Depressive disorders often co-occur with personality disorders. The extent to which depressive disorders influence treatment outcome in personality disorders remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of co-morbid depression on recovery from personality disorders and improvements in psychosocial functioning. This study drew data from a randomized-controlled trial in whic...

On-line personality tests are increasingly being used in a number of areas, from psychological research to commercial testing services, and interest in them seems to be growing. In addition to those who are professionally concerned with psychometric testing, people in general (or at least a sizeable number of Internet users) seem to be fascinated by the topic. There are newsgroups and other dis...

To further the potential for applied personality studies, we present a methodology for assessing personality in nonhuman animals without a priori assumptions, using behavioral measures to discriminate personality survey results. Our study group consisted of 12 free-ranging, provisioned, adult Tibetan macaques Macaca thibetana at the Valley of the Wild Monkeys, China. We asked familiar Chinese p...

Personality variables have always predicted important behaviors and outcomes in industrial, work, and organizational psychology. In this commentary, we first review empirically supported structural models of personality that show the following: (a) Personality traits are hierarchically organized, (b) the Big Five are not orthogonal, (c) abnormal personality measures assess the same continuum of...

Researchers often use very abbreviated (e.g., 1-item, 2-item) measures of personality traits due to their convenience and ease of use as well as the belief that such measures can adequately capture an individual's personality. Using data from 2 samples (N = 437 employees, N = 355 college students), we show that this practice, particularly the use of single-item measures, can lead researchers to...

How are retrospective accounts of family rearing environments linked to adult personality? We addressed this question by measuring both domains in a sample of 180 reared-apart twins. Twins completed extensive measures of rearing environments (the Minnesota-Briggs History Record, the Block Environmental Questionnaire, the Family Environment Scale, and the Physical Facilities Questionnaire) and a...

Personality is an important predictor of various outcomes in many social science disciplines. However, when personality traits are not the principal focus of research, for example, in global comparative surveys, it is often not possible to assess them extensively. In this article, we first provide an overview of the advantages and challenges of single-item measures of personality, a rationale f...

The purpose of the present study was to explore cognitive symptoms of personality disorder traits by means of Baddeley’s working memory model. Forty-nine college students were tested for personality disorder traits with the Coolidge Axis II Inventory, and they were given measures assessing executive control, working memory, including general working memory capacity (Operation-Word Span), phonol...

Measures of the Big Five factors of personality were used to predict a variety of criterion variables thought to represent behaviors of some social and cultural significance (e.g., alcohol consumption, grade point average). Analyses focused on replicated predictions across 2 independent samples of participants (Ns = 276 and 142) with 3 different measures of the Big Five (the NEO Five-Factor Inv...