Size constancy as a function of personal adjustment and disposition.

"A size-distance judging task was given to 40 men who were classified in 4 groups, respectively styled 'neurotic introverts,' 'neurotic extraverts,' 'normal introverts,' and 'normal extraverts.' Analysis of data from 4 distances under 2 conditions of judgment, i.e., objective and analytic, indicated that neuroticism was the major source of between-group variation. Under analytic conditions, neurotic persons tended to match the stimulus in terms of visual angle, and normals in terms of size." 15 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A personal adjustment television program.

"This article describes some of our experiences in presenting a television program on personal adjustment on a commercial station over a period of one year. It is also an announcement of the availability of 13 half-hour kinescope recordings of these programs through the Educational TV and Radio Center." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extreme response tendency as a function of emotional adjustment.

3 pairs of groups each consisting of an "adjusted" and "maladjusted" group were compared on their tendency to use the extreme, neutral, and intermediate points on semantic differential rating scales applied to unstructured materials. As suggested by several theories of cognitive development, maladjusted groups tended to use extreme points more and intermediate points less often than their adjusted controls. Besides supporting certain theoretical positions these findings were described as holding implications for a new approach to personality assessment. (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relation of positive and negative sociometric valuations to social and personal adjustment of school children.

For students (N = 250) in seven grade-school classes, the frequency of positive and negative sociometric choices was related to scores on the subtests of the California Test of Personality. Frequency of both positive and negative choices was dichotomized into "few" and "many," and the subtest scores were analyzed in a 2 X 2 factorial design created by the four possible combinations of choices. "Seven of the 12 subsections of the… test… produced evidence to indicate a relationship between one's social position among his peers and some aspect of personality adjustment as measured by this test." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experimental evaluations of role playing.

This article is restricted to those studies which have been reported in which role playing was evaluated experimentally. Studies concerned with role playing as an assessment procedure and as a method for producing personality change are included in this report. Though there is a scarcity of experimental studies, the author concludes, with reference to personality assessment, "there is some sound evidence for believing that reliable and valid role-playing tests can be developed." The evidence with reference to personality change is as yet inconclusive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The predictability of ratings as a function of interrater agreement.

"The hypothesis tested was that high agreement among the ratings assigned the same men by different raters does not necessarily imply predictable ratings." 3 superior officers rated 100 submariners on personal adjustment and technical competence. Each rating group was divided into 4 samples for interrater agreement. Correlations were computed with 3 predictor variables. The results support the hypothesis given. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of combined counseling and vocational training on personal adjustment.

To evaluate the effects of combined counseling and vocational training on personal adjustment, the Manson Evaluation test was administered to 85 students during the 1st 2 wk. of training and again near termination. The students, ages 17-21 yr., were generally characterized by previous failure in social, academic, and vocational endeavors. All students and classes received individual and group counseling by skilled counselors. Comparisons of "before" and "after" Manson scores revealed consistent and highly significant gains in personal adjustment. The findings are discussed in terms of current governmental efforts to combat socioeconomic problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A factorial study of adjustment to stress.

Ratings of personality and officer aptitude, objective and projective personality tests, measures of performance in stressful situations, the conditioning of the galvanic skin response, perceptual tests, and the analysis of urinary components were studied on 135 Air ROTC cadets at the University of Texas in a search for common factors of value in the prediction of adjustment to stress. Analysis of the inter-correlation matrix yielded 7 factors. In general, the degree of relationship among the measures derived from the different types of tests was very low. 21 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-appraisal, personal desirability, and perceived social desirability of personality traits.

200 college sophomores took the MMPI 3 times. Analysis showed the following results: (1) Variation of order or time of testing in the personal or social condition seemed to make no difference. (2) Intercorrelations between the 3 forms were low enough to show that the 3 tasks were different. (3) Variance on all 3 forms was lower than in the standardization of the MMPI. (4) The mean profiles were highly similar in all 3 groups. (5) The clinical scales were in general highest on self, as were the Si, A, and obvious scales. The L, K, and subtle scales were in general lowest on self. (6) Results based on analysis of item discrepancies rather than scale comparisons showed that the discrepancies tended to be very sizable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Normality evaluations and their relation to personality traits and well-being.

