Edited by Lisanne de Moor, Yavor Dragostinov, and René Mõttus
Attached to this newsletter you can find summaries of the published work from EJP’s March-April 2021 issue. This issue talks about interesting topics such as the psychological need of satisfaction, relations between personality traits, life goals and life narratives, the role of empathy in interpersonal interactions, vocational interest in daily life, the effect of birth order on factors such as intelligence, educational attainment, Big Five and risk aversion, the link between neuroticism and nostalgia, and the values of temptation.
March-April
Developmental Pathways of Preadolescents' Intrinsic and Extrinsic Values: The Role of Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction
Jiseul Sophia Ahn & Johnmarshall Reeve
Personal values play an important role in people’s motivations and ultimately in their behavior. These values can be broadly divided into intrinsic values, which are focused on internal motivations (e.g., personal development, meaningful relationships), and extrinsic values, which are focused on external motivations (e.g., financial success, popularity). But where do these values come from and how do they develop? In this study, Ahn and Reeve suggested that there might be three pathways to value development and that different pathways may apply to the different types of values. First, values might be directly transmitted from parents to their children through their words and behaviors, which children in turn use as markers for their own aspirations. Second, parents’ values may influence their parenting style, which may in turn affect children’s values (i.e., indirect transmission). Third, children’s values may originate through the satisfaction and frustration of basic psychological needs.
In a sample of 233 mother-child dyads of late elementary school students, the authors found that mothers’ values directly predicted children’s extrinsic but not intrinsic values, hence supporting the direct transmission pathway for the development of extrinsic values. Intrinsic values, on the other hand, were predicted solely by need satisfaction, supporting the value origination pathway for the development of intrinsic values. Thus, consistent with the self-determination theory, intrinsic and extrinsic values seem to spring from different sources: intrinsic values seem more need-based, whereas extrinsic values develop via direct exposure to such social messages.
The Actor, Agent, and Author Across the Life Span: Interrelations Between Personality Traits, Life Goals, and Life Narratives in an Age-Heterogeneous Sample
Janina Larissa Bühler, Rebekka Weidmann, & Alexander Grob
Research on personality and how people differ in terms of their personality has often focused on their stable traits such as extraversion and neuroticism, or on their life goals, for example having an intact family life or having job security. More recently, traits and goals have also been studied together, leading to the conclusion that they are complementary and non-reducible to a single construct. This is also in line with McAdams’ integrative framework of personality, which envisions personality as consisting of three levels: the person as a social actor, represented by their personality traits, the person as a motivated agent, represented by their goals and values as part of their characteristic adaptations, and the person as an autobiographical author, represented by the narratives that they form of their lived life. Across the lifespan, all three levels are expected to develop and also the interrelations between the levels may be moderated by age.
In a study with participants ranging from 14 to 68 years-old at the first wave of measurement, Bühler and colleagues found that the three levels of personality are indeed separate but interrelated. People with certain traits are more likely to pursue trait-corresponding life goals and form trait-corresponding narratives, and these associations are largely reciprocal. Interestingly, there may be overarching motives that generalize across the levels: a motive for getting along or getting ahead was reflected across people’s personality traits, their life goals, and their life narrative. The authors found some evidence of moderation by age mainly in young and middle adulthood, and mostly for the narratives that people constructed.
The Affiliative Role of Empathy in Everyday Interpersonal Interactions
Whitney Ringwald & Aidan Wright
Empathy plays an important role in social interactions and is generally thought to help satisfy affiliative motives. However, some studies contradict this idea and report empathy relates to agentic, self-serving motives. Part of this inconsistency might be due to the fact that empathy has often been studied in the lab, leaving out the important role of variation in the social context for eliciting empathy. As such, Ringwald and Wright used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to capture empathy in real, everyday social interactions. In their study, a sample of 330 undergraduate students and a community sample of 279 participants filled out EMA questions for 10 days on their smartphone.
Their results showed that empathy is generally elicited in social situations in which people are behaving warmly and experience positive emotions, consistent with its function of satisfying affiliative motives. These results suggest that instances of empathy motivated by agentic needs could be considered an exceptions rather than the rule.
Sometimes Hot, Sometimes Not: The Relations Between Selected Situational Vocational Interests and Situation Perception
Lena Roemer, Kai Horstmann, & Matthias Ziegler
People may have strong vocational interests such as helping others, but are these interests always equally strong? Researchers have often examined interests as being either largely stable (e.g., “I’m generally interested in helping others”) or momentarily fluctuating (e.g., “I’m interested in this activity right now”). This study shows that vocational interests can be both relatively stable and also fluctuating in strength over time.
