Pathological Traits and Interpersonal Difficulties in Depressed Older Adults: Clinical versus Community Sampling

Personality pathology, represented by high neuroticism and low agreeableness in the Five Factor Model of Personality, has been identified as a predictor of depression in mixed-age samples and preliminary studies of older adults. Research on older people, however, has not examined the differential impact of pathological personality traits and processes on depression or examined them across treatment settings. This secondary analysis examined personality traits and processes as predictors of depression, evaluated the moderating effect of interpersonal problems, and assessed stratification of these personality variables across community and clinical settings. Older adults (N=395) ranging in age from 55 to 99 (M = 72.06; SD = 10.10) from inpatient psychiatric, outpatient medical, and community settings completed self-report measures of personality traits (NEO-FFI Agreeableness and Neuroticism), processes (Inventory of Interpersonal Problems), and depression (GDS-30). Higher neuroticism predicted worsened depressive symptoms (β = .765, p < .001), as did lower agreeableness (β = -.163, p = .002) and more interpersonal problems (β = .459, p < .001). Findings partially supported the stratification of personality traits and processes by setting. Interpersonal problems moderated neither the neuroticism-depression or agreeableness-depression relationships. Personality traits and processes predict depression in older adults across care settings but do not significantly interact. Levels of pathological traits and processes vary across community and clinical settings.

Enhancing the Language Learning Process of Students in the Costa Rican Educational System by Considering the Use of Authentic Materials in the EFL Classroom

Each student has different personality traits and processes information in multiple ways. Learning takes place more effectively when conditions are optimal and enriching. Teachers should provide students with meaningful and authentic materials in order to guarantee and help students attain their own learning. The following article intends to offer practical ideas on how to incorporate authentic materials in the teaching process as vehicles to help students get the most out of them in order to enhance their learning development. The expressed ideas will focus on receptive skills; that is to say, aural and reading skills. A connection to the implementation of the new syllabus of the Ministry of Public Education (MEP), the «Action Oriented Approach», is also addressed in the following paragraphs.

The Big Question in Creativity Research: The Transcendental Source of Creativity

In this commentary, I raise an etiological question, which has been virtually excluded from the horizon of contemporary scholarship. In spite of a long history of philosophical, mystical, and religious approaches considering the transcendent and/or spiritual sources of human creativity, mainstream creativity researchers have become gradually reluctant to acknowledge the supernatural influences in this human endeavour. This account is either disregarded altogether or re-interpreted in a way that substitutes supernatural connections with observable and measurable processes. On the one hand, the latter approach appears to fall within the premises of modern science and thereby earns substantial attention the scientific community. On the other, this could be one of the reasons why creativity research has reached its epistemological cul-de-sac. I argue that by retaining the source of creativity within an individual, one annihilates the whole constellation of personality traits and processes, which have transcendent characteristics. It is important to integrate the study of transcendent experience into the study of cognitive, personality, and environmental underpinnings of creative faculties. A possible direction for this change is offered by transpersonal psychology, which makes an attempt to resurrect an investigation of spiritual reality and integrate it in the study of modern psychology. At the end of the commentary, I sketch a transcendental model of creativity developed along the lines of a transpersonal paradigm.