The Situational Eight DIAMONDS: a taxonomy of major dimensions of situation characteristics

Purpose in Daily Life: Considering Within-Person Sense of Purpose Variability

Sense of purpose refers to the extent to which one feels that they have personally meaningful goals and directions guiding them through life. Though this construct predicts a host of benefits, little is known regarding the extent to which sense of purpose fluctuates within an individual and the affective changes tied to those fluctuations. The current study uses daily diary data to addresses this gap by exploring (1) how much sense of purpose and different components of purpose fluctuate from one day to the next, (2) the extent to which these fluctuations correlate with positive and negative affect, and (3) whether dispositional sense of purpose and age correlate with greater variability. Participants (N = 354) reported on their sense of purpose and positive and negative affect every day for 10 days. Results suggest that approximately 45-61% of the variability in sense of purpose scores occurs between-person depending on how it is assessed. Furthermore, the within-person variability in sense of purpose is more strongly correlated with changes in positive affect relative to negative affect. Finally, higher levels of dispositional sense of purpose and age do not appear to be associated with how much variability an individual experiences in their purposefulness from one day to next. The discussion focuses on what these findings mean for the trait-like nature of sense of purpose, short-term sense of purpose measurement, lifespan development, and intervention efforts.

Never miss a beep: Using mobile sensing to investigate (non-)compliance in experience sampling studies

Given the increasing number of studies in various disciplines using experience sampling methods, it is important to examine compliance biases because related patterns of missing data could affect the validity of research findings. In the present study, a sample of 592 participants and more than 25,000 observations were used to examine whether participants responded to each specific questionnaire within an experience sampling framework. More than 400 variables from the three categories of person, behavior, and context, collected multi-methodologically via traditional surveys, experience sampling, and mobile sensing, served as predictors. When comparing different linear (logistic and elastic net regression) and non-linear (random forest) machine learning models, we found indication for compliance bias: response behavior was successfully predicted. Follow-up analyses revealed that study-related past behavior, such as previous average experience sampling questionnaire response rate, was most informative for predicting compliance, followed by physical context variables, such as being at home or at work. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for the design of experience sampling studies in applied research and future directions in methodological research addressing experience sampling methodology and missing data.

Beyond strategies: The when and why of emotion regulation in aging

Most research to date on potential age differences in emotion regulation has focused on whether older adults differ from younger adults in how they manage their emotions. We argue for a broader consideration of the possible effects of aging on emotion regulation by moving beyond tests of age differences in strategy use to also consider when and why emotion regulation takes place. That is, we encourage deeper consideration of contextual factors that spark regulation as well as the goals and motives underlying individuals' attempts to regulate their emotions. There may be age-related variation in all, some, or none of these components of emotion regulation. Descriptive work across all dimensions of emotion regulation is necessary to test and refine theories of emotional aging.

Face and context integration in emotion inference is limited and variable across categories and individuals

The ability to make nuanced inferences about other people's emotional states is central to social functioning. While emotion inferences can be sensitive to both facial movements and the situational context that they occur in, relatively little is understood about when these two sources of information are integrated across emotion categories and individuals. In a series of studies, we use one archival and five empirical datasets to demonstrate that people could be integrating, but that emotion inferences are just as well (and sometimes better) captured by knowledge of the situation alone, while isolated facial cues are insufficient. Further, people integrate facial cues more for categories for which they most frequently encounter facial expressions in everyday life (e.g., happiness). People are also moderately stable over time in their reliance on situational cues and integration of cues and those who reliably utilize situation cues more also have better situated emotion knowledge. These findings underscore the importance of studying variability in reliance on and integration of cues.

Neural representations of situations and mental states are composed of sums of representations of the actions they afford

Human behavior depends on both internal and external factors. Internally, people's mental states motivate and govern their behavior. Externally, one's situation constrains which actions are appropriate or possible. To predict others' behavior, one must understand the influences of mental states and situations on actions. On this basis, we hypothesize that people represent situations and states in terms of associated actions. To test this, we use functional neuroimaging to estimate neural activity patterns associated with situations, mental states, and actions. We compute sums of the action patterns, weighted by how often each action occurs in each situation and state. We find that these summed action patterns reconstructed the corresponding situation and state patterns. These results suggest that neural representations of situations and mental states are composed of sums of their action affordances. Summed action representations thus offer a biological mechanism by which people can predict actions given internal and external factors.

Translating the Transdiagnostic: Aligning Assessment Practices With Research Advances

Researchers and clinicians working within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fifth Edition, Text Rev (DSM-5-TR) framework face a difficult question: what does it mean to have an evidence-based assessment of a nonevidence-based diagnostic construct? Alternative nosological approaches conceptualize psychopathology as (a) hierarchical, allowing researchers to move between levels of description and (b) dimensional, eliminating artificial dichotomies between disorders and the dichotomy between mental illness and mental well-being. In this article, we provide an overview of ongoing efforts to develop validated measures of transdiagnostic nosologies (i.e., the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology; HiTOP) with applications for measurement-based care. However, descriptive models like HiTOP, which summarize patterns of covariation among psychopathology symptoms, do not address dynamic processes underlying the problems associated with psychopathology. Ambulatory assessment, well-suited to examine such dynamic processes, has also developed rapidly in recent decades. Thus, the goal of the current article is twofold. First, we provide a brief overview of developments in constructing valid measures of the HiTOP model as well as developments in ambulatory assessment practices. Second, we outline how these parallel developments can be integrated to advance measurement-based treatment. We end with a discussion of some major challenges for future research to address to integrate advances more fully in transdiagnostic and ambulatory assessment practices.