In this study, Roemer and colleagues examined if vocational interests fluctuate within persons across situations and what situation characteristics are related to this variation. They used experience sampling data from 237 participants, who responded to questionnaires received per email over a period of approximately four weeks. Their findings show that interests do indeed vary within persons across situations, but that there is also large stability in people’s interests. Different to Big Five personality states, people seldomly reported momentary interests that exceeded their general interest scores. For example, persons with low general interests in a topic reported momentary interests mostly at a low level. Furthermore, fluctuation in people’s interests mirrored situation characteristics. For instance, perceiving a situation to require sociality was accompanied with more momentary social interests. However, the directionality of this association remains unclear: it could be that being in a situation triggers related interests, but it could also be that people self-select into situations based on their interests.
Analysing Effects of Birth Order on Intelligence, Educational Attainment, Big Five and Risk Aversion in an Indonesian Sample
Laura Botzet, Julia Rohrer, & Ruben Arslan
Theories about birth order effects on intelligence assume that earlier-born children have more resources within a family available to them and thus experience more support for their intellectual development leading to higher intelligence scores compared to their younger siblings. This idea as well as theories about birth order effects on personality have generally been assumed to be universal principles, despite having often only been examined in WEIRD (i.e., western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations.
To examine the potential role of birth order position in a non-WEIRD population, Botzet and colleagues used data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey. The Republic of Indonesia has a very diverse population that differs from WEIRD samples on which theoretical accounts of birth order effects are based. The authors used data from up to 11,188 participants who answered questions about intelligence, educational attainment, Big Five personality, and risk aversion. They found no support for effects of birth order on intelligence, Big Five personality traits, or risk aversion within families. Some evidence was found for a non-linear effect of birth order on educational attainment in form of a checkmark-shaped pattern with higher birth order related to higher educational attainment except for the comparison between first- and second-borns who showed no differences in educational attainment. The findings of this study suggest that effects of birth order may be culture-specific and dependent on social mechanisms. In addition, the study highlights the need to go beyond WEIRD samples in our investigation of personality and its correlates.
Does Neuroticism Disrupt the Psychological Benefits of Nostalgia? A Meta-Analytic Test
Julius Frankenbach, Tim Wildschut, Jacob Juhl, & Constantine Sedikides
Although nostalgia was originally considered a cause of dysfunction, it is now seen as a resource that actually helps people counter adversity in their lives. Nostalgia is often seen as a universal phenomenon, but research is increasingly showing that some people may be more likely to experience it than others. In addition to predicting who experiences nostalgia, personality may also play a moderating role, in that the benefits attached to experiencing nostalgia may be dependent on the experiencer’s personality.
In the present study, Frankenbach and colleagues focused on the potential role of neuroticism, as high levels of neuroticism may be accompanied by differences in the availability and accessibility of negatively emotionally memories, as well as in processing with an emphasis on the negative aspects of the memory. The researchers meta-analyzed raw data from 19 studies and a total of 3,556 participants. Their results showed that nostalgia was indeed related to psychological benefits and that neuroticism directly predicted lower psychological well-being. However, neuroticism did not moderate the experimental influence of nostalgia on psychological benefits. This indicates that individuals with high and low levels of neuroticism are equally likely to benefit from engaging in nostalgic reminiscing.
When Impulsive Behaviours do not Equal Self-Control Failures: The (Added) Value of Temptation Enactments
Amir Ghoniem, & Wilhelm Hofmann
In daily life, people experience a large number of short-term motivations that are incompatible with their long-term standards and goals, such as eating a tempting dessert while being on a diet. In such cases, self-control may help people resist the short-term motivation and help them to stick to their long-term goals. In research on self-control but also in lay understanding, the predominant idea is that people sometimes fail in enacting self-control because deep down they are not convinced enough of their long-term goals and standards. As a result, the enactment of temptation would be followed by feelings of guilt and shame.
The present study challenges this idea by examining individual differences in the extent to which people value self-discipline versus their valuation of temptation enactment (VOTE). The authors hypothesized that people who feel that giving in to temptation is a normal and essential part of life will experience fewer negative emotions after a temptation enactment compared to people who value self-discipline. They tested this idea in six focal studies with a total of 1,036 participants. Findings across the six studies suggested that individual differences do indeed exist in the extent to which people value temptation enactments, and that these differences can be reliably measured with the VOTE measure. Furthermore, Ghoeniem and Hofmann found that individual differences in the value of temptation enactment matter for how people appraise their own actions and self.
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)