ontology corpus addition and filtering.

Development of Consistency Personality Measurement Instruments on Students at SMA Dwijendra Bualu

This research is a type of research and development. Measurement of personality consistency was carried out by testing the validity of the instrument items by applying the product moment correlation formula and testing the reliability of the questionnaire with Cronbach's Alpha coefficient. Based on the VC calculation on the content validation test with the Gregory formula, the results are 1 or > 0, it is stated that the personality consistency character instrument is very valid. The results of data analysis conducted to determine the validity of items using the product moment formula obtained 39 items declared valid or very good. Based on these results, it is expected that students are able to develop personality consistency so that they have goals and efforts or continuous development, this is still needed even though they have succeeded in achieving their goals in life.

Open-Source Personality Trait Norms for the United Kingdom and Ireland

Most copyrighted personality inventories facilitate norm-referencing through illustrative tables, yet their application to the many fields relevant to personality measurement is constrained by the need for stakeholders to possess the requisite financial resources to access them. Using an IPIP-NEO-300 dataset from Johnson’s IPIP-NEO data repository, we created open-source norm tables for different age groups (14–17 years; 18–25 years; and 30+ years) within a combined standardization sample from the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland ( N = 18,591). The newly created tables are freely available online ( https://osf.io/tbmh5 ), and there is no need to ask for permission to modify them. We provide general instructions that can be used to create open-source personality trait norms for other countries, settings, and age groups, as well as gender-specific norms. There is great potential for these norms to be used in various settings and their open-source freedoms may encourage future collaborations and investigations.

The Fakeability of Personality Measurement with Graded Paired Comparisons

This pre-registered study compares the faking resistance of Likert scales and graded paired comparisons (GPCs) analyzed with Thurstonian IRT models. Based on findings on other forced-choice formats, we hypothesized that GPCs would be more resistant to faking than Likert scales by resulting in lower score inflation and better recovery of applicants’ true (i.e., honest) trait scores. A total of N = 573 participants completed either the Likert or GPC version of a personality questionnaire first honestly and then in an applicant scenario. Results show that participants were able to increase their scores in both the Likert and GPC format, though their score inflation was smaller in the GPC than the Likert format. However, GPCs did not exhibit higher honest–faking correlations than Likert scales; under certain conditions, we even observed negative associations. These results challenge mean score inflation as the dominant paradigm for judging the utility of foeced-choice questionnaires in high-stakes situations. Even if FC factor scores are less inflated, their ability to recover true trait standings in high-stakes situations might be lower compared with Likert scales. Moreover, in the GPC format, faking effects correlated almost perfectly with the social desirability differences of the corresponding statements, highlighting the importance of matching statements equal in social desirability when constructing forced-choice questionnaires.

Construct and Predictive Validity of an Assessment Game to Measure Honesty–Humility

Research on commercial computer games has demonstrated that in-game behavior is related to the players’ personality profiles. However, this potential has not yet been fully utilized for personality assessments. Hence, we developed an applied (i.e., serious) assessment game to assess the Honesty–Humility personality trait. In two studies, we demonstrate that this game adequately assesses Honesty–Humility. In Study 1 ( N = 116), we demonstrate convergent validity of the assessment game with self-reported Honesty–Humility and divergent validity with the other HEXACO traits and cognitive ability. In Study 2 ( N = 287), we replicate the findings from Study 1, and also demonstrate that the assessment game shows incremental validity—beyond self-reported personality—in the prediction of cheating for financial gain, but not of counterproductive work and unethical behaviors. The findings demonstrate that assessment games are promising tools for personality measurement in applied contexts.