The positive-negative-competence (PNC) model of psychological responses to representations of robots

Robots are becoming an increasingly prominent part of society. Despite their growing importance, there exists no overarching model that synthesizes people's psychological reactions to robots and identifies what factors shape them. To address this, we created a taxonomy of affective, cognitive and behavioural processes in response to a comprehensive stimulus sample depicting robots from 28 domains of human activity (for example, education, hospitality and industry) and examined its individual difference predictors. Across seven studies that tested 9,274 UK and US participants recruited via online panels, we used a data-driven approach combining qualitative and quantitative techniques to develop the positive-negative-competence model, which categorizes all psychological processes in response to the stimulus sample into three dimensions: positive, negative and competence-related. We also established the main individual difference predictors of these dimensions and examined the mechanisms for each predictor. Overall, this research provides an in-depth understanding of psychological functioning regarding representations of robots.

Personality Science in the Digital Age: The Promises and Challenges of Psychological Targeting for Personalized Behavior-Change Interventions at Scale

With the rapidly growing availability of scalable psychological assessments, personality science holds great promise for the scientific study and applied use of customized behavior-change interventions. To facilitate this development, we propose a classification system that divides psychological targeting into two approaches that differ in the process by which interventions are designed: audience-to-content matching or content-to-audience matching. This system is both integrative and generative: It allows us to (a) integrate existing research on personalized interventions from different psychological subdisciplines (e.g., political, educational, organizational, consumer, and clinical and health psychology) and to (b) articulate open questions that generate promising new avenues for future research. Our objective is to infuse personality science into intervention research and encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations within and outside of psychology. To ensure the development of personality-customized interventions aligns with the broader interests of individuals (and society at large), we also address important ethical considerations for the use of psychological targeting (e.g., privacy, self-determination, and equity) and offer concrete guidelines for researchers and practitioners.

Geofencing in location-based behavioral research: Methodology, challenges, and implementation

This manuscript presents a novel geofencing method in behavioral research. Geofencing, built upon geolocation technology, constitutes virtual fences around specific locations. Every time a participant crosses the virtual border around the geofenced area, an event can be triggered on a smartphone, e.g., the participant may be asked to complete a survey. The geofencing method can alleviate the problems of constant location tracking, such as recording sensitive geolocation information and battery drain. In scenarios where locations for geofencing are determined by participants (e.g., home, workplace), no location data need to be transferred to the researcher, so this method can ensure privacy and anonymity. Given the widespread use of smartphones and mobile Internet, geofencing has become a feasible tool in studying human behavior and cognition outside of the laboratory. The method can help advance theoretical and applied psychological science at a new frontier of context-aware research. At the same time, there is a lack of guidance on how and when geofencing can be applied in research. This manuscript aims to fill the gap and ease the adoption of the geofencing method. We describe the current challenges and implementations in geofencing and present three empirical studies in which we evaluated the geofencing method using the Samply application, a tool for mobile experience sampling research. The studies show that sensitivity and precision of geofencing were affected by the type of event, location radius, environment, operating system, and user behavior. Potential implications and recommendations for behavioral research are discussed.

Toward an Index of Adaptive Personality Regulation

The idea that matching personality expression with situational demands is adaptive is implicit in many accounts of personality. Numerous constructs and measures have been posited to address this or similar phenomena. Few have proven adequate. In response, we proposed and tested a novel measurement approach (the APR index) assessing real-time behavior to rate participants' success in matching personality expression with situational demands, which we denote adaptive personality regulation. An experimental study (N = 88) and an observational study of comedians (N = 203) provided tests of whether the APR index constituted a useful metric of adaptive personality regulation. In both studies, the APR index showed robust psychometric properties; was statistically unique from mean-level personality, self-monitoring, and the general factor of personality expression; and provided incremental concurrent prediction of task/job performance. The results suggest that the APR index provides a useful metric for studying the phenomenon of successfully matching personality expression to situational demands.

Within-Individual Variation in Cognitive Performance Is Not Noise: Why and How Cognitive Assessments Should Examine Within-Person Performance

Despite evidence that it exists, short-term within-individual variability in cognitive performance has largely been ignored as a meaningful component of human cognitive ability. In this article, we build a case for why this within-individual variability should not be viewed as mere measurement error and why it should be construed as a meaningful component of an individual's cognitive abilities. We argue that in a demanding and rapidly changing modern world, between-individual analysis of single-occasion cognitive test scores does not account for the full range of within-individual cognitive performance variation that is implicated in successful typical cognitive performance. We propose that short-term repeated-measures paradigms (e.g., the experience sampling method (ESM)) be used to develop a process account of why individuals with similar cognitive ability scores differ in their actual performance in typical environments. Finally, we outline considerations for researchers when adapting this paradigm for cognitive assessment and present some initial findings from two studies in our lab that piloted the use of ESM to assess within-individual cognitive performance variation.

