This study describes the relation between personality items' validities, defined as the items' correlations with acquaintance ratings on the Big 5 personality factors, and other itemmetric properties including ambiguity, syntactic complexity, social desirability, content, and trait indicativity. Five external validity coefficients for each item on the California Psychological Inventory were cor...

OBJECTIVE To determine the rates of psychiatric disorder and personality variables in a sample of older people who had committed suicide and to compare the rates in a subgroup of this sample with those in a control group of people who died from natural causes. DESIGN Descriptive psychological autopsy study, including interviews with informants, of psychiatric and personality factors in 100 su...

The thesis of these volumes is that the study of personality traits has advanced towards " normal science " in the sense of a Kuhnian paradigm (cf. Eysenck, 1981; Kuhn, 1962). That is, most researchers in this area share a set of common core beliefs supported by empirical evidence. These include the stability of traits over time, a significant genetic and biological influence on personality, an...

BACKGROUND Determining the ways in which personality traits interact with contextual determinants to shape social behavior remains an important area of empirical investigation. The specific personality trait of neuroticism has been related to characteristic negative emotionality and associated with heightened attention to negative, emotionally arousing environmental signals. However, the mechan...

To investigate whether personality traits affect the rate of decline of gray matter volume, we analyzed the relationships between personality traits and the annual rate of changes of gray matter volume in 274 healthy community dwelling subjects with a large age range by applying a longitudinal design over 6 years, using brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) and the Revised NEO Personality Inven...

The authors investigate the illusory correlation phenomenon as a possible contributor to the persistence of graphology's use to predict personality. Participants unfamiliar with graphology inspected handwriting samples paired with fabricated personality profiles. In Experiment 1, handwriting samples and personality profiles were randomly paired. In Experiment 2, discernible correlations near un...

The author explores the viability of a comparative approach to personality research. A review of the diverse animal-personality literature suggests that (a) most research uses trait constructs, focuses on variation within (vs. across) species, and uses either behavioral codings or trait ratings; (b) ratings are generally reliable and show some validity (7 parameters that could influence reliabi...