Despite frequent discussions of what it means to be normal in clinical, social, and personality psychology theory, the characteristics of individuals who call themselves normal are little understood. In 5 studies, the authors investigated various hypotheses concerning the nature of normality evaluations. The authors add to recent evidence that normality evaluations represent a distinct dimension of evaluative judgments, showing self-judgments of being normal (versus strange) to be relatively independent from self-judgments of being average (versus unique). Normality evaluations showed positive relations with communal traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and were negatively related to openness to experience. Supporting a broader hypothesis that normality evaluations may be involved in directing or motivating personality development processes, normality evaluations were positively associated with well-being and a sense of fitting in with one's peers, and individuals who felt abnormal felt a heightened sense that they needed to improve their personality. Finally, the personality correlates of normality evaluations were found to change over the lifespan, largely in parallel with the actual mean-level development of personality traits with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptual sorting and personality adjustment in children.

24 relatively well adjusted and 24 relatively poorly adjusted children, selected from 150 normal 6th-grade children, were compared on the Gelb-Goldstein-Weigl-Scheerer Object Sorting Test. Poorly adjusted children made significantly more inadequate sortings than well adjusted children, confirming the prediction of this study. High and average intelligence children were more adequate in their object sortings than low intelligence children. Relatively poorly adjusted children, because of lack of appropriate categories, may not be as able to reduce environmental complexity and assign meaning to events as relatively well adjusted children. High and average intelligence, at this age level, contributes to the ability to abstract and use shared properties as a grouping principle. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Applications of personal construct theory.

Reviews the book, Applications of personal construct theory edited by Jack Adams-Webber and James C. Mancuso (1983). Jack Adams-Webber and James Mancuso have edited a book well worth studying. Almost any psychologist will derive some benefit from the research methods used and the results reported. Most psychologists will also be encouraged to discover that there is renewed hope for a successful experimental approach to a number of research questions in personality and abnormal psychology. Applications of personal construct theory is a collection of papers presented at the Fourth International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, in the summer of 1981. For this volume the editors have chosen all five invited addresses and nineteen selected papers from the more than eighty items of the complete Congress programme. The selection that they have made is varied and contains some excellent chapters. The book's title is somewhat misleading, however, in that there are chapters dealing with theoretical questions and historical material, as well as those that can properly be regarded as applications of personal construct theory. Apart from its general interest, this book would be a possible text for a senior undergraduate course. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychological adjustment and the worker role: An analysis of occupational differences.

How does the place of worker role on his personal adjustment vary from nonmanual to manual type of employment? "301 Ss, all between the ages of 55 and 65, were divided into two occupational statuses, nonmanual and manual workers. The former status included 116 of the managerial, supervisory, professional-technical, and clerical-sales personnel of a Midwestern oil refinery, while the latter status contained 185 of that company's skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled laborers. Both groups were then treated as separate populations in an analysis of the worker role as it related to personal adjustment, social adjustment, and job satisfaction… . the personal adjustment of nonmanual employees was not significantly related with their work-role competency, while the personal adjustment of manual employees showed a significant correlation with the worker role variable… . It was therefore concluded that the degree to which personal adjustment is related with the worker role depends to some extent upon an employee's occupational status." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Purpose in life as a mediator of adjustment after spinal cord injury.

Objective: Determine how purpose in life influences adjustment after spinal cord injury (SCI). Study Design: Cross-sectional survey with mediation analysis. Subjects: 1,391 adults with traumatic SCI 1 or more years prior. Main Outcome Measure: Ladder of Adjustment (N. M. Crewe & J. S. Krause, 1990). The Purpose in Life scale (PIL: .J. C. Crumbaugh, 1968), the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire (M. Zuckerman, D. M. Kuhlman, J. Joireman, P. Teta, & M. Kraft, 1993), and the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control scale (K. A. Wallston, B. S. Wallston, & R. DeVellis, 1978) were assessed. Results: PIL mediated between most measures and adjustment. Conclusions: Logotherapy is effective in strengthening purpose in life. Its use with persons with SCI may improve their adjustment and quality of life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prefrontal lobotomy as a means to improve the hospital adjustment of chronic psychotic patients.