Events-Affect-Personality: A Daily Diary Investigation of the Mediating Effects of Affect on the Events-Personality Relationship

Our 10-day diary investigation anchored in dynamic personality theories, such as Whole Trait Theory examined (a) whether within-person variability in two broad personality traits Extraversion and Neuroticism is consistently predicted by daily events, (b) whether positive and negative affect, respectively partly mediate this relationship and (c) the lagged relationships between events, and next day variations in affect and personality. Results revealed that personality exhibited significant within-person variability, that positive and negative affect partly mediate the relationship between events and personality, affect accounting for up to 60% of the effects of events on personality. Additionally, we identified that event-affect congruency was accountable for larger effects compared to event-affect non-congruency.

Discovering trends of social interaction behavior over time: An introduction to relational event modeling : Trends of social interaction

Real-life social interactions occur in continuous time and are driven by complex mechanisms. Each interaction is not only affected by the characteristics of individuals or the environmental context but also by the history of interactions. The relational event framework provides a flexible approach to studying the mechanisms that drive how a sequence of social interactions evolves over time. This paper presents an introduction of this new statistical framework and two of its extensions for psychological researchers. The relational event framework is illustrated with an exemplary study on social interactions between freshmen students at the start of their new studies. We show how the framework can be used to study: (a) which predictors are important drivers of social interactions between freshmen students who start interacting at zero acquaintance; (b) how the effects of predictors change over time as acquaintance increases; and (c) the dynamics between the different settings in which students interact. Findings show that patterns of interaction developed early in the freshmen student network and remained relatively stable over time. Furthermore, clusters of interacting students formed quickly, and predominantly within a specific setting for interaction. Extraversion predicted rates of social interaction, and this effect was particularly pronounced on the weekends. These results illustrate how the relational event framework and its extensions can lead to new insights on social interactions and how they are affected both by the interacting individuals and the dynamic social environment.

A data-driven investigation of human action representations

Understanding actions performed by others requires us to integrate different types of information about people, scenes, objects, and their interactions. What organizing dimensions does the mind use to make sense of this complex action space? To address this question, we collected intuitive similarity judgments across two large-scale sets of naturalistic videos depicting everyday actions. We used cross-validated sparse non-negative matrix factorization to identify the structure underlying action similarity judgments. A low-dimensional representation, consisting of nine to ten dimensions, was sufficient to accurately reconstruct human similarity judgments. The dimensions were robust to stimulus set perturbations and reproducible in a separate odd-one-out experiment. Human labels mapped these dimensions onto semantic axes relating to food, work, and home life; social axes relating to people and emotions; and one visual axis related to scene setting. While highly interpretable, these dimensions did not share a clear one-to-one correspondence with prior hypotheses of action-relevant dimensions. Together, our results reveal a low-dimensional set of robust and interpretable dimensions that organize intuitive action similarity judgments and highlight the importance of data-driven investigations of behavioral representations.

Individual differences and personality traits across situations

BACKGROUND

According to the Big Five theory, personality can be classified into five traits (i.e., extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness), and past research showed that situations impact personality. In the present study, (1) we measured which of these five personality traits changed according to different situations and (2) tested whether the across-situation variability (ASV; i.e., a continuous variable showing how much people change their personality traits according to situations) was significantly connected with specific personality domains, revealing a potential marker of personality disturbance.

PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE

We recruited 80 participants (40 women) to complete the five situation-version (family, work, friends, romantic partner, and hobbies/leisure) of the Big Five Inventory to measure whether personality traits significantly changed across these situations. In addition, we ran a network analysis to reveal how the ASV is related to personality traits.

RESULTS

The findings showed that all traits significantly changed across the situations, except openness, which remained stable. The network analysis revealed that the ASV variable was especially connected with conscientiousness (in romantic partner and family situations).

CONCLUSIONS

Most personality traits were flexible, showing how important it is to consider the role of situations in the study of personality. Openness appeared to be particularly stable and understanding its nature represents a challenge for future studies. Finally, the network analysis demonstrated that the ASV shows specific connections with conscientiousness and might be a potential psychopathology marker.

