Edited by Yavor Dragostinov and Lisanne de Moor
Welcome to the first issue of the EJP Newsletter of 2022! This edition features summaries of the published work from EJP’s January-February issue. If you have the time, feel free to check out the full manuscripts which are currently freely available!
The articles published in this issue explore the age and gender differences in “dark” personality traits; the role of perceived risk and protective behaviours by parents in the development of perfectionism in adolescents; the prediction of responses to COVID-19 from personality; to what degree the transition to parenthood is related to changes in the importance of major life goals; how similar are personality traits and personality disorders; the assessment on early risk factors for psychopathology, with a focus on child temperament; as well as further investigating the link between creativity and dishonesty.
January-February
Age and gender differences in socially aversive (“dark”) personality traits
Johanna Hartung, Martina Bader, Morten Moshagen & Oliver Wilhelm
Since the introduction of the “dark triad” – a group of three socially aversive traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) – the broader research area dealing with the malevolent part of personality has flourished. The research and publicity of “dark” personality traits has endorsed the existence of several dark traits (callousness, deceitfulness, narcissistic entitlement, sadism, and vindictiveness), which can be modelled by an underlying D factor of socially aversive personality. Despite the rapidly growing research on socially aversive traits, there is a lack of studies addressing age-associated differences in “dark” traits.
In order to shed light on potential age-associated differences in the structure and mean levels of socially aversive personality traits, the present study relied on a large sample of participants covering a wide age range (from 21 to 53 years) and employed an innovative method for estimating continuous age moderation of the factor model. Results indicated that the factor structure was mostly stable for age and gender, offering support for the usefulness of the D Factor of socially aversive personality traits. Men exhibited uniformly higher means than females and all means decreased with increasing age. Such findings open the door for future studies to pursue causes of mean differences in “dark” personality traits across age and between genders.
Becoming a perfectionistic adolescent: Perceived parental behaviors involved in developmental trajectories of perfectionism
Lavinia Damian, Oana Negru-Subtirica, Eleonora Pop & Joachim Stoeber
Perfectionism is a personality disposition that is characterized by exceedingly high standards that are difficult, if not impossible to meet. As adolescence is a period of important change and development, the period is highly relevant for perfectionism. Furthermore, parental behaviours have been shown to influence perfectionism in a meaningful way.
Damian and colleagues conducted a longitudinal study that investigated the role of perceived risk and protective behaviours by parents in the development of perfectionism in adolescents. The work evaluated developmental trajectories of the following types of perfectionism:
1. Self-orientated – the belief that striving for perfection and being perfect are important to oneself.
2. Socially prescribed – the perception that others hold perfectionistic expectations of oneself that one must fulfil to be accepted.
3. Other-oriented perfectionism – the perfectionistic expectations directed toward others.
The assessment was done over four waves each spaced five to six months apart. Results demonstrated different trajectories for all three types of perfectionism. Furthermore, adolescents high in self-oriented perfectionism experienced higher perceived responsiveness, but also higher perceived control from their parents. On the contrary, adolescents high in socially prescribed and other-oriented perfectionism experienced low perceived responsiveness and autonomy support and high perceived control from their parents.
These findings suggest that parents should try to make sure that adolescents really receive love, warmth, and support when they need it, but also get the right amount of space to develop a healthy autonomy from parents.
Does personality predict responses to the COVID-19 crisis? Evidence from a prospective large-scale study
Beatrice Rammstedt, Clemens Lechner and Bernd Weiß
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted people’s daily routines and infused their lives with considerable insecurity and uncertainty. However, individuals’ responses to the pandemic vary widely. The present study investigates the role of personality traits for key aspects of people’s responses to the COVID-19 crisis.
Using data from the GESIS Panel in Germany, Rammstedt and colleagues examined whether Big Five domains and facets measured prior to the pandemic predicted individuals’ responses to the pandemic in terms of: 1) perceptions of infection risks, 2) behavioural changes to prevent infection, 3) beliefs in the effectiveness of police measures to combat further spread of coronavirus, and 4) trust in relevant policymakers and institutions regarding the handling of coronavirus.
Results revealed that personality explained only a small portion (between 0.6% and 3.8%) of the variance in the four outcomes. Nonetheless, several Big Five domains and facets had associations with the outcomes. Overall, Agreeableness and its Trust facet showed the most robust associations with the four outcomes. Most trait–outcome associations were also robust to controlling for three possible confounders (sex, age, and risk-group membership).
Conducting studies that evaluate behaviour during the pandemic could inform policymakers and practitioners about possible ways of shaping public opinion. By doing so, individual behaviour can be nudged in a way that could help society navigate through the pandemic.