25 schizophrenic patients were evaluated psychiatrically, psychologically, and behaviorally immediately before, 3 months after, and 12 months after prefrontal lobotomies. The paramount conclusion drawn is that bilateral prefrontal lobotomy has a significant effect in improving the disturbed behavior of chronic, long term, psychotic patients. Their care and management became less of a problem. The operation, however, did not affect their basic psychotic conditions, the S's remaining in need of hospital care at the end of 12 months after surgery. It is suggested that these effects are the indirect, non-specific results of prefrontal lobotomy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Externalizing psychopathology and marital adjustment in long-term marriages: Results from a large combined sample of married couples.

The current study evaluated the associations between externalizing psychopathology and marital adjustment in a combined sample of 1,805 married couples. We further considered the role of personality in these associations, as personality has been found to predict both the development of externalizing psychopathology as well as marital distress and instability. Diagnostic interviews assessed conduct disorder, adult symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, and alcohol dependence. Personality was assessed using the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. The Dyadic Adjustment Scale was used to measure marital adjustment. Results indicate that more externalizing psychopathology, greater negative emotionality, and lower communal positive emotionality were associated with reduced marital adjustment in both individuals and their spouses. Low constraint was associated with reduced marital adjustment for individuals but not for their spouses. Multivariate analyses indicated externalizing psychopathology continued to predict marital adjustment even when accounting for overlap with personality. These results highlight the importance of examining the presence of externalizing psychopathology and the personality attributes of both members of a dyad when considering psychological predictors of marital adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Applications of personal construct theory.

Reviews the book, Applications of personal construct theory edited by J. Adams-Webber and J. C. Mancuso (1983). The 24 chapters of this volume are a selection from papers presented at the Fourth International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) held in 1981. The title of the volume is perhaps misleading, as there are three discernible motifs in this varied assortment of offerings. These can be identified as those papers dealing primarily with theoretical issues, those concerned with the history of the theory and the man who developed it (George Kelly), and those that focus on applications of the theory. It is clear that ten chapters are theoretical, including the first nine and Bannister's concluding chapter on the self. If I were to assume that these efforts are representative of the development of PCP, my judgment would be that little important change in Kelly's ideas has occurred over the years. It is not easy to say why this is so, although the fact that Kelly died before he might have revised aspects of his theory has to be considered. Overall, however, the conceptual advances have a pallid quality and the occasional adulatory echoing of the master is disconcerting. Of the 11 or so empirical and applied chapters, a number point in useful and interesting directions. Several papers deal with PCP in relation to schizophrenic thought disorder, depression, chronic illness, anorexia nervosa, and obsessive neurosis. Neimeyer's chapter on sociohistorical influences in the development of PCP affords an opportunity to reflect upon the past, present, and future of Kelly's ideas--including the trend toward integration with other schools of thought despite Kelly's well-known resistance to direct comparison with other kindred theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personal adjustment and prediction of academic achievement.

The hypothesis tested was that "better" adjusted students would be more predictable than maladjusted students. Predictability was determined by correlation coefficients between aptitude test (CEEB-M and CEEB-V) scores and both 1st-quarter and 1st-yr grades. The sample consisted of 188 freshmen male business students who were classified into positive-, average-, and negative- adjustment groups on the basis of the means of the 10 Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey (GZTS) trait raw scores. Comparisons of the adjustment groups on correlations between the mathematics and verbal scores and grade averages indicated that the adjustment groups did not differ in terms of academic predictability. Analysis of differences between the groups on both high school achievement and college achievement revealed, however, that the positive-adjustment group earned significantly higher grades than the negative group. These results indicated that although the adjustment groups did not appear to be significantly different in terms of academic predictability, a definite relationship did exist between the groups on levels of achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)