Functional organization of social perception in the human brain

Humans rapidly extract diverse and complex information from ongoing social interactions, but the perceptual and neural organization of the different aspects of social perception remains unresolved. We showed short movie clips with rich social content to 97 healthy participants while their haemodynamic brain activity was measured with fMRI. The clips were annotated moment-to-moment for a large set of social features and 45 of the features were evaluated reliably between annotators. Cluster analysis of the social features revealed that 13 dimensions were sufficient for describing the social perceptual space. Three different analysis methods were used to map the social perceptual processes in the human brain. Regression analysis mapped regional neural response profiles for different social dimensions. Multivariate pattern analysis then established the spatial specificity of the responses and intersubject correlation analysis connected social perceptual processing with neural synchronization. The results revealed a gradient in the processing of social information in the brain. Posterior temporal and occipital regions were broadly tuned to most social dimensions and the classifier revealed that these responses showed spatial specificity for social dimensions; in contrast Heschl gyri and parietal areas were also broadly associated with different social signals, yet the spatial patterns of responses did not differentiate social dimensions. Frontal and subcortical regions responded only to a limited number of social dimensions and the spatial response patterns did not differentiate social dimension. Altogether these results highlight the distributed nature of social processing in the brain.

How Is Variety in Daily Life Related to the Expression of Personality States? An Ambulatory Assessment Study

People differ in the way they live their daily lives. For some people, daily life is characterized by multiple and diverse experiences, while others have more stability and routine in their lives. However, little is known about how variety in daily life relates to the expression of personality states. The present study examined within-person associations between variety in social partners, places, and activities with state expression. Data came from an ambulatory assessment study ( N = 962, Mage = 25.49) with four assessments per day over a period of six consecutive days. The results of the multilevel modeling analyses suggest that variety in daily life is associated with some, but not all, state expressions. For instance, on days when participants experienced a greater variety in activities, they reported being less neurotic and conscientious, but also more agreeable. In addition, the links between all social partners, places, and activities with the expression of the state were examined simultaneously to obtain more detailed information on the multifaceted nature of situation-state expression links. We conclude that variety in daily life has both theoretical and empirical relevance for the expression of personality states.

Customizing virtual interpersonal skills training applications may not improve trainee performance

While some theoretical perspectives imply that the context of a virtual training should be customized to match the intended context where those skills would ultimately be applied, others suggest this might not be necessary for learning. It is important to determine whether manipulating context matters for performance in training applications because customized virtual training systems made for specific use cases are more costly than generic "off-the-shelf" ones designed for a broader set of users. Accordingly, we report a study where military cadets use a virtual platform to practice their negotiation skills, and are randomly assigned to one of two virtual context conditions: military versus civilian. Out of 28 measures capturing performance in the negotiation, there was only one significant result: cadets in the civilian condition politely ask the agent to make an offer significantly more than those in the military condition. These results imply that-for this interpersonal skills application, and perhaps ones like it-virtual context may matter very little for performance during social skills training, and that commercial systems may yield real benefits to military scenarios with little-to-no modification.

Dynamics of personality: The Zurich model of motivation revived, extended, and applied to personality

Personality researchers are increasingly interested in the dynamics of personality, that is, the proximal causal mechanisms underlying personality and behavior. Here, we review the Zurich Model of Social Motivation concerning its potential to explain central aspects of personality. It is a cybernetic model that provides a nomothetic structure of the causal relationships among needs for security, arousal, and power, and uses them to explain an individual's approach-avoidance or "proximity-distance" behavior. We review core features of the model and extend them by adding features based on recent behavioral and neuroscientific evidence. We close by discussing the model considering contemporary issues in personality science such as the dynamics of personality, five-factor personality traits and states, and personality growth.

Personalized Prediction of Behaviors and Experiences: An Idiographic Person-Situation Test

A longstanding goal of psychology is to predict the things that people do and feel, but tools to accurately predict future behaviors and experiences remain elusive. In the present study, we used intensive longitudinal data (N = 104 college-age adults at a midwestern university; total assessments = 5,971) and three machine-learning approaches to investigate the degree to which three future behaviors and experiences-loneliness, procrastination, and studying-could be predicted from past psychological (i.e., personality and affective states), situational (i.e., objective situations and psychological situation cues), and time (i.e., trends, diurnal cycles, time of day, and day of the week) phenomena from an idiographic, person-specific perspective. Rather than pitting persons against situations, such an approach allows psychological phenomena, situations, and time to jointly predict future behaviors and experiences. We found (a) a striking degree of prediction accuracy across participants, (b) that a majority of participants' future behaviors are predicted by both person and situation features, and (c) that the most important features vary greatly across people.

Attachment Manifestations in Daily Interpersonal Interactions

The predominant focus in attachment research on trait-like individual differences has overshadowed investigation of the ways in which working models of attachment represent dynamic, interpersonally responsive socio-affective systems. Intensive longitudinal designs extend previous work by evaluating to what extent attachment varies over social interactions and the functional processes that underlie its fluctuation. We examined momentary activation of attachment orientations in the stream of peoples' daily lives and how those patterns were linked to interpersonal behavior. Based on an event-contingent, ambulatory 7-day assessment protocol (N=263; 3,971 interactions) operationalized using Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory, we examined whether contextually activated working models accounted for patterns of interpersonal (anti-)complementarity. Our analyses revealed that the situational activation of working models varied as a function of interpersonal perceptions of warmth, which were linked to greater state security and lower levels of anxious or avoidant expectations. These reactivity patterns, in turn, accounted for interpersonal complementarity. Avoidant attachment was linked to diminished and secure attachment to enhanced expressions of warmth. The analyses were robust even when controlling for momentary positive and negative affect and closeness of the relationship. Attachment expectations wax and wane across daily social interactions, and such fluctuations are reflective primarily of a process in which perceptions of others' warmth activate secure attachment expectations and lower insecure ones.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00117-6.

