Personality Research Round-up

"After three-quarters of a century of research on traits the catalog of basic facts concerning the relationships between personality and behavior remains thin. If, for example, one were to go to the literature and look for a list of contextualized behaviors that had been shown to be robustly associated with, say, extraversion, one would find surprisingly little. There would be no shortage of hypotheses tested concerning extraversion (e.g., do extraverts respond less intensely than introverts to lemon juice on the tongue), and an outright surplus of data concerning the correlations among extraversion questionnaires and other similar measures, but as for what extraverts have been observed to actually do, beyond some indication that they speak loudly (Scherer, 1978), little would be found. Even less information is available about the behavioral correlates of other personality traits." (Funder, 2001) [My personality psych professor does studies looking at real-world behavioral correlates of traits.]

"The idealized scene that I am now envisioning involves my wife and me leaving the dinner party sometime around midnight, getting into our car, and finding nothing worth listening to on the radio, beginning our traditional post-party postmordem. Summoning up all the personological wisdom and nuance I can muster at the moment, I may start off with something like, 'He was really an ass.' Or adopting the more 'relational' mode that psychologists such as Gilligan (1982) insist comes more naturally to women than men, my wife may say something like, 'I can't believe they stay married to each other.' It's often easier to begin with the cheap shots." (McAdams, 1995 - "What do we know when we know a person?")

"The authors investigated measurement of chimpanzee 'happiness' based on the human trait of subjective well-being (SWB).  Zoo workers at 13 zoos used a 7-point scale to rate 128 chimpanzees on four items related to their SWB. The items included assessment of pleasure derived from social interactions, balance of positive and negative moods, success in goal attainment, and the desirability of being a particular chimpanzee [this last measure was called Bechimp in their analysis]....Chimpanzee SWB varied positively with Dominance, Extraversion, and Dependability factors. SWB was negatively correlated with frequency of submissive behaviors. Age and sex were not significantly related to SWB." (King & Landau, 2003 - "Can chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) happiness be estimated by human raters?")

"We assert, without providing evidence, that most people care about their own health and well being, care about their marital relationships, and care about success and satisfaction in their career. These may not be outcomes understood as universally important across time and culture, but neither are they concerns unique to our own venue of southern California at the start of the twenty-first century." (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006)

"...There is no 'physics of carpets.' Although carpets may have characteristic physical components, what makes something a carpet is its relationship, at a much higher level of analysis, with the world of human beings. No amount of physics would ever lead to an explanation of why some objects are carpets." (Turkheimer, 1998)

"With goal-setting theory, specific difficult goals have been shown to increase performance on well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants in at least 8 countries working in laboratory, simulation, and field settings. The dependent variables have included quantity, quality, time spent, costs, job behavior measures, and more. The time spans have ranged from 1 minute to 25 years. The effects are applicable not only to the individual but to groups, organizational units, and entire organizations...Isn't it time that psychologists took consciousness, including conscious motivation, seriously?" (Locke & Latham, 2002)

"We examined the relationship between subjective well-being and the ethnic/racial homogeneity of the Facebook friendship networks of first-year college students...Among European American participants, having a more homogeneous friendship network was associated with higher life satisfaction and positive affect, as well as lower felt misunderstanding." (Seder & Oishi, 2009)

Also, disappointingly, the "Jackson-5 Scales" (Jackson, 2009) have nothing to do with 1970's music.