Stability and change in major life goals during the transition to parenthood
Caroline Wehner, Manon van Scheppingen & Wiebke Bleidorn
Major life goals reflect what people generally strive for in life. They provide guidance and consistency across situations and play a fundamental role in shaping people’s everyday behaviour. In this paper, Wehner and colleagues examined whether and to what degree the transition to parenthood is related to changes in the importance of major life goals.
The authors examined the rank-order stability, ipsative stability, and mean-level change in six life goal domains – achievement, power, variation, affiliation, altruism, and intimacy. The sample size consisted of 248 first-time parents and 294 individuals in a romantic relationship without children that were assessed across two time points. The results indicated high levels of all the different types of stability and little evidence for mean-level changes in the importance of life goals across the transition to parenthood. However, several selection effects were found that suggested women without children tended to endorse agentic life goals (variation and achievement) more than mothers did.
Overall, these findings suggest that the importance of major life goals is quite stable, even amid a major life event such as the transition to parenthood. As such, selection rather than socialization effects appear to explain the differences in life goals between parents and nonparents.
Longitudinal associations between borderline personality disorder and five-factor model traits over 24 years
Christopher Hopwood, Ted Schwaba, Aidan Wright, Wiebke Bleidorn & Mary Zanarini
The question, “How similar are personality traits and personality disorders?” has preoccupied personality researchers for decades. Currently, the general consensus is that traits and personality disorders (PDs) are very similar empirically, and arguments mostly involve whether there is any difference in them at all.
In this study, Hopwood et al. examined longitudinal associations between five-factor traits (FFM) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms in a sample of patients assessed 12 times over 24 years. The mean trajectories for all variables were in the direction of symptom reduction/personality maturation and could be parsed into an initial, rapid improvement phase and a subsequent, gradual improvement phase. Higher levels of neuroticism as well as lower levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were associated with higher levels of BPD symptoms, and changes in these traits towards the mean were correlated with reduction in symptoms over time. These results suggest that, at a general level, stable individual differences in BPD and FFM traits are very similar in terms of both cross-sectional and longitudinal associations, particularly at the between-person level. Such findings set the stage for future research aimed at identifying more specific distinctions between basic traits and PD symptoms.
A person-centered approach to understanding child temperament at ages 3 and 6
Mariah Hawes, Megan Finsaas, Thomas Olino & Daniel Klein
Empirical study of child temperament has primarily relied on variable-centred approaches, despite a theoretical interest in temperament "types". Person-centered approaches, which seek to identify common subgroups characterized by response patterns across variables, are more in line with typological theory.
In a community sample, Hawes and colleagues longitudinally assessed 559 children across ages 3 and 6 on early risk factors for psychopathology, with a focus on child temperament. Behavioural observation ratings of child temperament were subjected to a latent profile analysis, a person-centered approach based on factor analysis. The authors found evidence for four temperament subgroups at age 3, which were labelled “typical”, “sluggish”, “surgent”, and “dysregulated” based on the pattern of group-specific means. At age 6, they found evidence for five subgroups: “typical”, “sluggish”, “outgoing”, “active-impulsive”, and “negative affect. Concurrently assessed, mother-reported temperament traits were mostly consistent with the subgroup identities. Comparison of subgroup membership across waves generally demonstrated patterns of continuity across groups characterized by similar trait patterns.
Although more research is needed to further validate the findings, continued investigations of temperament-based subgroups and of the correlates and outcomes of these groups may lead to more targeted risk assessment and intervention.
Dark, gray, or bright creativity? (Re)investigating the link between creativity and dishonesty
Karolina A. Ścigała, Christoph Schild, & Ingo Zettler
The question of whether and, if so, how creativity and unethical behaviour such as dishonesty are related to each other has been addressed in multiple studies, with mixed results overall. The aim of Ścigała and colleagues’ Registered Report was to shed further light on this complex and unclear association.
First, the authors presented a meta-analysis on the relation between creativity and dishonesty, which indicated no relation between the two constructs. Next, the authors examined the relation between creativity and dishonesty in a new empirical study, addressing several limitations of previous research. Specifically, the relations between comprehensively assessed creativity and dishonesty were examined using subjective and objective indicators for both constructs. The authors found mixed results concerning the relation between creativity and dishonesty. In the majority of the tests, subjective creativity was positively related, whereas objective creativity was negatively related to dishonesty in the mind game – a cheating assessment task. However, in exploratory analyses, Ścigała et al. found that neither subjective nor objective creativity was related to dishonesty in the second dishonesty measure, the sender–receiver game. Although the findings are not entirely conclusive, they provide hints that subjective creativity might be positively related to dishonesty whereas objective creativity might be negatively related to dishonesty.
Do you have any questions or comments regarding this newsletter or its contents? Please contact:
Lisanne de Moor (Research Communications Editor; e.l.demoor@gmail.com) or Yavor Dragostinov (Research Communications Assistant; y.dragostinov@sms.ed.ac.uk)