Modeling Dynamic Personality Theories in a Continuous-time Framework:An Illustration

Personality psychology has traditionally focused on stable between-person differences. Yet, recent theoretical developments and empirical insights have led to a new conceptualization of personality as a dynamic system (e.g., Cybernetic Big Five Theory). Such dynamic systems comprise several components that need to be conceptually distinguished and mapped to a statistical model for estimation. In the current work, we illustrate how common components from these new dynamic personality theories may be implemented in a continuous-time modeling framework. As an empirical example, we reanalyze experience sampling data from Sherman et al. (2015) with N = 180 persons (with on average T = 40 [SD = 8] measurement occasions) to investigate four different effects between momentary happiness, momentary extraverted behavior, and the perception of a situation as social: (1) between-person effects, (2) contemporaneous effects, (3) autoregressive effects, and (4) cross-lagged effects. We highlight that these four effects must not necessarily point in the same direction, which is in line with assumptions from dynamic personality theories.

Using a conversational agent for thought recording as a cognitive therapy task: Feasibility, content, and feedback

E-mental health for depression is increasingly used in clinical practice, but patient adherence suffers as therapist involvement decreases. One reason may be the low responsiveness of existing programs: especially autonomous systems are lacking in their input interpretation and feedback-giving capabilities. Here, we explore (a) to what extent a more socially intelligent and, therefore, technologically advanced solution, namely a conversational agent, is a feasible means of collecting thought record data in dialog, (b) what people write about in their thought records, (c) whether providing content-based feedback increases motivation for thought recording, a core technique of cognitive therapy that helps patients gain an understanding of how their thoughts cause their feelings. Using the crowd-sourcing platform Prolific, 308 participants with subclinical depression symptoms were recruited and split into three conditions of varying feedback richness using the minimization method of randomization. They completed two thought recording sessions with the conversational agent: one practice session with scenarios and one open session using situations from their own lives. All participants were able to complete thought records with the agent such that the thoughts could be interpreted by the machine learning algorithm, rendering the completion of thought records with the agent feasible. Participants chose interpersonal situations nearly three times as often as achievement-related situations in the open chat session. The three most common underlying schemas were the Attachment, Competence, and Global Self-evaluation schemas. No support was found for a motivational effect of providing richer feedback. In addition to our findings, we publish the dataset of thought records for interested researchers and developers.

Self-Other Agreement in Experience Sampling Measures

Experience sampling methodology (ESM) has provided researchers with a flexible and innovative measurement tool, and the methodology has become increasingly popular in several fields of psychology. Therefore, validity studies on such measures are important. The present study investigated convergent and discriminant validity of ESM measures using peer-ratings as the criteria. We obtained ESM self- and other-ratings of personality states, situation perceptions, and feelings from 344 occasions, from 49 target participants. The results showed that several—but not all—widely used ESM self-ratings have substantial and distinct self-other agreement. We conclude that many ESM self-reports are likely to capture, at least to an extent, target persons’ actual personality states, feelings, and situation perceptions.

Patterned person-situation fit in daily life: Examining magnitudes, stabilities, and correlates of trait-situation and state-situation fit

Person-situation fit can be operationalized as within-person associations between profiles of personality traits and situation characteristics ( trait-situation fit) as well as personality states and situation characteristics ( state-situation fit). We provide an initial examination of basic properties (magnitudes, individual differences, reliabilities, intercorrelations), short-term stability (across weeks), and nomological correlates of overall and distinctive profile-level person-situation fits. In a real-life, multi-method multi-occasion design ( N = 204–209), we obtained data on participants’ traits (self- and informant-reported) as well as, at four time-points from their everyday lives, on situation characteristics (self- and coder-reported) and states (self-reported). Profile scores ( q-correlations) were computed across 35 cognate items between the CAQ (traits), RSQ (situations), and RBQ (states). Our descriptive and exploratory findings indicated that trait-situation and state-situation fits were sizable (overall more so than distinctive forms), and that there were substantial individual differences, which were only modestly stable during a short period and had some plausible nomological correlates (i.e., lower depression and neuroticism, but higher psychological well-being and happiness) that were driven mainly by normativity. Most findings replicated across measurement sources (self- vs. other-reports). Person-situation fit concepts, once further corroborated, could further personality-psychological research.

