Edited by Yavor Dragostinov and Lisanne de Moor
Welcome to the second issue of the EJP Newsletter of 2022! This edition features summaries of the published work from EJP’s March issue. If you have the time, make sure to check out the full manuscripts which are freely available!
The articles published in this issue explore the following topics: the importance of personal values on behaviour; the impact of neuroticism on satisfaction in romantic relationships; a tutorial walkthrough that describes a sufficient way to test the link between state dynamics and trait change; an assessment of the phenotypic relationship between HEXACO personality and ideology variables; evaluation of the personality and psychosocial functioning in early adolescence; a theoretical framework that proposes a new component of emotional intelligence.
Are value–behaviour relations stronger than previously thought? It depends on value importance
Julie Anne Lee, Anat Bardi, Paul Gerrans, Joanne Sneddon, Hester van Herk, Uwana Evers & Shalom Schwartz
Many people assume that personal values motivate behaviour. This assumption may have stemmed from observations that people’s behaviours often appear to be consistent with the values they verbally express. In contrast to this widespread assumption, empirical studies have typically found weak value–behaviour correlations, even when behaviours are measured with self-reports. Does this mean that people’s assumptions are wrong?
The current study examined value–behaviour relations in a large, diverse sample of adults aged 18 to 75 years. Using a novel method, values and self-reported everyday behaviour were assessed at different locations along with the distribution of value importance, across several weeks as part of short online surveys. This study provided the first evidence that people who ascribe high importance to a value, engage in value-expressive behaviours more frequently. Moreover, as we move up the value importance distribution, these relations strengthen. In contrast, people who ascribe low importance to a value not only engage in value-expressive behaviours less frequently, but as we move down the value importance distribution, these relations weaken. These findings suggest that values may be more strongly related to behaviour than was previously recognized, especially so for values that are considered important. In other words, people’s assumptions may have been correct all along.
Neuroticism and satisfaction in romantic relationships: A systematic investigation of intra- and interpersonal processes with a longitudinal approach
Marianne Kreuzer & Mario Gollwitzer
One of the most important facets of people’s general life satisfaction is the extent to which they feel that their social relationships—especially with their romantic partners—are stable, rewarding, and mutually beneficial. Previous studies have shown neuroticism to be associated with less marital satisfaction and higher divorce rates.
Kreuzer and Gollwitzer analysed several cognitive, emotional, and behavioural processes from 2,090 heterosexual couples. The longitudinal study looked at how both partners’ neuroticism affects their respective (and mutual) relationship satisfaction. The findings supported the assumption that neuroticism reliably predicts cognitive, emotional, and behavioural variables, which, in turn, predict both partners’ relationship satisfaction. Importantly, cognitive processes play a particularly important role both on an interpersonal level (how an individual’s personality influences the relationship satisfaction of their partner) as well as on an intrapersonal level (how an individual’s personality influences their own relationship satisfaction). For instance, interpreting ambiguous partner behaviour such as inattention in a conversation as either proof of missing interest or as an indication of exhaustion after a busy day. In other words, perceptions and attributions of the partner’s behaviour can be seen as an adaptive process affecting coping with a stressful event.
These findings help to shed light on the behavioural processes underlying the effect of neuroticism on relationship satisfaction.
Integrating state dynamics and trait change: A tutorial using the example of stress reactivity and change in well-being
Annette Brose, Andreas Benjamin Neubauer & Florian Schmiedek
Across adulthood, many aspects of personality such as the Big Five are relatively stable. Yet, people change when experiencing developmental transitions. The adaptation from high school into university or in response to more idiosyncratic life events such as health-related experiences. Recent accounts on how a change in personality traits may occur have emphasized the role of personality states: repetitions of changes in short-term processes may become habits and generalize across domains and eventually result in enduring trait change.
To test the idea of a link between state dynamics and trait change, methods are required that ideally, model variation on different time scales simultaneously. However, while appropriate methods have been developed to analyse state dynamics on the one hand and trait change on the other, their integration is rare and has only recently emerged in the literature. Instead, it is common to use a two-step approach, estimating state dynamics in the first step and then using person-specific estimates of parameters capturing these dynamics in subsequent analyses.
In their non-empirical paper, Brose and colleagues highlight three advantageous methods over the two-step approach. The paper targets a readership of substantive researchers interested in the relationships between state dynamics and traits or trait change and provides a tutorial with state-of-the-art methods on these topics.