Perception of major life events and personality trait change

Major life events can trigger personality trait change. However, a clear, replicable pattern of event-related personality trait change has yet to be identified. We examined whether the perception of major life events is associated with personality trait change. Therefore, we assessed young adults’ personality traits at five measurement occasions within 1 year. At the second measurement occasion, we also assessed their perception of a recently experienced major life event using the Event Characteristics Questionnaire. Contrary to our expectations, perceived impact of the event was not associated with the amount of personality trait change, but perceived valence was associated with changes in agreeableness and neuroticism. Exploratory analyses revealed some weak associations between other perceived event characteristics and the amount of personality trait change as well as interactions between perceived event characteristics and event categories in predicting changes in neuroticism. In general, effect sizes were small, and associations depended on the time interval between pre-event and post-event personality assessment. Results indicate that perceived event characteristics should be considered when examining event-related personality trait change.

Taking Stock and Moving Forward: A Personalized Perspective on Mixed Emotions

Research on mixed emotions is flourishing but fractured. Several psychological subfields are working in parallel and separately from other disciplines also studying mixed emotions, which has led to a disorganized literature. In this article, we provide an overview of the literature on mixed emotions and discuss factors contributing to the lack of integration within and between fields. We present an organizing framework for the literature of mixed emotions on the basis of two distinct goals: solving the bipolar-bivariate debate and understanding the subjective experience of mixed emotions. We also present a personalized perspective that can be used when studying the subjective experience of mixed emotions. We emphasize the importance of assessing both state and trait emotions (e.g., momentary emotions, general levels of affect) alongside state and trait context (e.g., physical location, culture). We discuss three methodological approaches that we believe will be valuable in building a new mixed-emotions literature-inductive research methods, idiographic models of emotional experiences, and empirical assessment of emotion-eliciting contexts. We include recommendations throughout on applying these methods to research on mixed emotions, and we conclude with avenues for future interdisciplinary research. We hope that this perspective will foster research that results in the organized accumulation of knowledge about mixed emotions.

The Day Evaluation Q-Sort

Abstract. The Day Evaluation Q-sort (DEQ) is a measure designed to describe the day as it is experienced. In two undergraduate samples ( Ns = 472 and 302), this research explores how the day is described, and how the evaluation of the day relates to personality attributes and to time spent in various daily activities. We find that individuals tend to describe their days as generally positive and productive, and that day evaluations are related to psychological attributes (Big Five traits, affect, and well-being) and time use. Day evaluations are not simply a reflection of the activities that make up the day. Two people spending their time similarly may evaluate the day differently. The DEQ is presented as a measure of day evaluations that captures variation in the way the day is experienced. These differences relate meaningfully to individual differences and how time is spent throughout the day.

Five reasons to cry—FRC: a taxonomy for common antecedents of emotional crying

Human beings are probably the only creatures with a capacity to shed emotional tears. While prior work has mostly used data-driven approaches to identify situational antecedents of adult crying, we present a theory-based taxonomy. Assuming that crying is preceded by the frustration or satisfaction of psychological needs, we postulate that the most common antecedents of crying can be organized into five categories—that is, the Five Reasons to Cry (FRC): loneliness, impotence, overload, harmony, and media. Testing our assumptions in a retrospective study (N = 720, pre-registered) and a thirty-day electronic diary study (N = 91) showed that (i) crying episodes could be reliably assigned to the FRC, (ii) the theorized relations to frustrated/satisfied psychological needs emerged, and (iii) the categories were systematically related to subjective well-being, indicating their criterion validity. In sum, this research provides a valid taxonomy of common situational antecedents of adult emotional crying.

Everyday Perceiver-Context Influences on Impression Formation: No Evidence of Consistent Effects

Facial impressions (e.g., trustworthy, intelligent) vary considerably across different perceivers and targets. However, nearly all existing research comes from participants evaluating faces on a computer screen in a lab or office environment. We explored whether social perceptions could additionally be influenced by perceivers' experiential factors that vary in daily life: mood, environment, physiological state, and psychological situations. To that end, we tracked daily changes in participants' experienced contexts during impression formation using experience sampling. We found limited evidence that perceivers' contexts are an important factor in impressions. Perceiver context alone does not systematically influence trait impressions in a consistent manner-suggesting that perceiver and target idiosyncrasies are the most powerful drivers of social impressions. Overall, results suggest that perceivers' experienced contexts may play only a small role in impressions formed from faces.

A Generative View of Rationality and Growing Awareness†

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as "intuitive statisticians" while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as "probing organisms." We first highlight how ecological rationality's focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue uncertainty. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies ecological rationality, which originate from the misapplication of concepts in psychophysics (e.g., signal detection, just-noticeable-differences). We then work through the most popular experimental task in the ecological rationality literature-the city size task-to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have informally been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology-in contrast to ecological rationality's focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given or available for statistical processing. Therefore we focus on the psychogenesis of awareness rather than psychophysics of cues. For any agent or organism, environments "teem" with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and the organism-directed probing that shapes awareness and perception. Cues in teeming environments are noticed when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a "cue-to-clue" transformation. In this sense, awareness toward a cue or cues is actively "grown." We thus argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. This generative approach not only applies to relatively mundane organism (including human) interactions with their environments-as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature-but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with-but modify-Herbert Simon's popular "scissors" metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments.

The Six Components of Social Interactions: Actor, Partner, Relation, Activities, Context, and Evaluation

Social interactions are essential aspects of social relationships. Despite their centrality, there is a lack of a standardized approach to systematize social interactions. The present research developed (Study 1) and tested (Study 2) a taxonomy of social interactions. In Study 1 (5,676 descriptions of social interactions from N = 708 participants, age range 18–83 years), we combined a bottom-up approach based on the grounded theory with a top-down approach integrating existing empirical and theoretical literature to develop the taxonomy. The resulting taxonomy (APRACE) comprises the components Actor, Partner, Relation, Activities, Context, and Evaluation, each specified by features on three levels of abstraction. A social situation can be described by a combination of the components and their features on the respective abstraction level. Study 2 tested the APRACE using another dataset (N = 303, age range 18–88 years) with 1,899 descriptions of social interactions. The index scores of the six components, the frequencies of the features on the most abstract level, and their correlations were largely consistent across both studies, which supports the generalizability of the APRACE. The APRACE offers a generalizable tool for the comprehensive, parsimonious, and systematic description of social interactions and, thus, enables networked research on social interactions and application in a number of practical fields.

Accumulating Knowledge in the Organizational Sciences

In some fields, research findings are rigorously curated in a common language and made available to enable future use and large-scale, robust insights. Organizational researchers have begun such efforts [e.g., metaBUS ( http://metabus.org/ )] but are far from the efficient, comprehensive curation seen in areas such as cognitive neuroscience or genetics. This review provides a sample of insights from research curation efforts in organizational research, psychology, and beyond—insights not possible by even large-scale, substantive meta-analyses. Efforts are classified as either science-of-science research or large-scale, substantive research. The various methods used for information extraction (e.g., from PDF files) and classification (e.g., using consensus ontologies) is reviewed. The review concludes with a series of recommendations for developing and leveraging the available corpus of organizational research to speed scientific progress.

On the Construct-Related Validity of Implicit Trait Policies

In response to recent calls to incorporate Implicit Trait Policies (ITPs) into personality research, the current study examined the construct-related validity of ITP measures. ITPs are defined as implicit beliefs about the effectiveness of behaviors that reflect a certain trait. They are assessed by utilizing the methodology of Situational Judgment Tests. We empirically examined ( N = 339) several underlying key assumptions of ITP theory, including trait-specificity, the relation to personality traits, their context-independence, and the relation to general domain knowledge. Overall, our results showed little support for these assumptions. Although we found some confirmation for expected correlations between ITPs and personality traits, most of the observed variance in ITP measures was either method-specific or due to measurement error. We conclude that the herein examined ITP measures lack construct-related validity and discuss implications for ITP theory and assessment.

COVID-19 vermijdingsgedrag: Het belang van persoonlijkheid en de relatie met toename in thuiswerken

De COVID-19 pandemie kan opgevat worden als een situatie waarin een specifieke vorm van trekactivatie plaatsvindt waarbij persoonlijkheid de kans op besmetting met het COVID-19 virus kan beïnvloeden. In dit onderzoek wordt gekeken naar de relatie tussen HEXACO persoonlijkheid en COVID-19 vermijdingsgedrag, dat wil zeggen het omgaan met de bedreiging die uitgaat van de pandemie en de mate waarin men zich schikt naar de COVID-19 gedragsregels. Daarnaast wordt gekeken in hoeverre COVID-19 vermijdingsgedrag een relatie heeft met een toename in thuiswerken. In een gestratificeerde Nederlandse steekproef van 932 volwassenen (waarvan N = 526 werkten) in september 2020 werd gevonden dat – naast leeftijd – hoge emotionaliteit en consciëntieusheid en lage extraversie de voornaamste unieke persoonlijkheidsvoorspellers van COVID-19 vermijdingsgedrag waren. Daarnaast voorspelden een selectie van zes facetten (angstigheid, sociabiliteit, ijver, weetgierigheid, onconventionaliteit en proactiviteit) COVID-19 vermijdingsgedrag beter dan de HEXACO domeinschalen. De belangrijkste voorspellers van een toename in thuiswerken waren het hebben van een kantoorbaan en een hoge opleiding. Het onderzoek maakt duidelijk dat individuele verschillen een grote rol spelen in hoe men omgaat met de pandemie, maar dat verschillen in opleiding en type baan het meest bepalend zijn voor de mate waarin men is gaan thuiswerken.

Socially Desirable Responding in Experience Sampling

Abstract. Experience sampling often makes use of items that are similar to personality questionnaire items. Arguably, this opens up for item-popularity effects, where some respondents react to the items’ level of evaluative phrasing, causing a separate factor. Gauging the risk of item popularity effects in experience sampling is important since the multifactorial aspect of the responses to the items may cause spurious correlations. We investigate this in one original study and two existing datasets. The results reveal that evaluativeness in experience sampling items creates the same type of problems as in self-rating inventories. We conclude that personality researchers need to be aware that the experience sampling method is not vaccinated against socially desirable responding, and that careful phrasing of items promotes purer personality measures. This allows for more optimal testing of theoretical models of personality, as the fit between data and model will not concern variance in socially desirable responding but in the relevant constructs.