Relations between HEXACO personality and ideology variables are mostly genetic in nature
Reinout de Vries, Laura Wesseldijk, Annika Karinen, Patrick Jern & Joshua Tybur
There are two ideological dimensions, Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), that form the bedrock of people’s socio-political attitudes towards social groups, systems of government, the environment, social values, and numerous other societally relevant attitudes and behaviours. In previous studies, SDO and RWA have been shown to relate strongly to honesty-humility and openness to experience, the two value-related domains of the HEXACO framework.
De Vries and colleagues used a sample of 7,067 twins and siblings of twins (1,376 complete twin pairs) to evaluate the degree to which these relations arise from common genetic and environmental sources. Heritability estimates for the HEXACO personality and ideology variables ranged from .34 to .58. Environmental effects were generally negligible for both personality and ideology variables. At the phenotypic level, SDO and RWA dimensions related most strongly to honesty-humility and openness to experience. These associations were mostly explained by genetic factors (48%–93%). Out of all the HEXACO variables, the heritability estimates between openness to experience and the ideology scales ranged from –.29 to –.53; those between honesty-humility and the ideology scales ranged from –.31 to –.43.
These findings show that ideology is partially grounded in the heritable part of personality and that honesty-humility and openness to experience are the two most important personality dimensions that underlie individual differences in ideology. Honesty-humility and openness to experience are crucial as they are related to how we vote, how we relate to our environment, and how we treat other ethnic groups.
Personality and psychosocial functioning in early adolescence: Age-differential associations from the self- and parent perspective
Anne Israel, Naemi Brandt, Simon Grund, Olaf Köller, Oliver Lüdtke & Jenny Wagner
Both conceptual and empirical research emphasizes the importance of personality as an adaptive capacity for positive life outcomes across the entire adult lifespan. But what about earlier phases in life? Much less is known about how personality is related to key aspects of psychosocial functioning during adolescence.
To investigate age-differential associations in achievement, Israel and colleagues analysed the interrelatedness between personality and relevant indicators of psychosocial functioning from two rater perspectives. The authors used data from 2,667 adolescents and 1,959 of their parents from grades 5, 7, and 9 to examine differential associations between the Big Five personality traits and three sets of psychosocial functioning variables: academic achievement, social relationships, and psychosocial adjustment.
According to the findings, adolescents’ personality traits showed significant associations with all psychosocial functioning variables – achievement was most consistently associated with emotional stability, openness, and conscientiousness; social relationships were most consistently associated with agreeableness and conscientiousness; and psychosocial adjustment was related to all of the Big Five traits. Most associations did not vary across grades, whereas self-reported extraversion showed weaker associations with psychosocial functioning in later grades. Looking at rater-specific effects, the authors found fewer and usually smaller associations with parent- than with self-rated personality, again with the most significant differences with extraversion.
In summary, the study provides evidence for the strong interrelatedness of Big Five personality traits and psychosocial during adolescence in the educational, relational, and psychological domain. Thereby, school can be interpreted by adolescents as crucial content that confronts students with different developmental tasks and rewards (or punishes) certain behaviours.
Emotion information processing as a new component of emotional intelligence: Theoretical framework and empirical evidence
Marina Fiori, Shagini Udayar & Ashley Vesely Maillefer
Among the most significant challenges in the literature on Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been the introduction of tests that measure EI as an ability – that is, as a form of intelligence. In-depth analysis of the typical items employed to measure EI as an ability reveals that individuals may correctly answer tests’ items by relying on what they know about emotions. This begs the question as to whether they would be able to apply that knowledge in real-life situations.
The goal of this article was to introduce a new EI component that measures how individuals experience (feel) and respond to emotions. Such a component represents experiential EI and may predict additional variability in emotionally intelligent behaviour. More specifically, Fiori and colleagues posit that within a broad conceptualization of EI as a unique construct, there might be two distinct components: (1) EIK or the emotion /knowledge/ component, which can be captured with current ability emotional intelligence tests, and is related to top-down, higher-order reasoning about emotions; (2) EIP or the emotion information /processing/ component, which can be measured with emotion information processing tasks, and is based on bottom-up attention-related responses to emotion information. In Study 1, the authors tested the proposed structure of EI with a study that included current EI measures, emotion information processing tasks, and measures of fluid and crystallized intelligence. The results indicated that EI could be best captured by EIP and EIK as separate factors related to both fluid and crystallized intelligence. In Study 2, they examined EIP in predicting both objective performance and the charisma of individuals delivering a presentation in stressful conditions. For both outcome variables, EIP predicted incremental variability on top of EIK, intelligence, and personality. Overall, the results support the utility of introducing EIP as a new EI component. Further research could explore other types of emotion-information processing and introduce a new EI measure. This would allow capturing stable individual differences in how individuals process emotion information.