Conceptualizing and Studying Characteristics, Units, and Fits of Persons and Environments: A Coherent Synthesis

Based on a perspective on personality coherence as the extent to which personality-relevant characteristics are differentiated and integrated within a person in his or her environment, we propose a synthesis that builds on and harmonizes existing and partly conflicting theories, methodological approaches, and empirical findings. This understanding of personality coherence needs clear definitions of person and environment characteristics. We define traits as characteristics of the person, adaptations as characteristics of the person-in-contexts, and states as characteristics of the person-in-situations. Thus, our synthesis involves concepts of environments and person-environment units. Next, we provide testable criteria to differentiate characteristics of persons from characteristics of person-environment units and to identify dispositional traits for a narrow-sense perspective on personality coherence. We raise awareness of the importance of fit between (profiles of) person and environment characteristics for an understanding of the integrated uniqueness of persons in their environments. We outline implications of this broader perspective on personality coherence for personality development, self-regulation, social integration, well-being, and psychological interventions. Lastly, we conclude that the analysis of an individual’s uniqueness and personality differences requires information about how well-defined, well-differentiated, well-integrated, and well-operationalized person(ality) variables are actually expressed in, or interact and transact with, the individual environment.

Pathological personality, situations, and their joint influences on daily emotional symptoms

OBJECTIVE

The present research aims to advance current understanding on how individuals with pathological personality traits construe their day-to-day situational experiences.

METHOD

College students (N = 231) completed a measure of personality pathology, followed by six assessments of everyday situations and anxiety/depression symptoms over two weeks.

RESULTS

Multilevel analyses indicated that personality pathology was meaningfully associated with situational experiences. Major findings suggested that situations that entailed aggravations and interpersonal confrontations were associated with negative affectivity, antagonism, and psychoticism. Detached individuals were less likely to experience pleasant and social situations. Exploratory analyses suggested an amplification effect where individuals high on personality pathology were more anxious or depressed when they perceived certain situational features, compared to their low trait counterparts. However, such cross-level interactions constituted a small minority; most personality traits and situations exerted additive effects on symptoms.

CONCLUSION

Situational experiences appear to be driven in part by personality pathology. The exacerbation of daily negative symptoms can be attributed to the joint (largely additive) influence of the trigger situations and pathological personality traits.

Two Ways to Stay at the Top: Prestige and Dominance Are Both Viable Strategies for Gaining and Maintaining Social Rank Over Time

The dual-strategies theory of social rank proposes that both dominance and prestige are effective strategies for gaining social rank (i.e., the capacity for influence) in groups. However, the only existing longitudinal investigation of these strategies suggests that, among undergraduate students, only prestige allows people to maintain social rank over time. The current study provides a longitudinal test of dominance and prestige in a context where dominance is more normative: MBA project groups. Among 548 MBA students in 104 groups, peer-rated dominance and prestige predicted gains in social rank over the course of 4 weeks, indicating that both strategies may help people not only gain social rank but also maintain it over time. Furthermore, prestige-but not dominance-led to social rank because of willingly given deference from group members. This confirms a central but thus-far-untested principle of dual-strategies theory: While prestige is based on freely conferred deference, dominance is not.

Personality Traits and Perceptions of Major Life Events

Research examining the associations between major life events and personality trait development is mixed. Work that evaluates perceptions of life events and how those perceptions are themselves associated with personality traits may help clarify the existing literature. We used a large student sample ( N = 1,509) and a demographically diverse sample from a Qualtrics panel ( N = 552) to conduct exploratory analyses examining the associations between the big five personality traits and perceptions of life events. Results suggested that (a) associations between personality and beliefs about event-related personality change differ between students and more representative samples, (b) associations between personality and event perceptions are often nuanced, and (c) event perceptions are not merely proxies for personality traits. These studies highlight the importance of subjective event perceptions in the study of major life events and personality.

Integrating and distinguishing personality and psychopathology

OBJECTIVE

We asked authors of this Special Issue to answer the following four questions: (1) Is there evidence that personality and psychopathology can be integrated? (2) Is integration important? (3) Can they be distinguished? and (4) How can the difference be measured?

METHOD

We review each of the papers and place the special issue in a historical context.

RESULTS

Authors uniformly agreed that personality and psychopathology can be integrated within a common structure and that this is important. The third and fourth questions were more challenging. Though authors generally agreed that there is a distinction between the person and their mental health problems, articulations of that distinction were fuzzy and it is clear that current methods cannot adequately delineate these domains.

CONCLUSIONS

We summarize the issue by offering five directions for future research: (1) develop measurement tools that distinguish between the person, the context, and their transaction, (2) measure behavior and context at multiple timescales, (3) distinguish behavior and dysfunction in measurement, (4) use multimethod data to tap different levels of behavior, and (5) examine person-specific processes. Each of these directions comes with challenges, but the payoff of resolving them will be a more principled, evidence-based, and clinically useful model for the distinction between personality and psychopathology.