Implicit and explicit personality: A test of a channeling hypothesis for aggressive behavior.

D. G. Winter, O. P. John, A. J. Stewart, E. C. Klohnen, and L. E. Duncan (1998) proposed that self-beliefs about personality influence the channels through which people express their implicit motives. On the basis of this hypothesis, the authors predicted that self-beliefs about aggressiveness would influence the channel(s) through which people express their aggressive motive and the justification mechanisms they use to defend expression of this motive. For example, the authors predicted that people who were implicitly prepared to rationalize a desire to harm others would engage in (a) overt aggression if they viewed themselves as aggressive or (b) passive aggression if they viewed themselves as nonaggressive. The implicit aspects of aggressiveness were measured via conditional reasoning (L. R. James et al., 2005). Results based on intramural basketball players supported the channeling hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The displaced aggression questionnaire.

Previous measures of aggressive personality have focused on direct aggression (i.e., retaliation toward the provoking agent). An original self-report measure of trait displaced aggression is presented. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a 3-factor conceptualization of the construct. These analyses identified an affective dimension (angry rumination), a cognitive dimension (revenge planning), and a behavioral dimension (general tendency to engage in displaced aggression). The trait measure demonstrated good internal consistency and test-retest reliability as well as convergent and discriminant construct validity. Unlike other related personality measures, trait displaced aggression significantly predicted indirect indicators of real-world displaced aggression (i.e., self-reported domestic abuse and road rage) as well as laboratory displaced aggression in 2 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alcohol and aggressive personality styles: Potentiators of serious physical aggression against wives?

This study examined the relationship between alcohol consumption and marital aggression in a community sample (N?=?272) assessed in a longitudinal study at premarriage and at 6, 18, and 30 months of marriage. Participants completed self-report measures of alcohol problems and total alcohol consumption, aggressive personality style, marital aggression, marital adjustment, and divorce potential. Husbands' alcohol problems were associated with serious aggression at premarriage and at 6 months. Alcohol use interacted with aggressive personality traits in predicting aggression at 18 months. Husbands' premarital aggression, but not alcohol problems, was predictive of wives' future steps toward divorce and lower marital adjustment. Results are discussed in relation to the marital mediational model of alcohol and aggression in marriage and to the need to account for developmental changes in the relation between alcohol and aggression during the early years of marriage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The link between alcohol use and aggression toward sexual minorities: An event-based analysis.

The current study used an event-based assessment approach to examine the day-to-day relationship between heterosexual men's alcohol consumption and perpetration of aggression toward sexual minorities. Participants were 199 heterosexual drinking men between the ages of 18–30 who completed (1) separate timeline followback interviews to assess alcohol use and aggression toward sexual minorities during the past year, and (2) written self-report measures of risk factors for aggression toward sexual minorities. Results indicated that aggression toward sexual minorities was twice as likely on a day when drinking was reported than on nondrinking days, with over 80% of alcohol-related aggressive acts perpetrated within the group context. Patterns of alcohol use (i.e., number of drinking days, mean drinks per drinking day, number of heavy drinking days) were not associated with perpetration after controlling for demographic variables and pertinent risk factors. Results suggest that it is the acute effects of alcohol, and not men's patterns of alcohol consumption, that facilitate aggression toward sexual minorities. More importantly, these data are the first to support an event-based link between alcohol use and aggression toward sexual minorities (or any minority group), and provide the impetus for future research to examine risk factors and mechanisms for intoxicated aggression toward sexual minorities and other stigmatized groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The case for using research on trait narcissism as a building block for understanding narcissistic personality disorder.

The empirical literature on narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is quite sparse with only a small number of studies singularly devoted to this important construct. Of the published articles on NPD, the majority (approximately 80%) are either of a theoretical nature or present data from a case study perspective. There is, however, a thriving and growing literature on trait narcissism. In comparison to NPD, trait narcissism is viewed as a continuous construct in which no attempt is made to make dichotomous decisions of a clinical nature. Recent data suggest that research on trait narcissism is relevant to NPD as self-report scores are substantially correlated with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 1994) interviews of NPD and generate a five-factor model personality profile that is congruent with expert ratings of prototypical NPD. We review the literature on trait narcissism in relation to implicit and explicit aspects of self-esteem, self-presentation, decision making, relationships, work performance, and externalizing behavior (e.g., aggression). Ultimately, we argue that this literature might be used as a stepping stone toward the development of a better empirical understanding of NPD and its nomological network. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A conditional approach to dispositional constructs: The local predictability of social behavior.

A conditional approach to dispositions is developed in which dispositional constructs are viewed as clusters of if-then propositions. These propositions summarize contingencies between categories of conditions and categories of behavior rather than generalized response tendencies. A fundamental unit for investigating dispositions is therefore the conditional frequency of acts that are central to a given behavior category in circumscribed situations, not the overall frequency of behaviors. In an empirical application of the model, we examine how people's dispositional judgments are linked to extensive observations of targets' behavior in a range of natural social situations. We identify categories of these social situations in which targets' behavior may be best predicted from observers' dispositional judgments, focusing on the domains of aggression and withdrawal. One such category consists of subjectively demanding or stressful situations that tax people's performance competencies. As expected, children judged to be aggressive or withdrawn were variable across situations in dispositionally relevant behaviors, but they diverged into relatively predictable aggressive and withdrawn actions in situations that required the social, self-regulatory, and cognitive competencies they lacked. Implications of the conditional approach for personality assessment and person perception research are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Introduction to the special issue on developments in psychological measurement and assessment.

This introduction to the special issue on developments in psychological measurement and assessment sets the special issue within a larger scientific and professional context and provides summaries of the 8 articles that make up the issue. The articles address (a) self-report personality and psychopathology assessment; (b) intensive, repeated, self-report measures used in naturalistic settings; (c) implicit measures of personality; (d) personality assessment and faking in personnel selection; (e) performance appraisals; (f) risk assessments; (g) intelligence and the assessment of intelligence; and (h) neuropsychological assessment. Together, these articles demonstrate the substantial progress being made in the research on psychological measurement and assessment and the solid foundation that this work provides for both psychological science and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing alexithymia and related emotional ability constructs using multiple methods: Interrelationships among measures.

This study examined relationships among various measures of emotional ability reflecting different methods of assessment: self-report, clinical interview, collateral report, and emotion-relevant performance. On 140 young adults, the authors assessed self-reported alexithymia, emotional approach coping, and trait metamood skills; observer-reported alexithymia; interviewer-rated alexithymia; emotional awareness in response to vignettes; and emotional intelligence test performance. There were moderate magnitude correlations among the self-report measures, but correlations among other measures were relatively low. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a 3-factor model in which explicit self, implicit self, and explicit other measures were differentiated. These emotional ability measures do not form a unitary construct but differ as a function of the person providing the information and whether the measure is explicit or implicit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measurement issues associated with conditional reasoning tests: Indirect measurement and test faking.

Conditional reasoning is a new measurement technique used to measure cognitive biases associated with latent personality motives. The current article describes 3 studies examining 2 related measurement issues associated with conditional reasoning tests (CRTs). Study 1 examined the necessity of maintaining indirect assessment when administering CRTs. Results indicated that, compared with a control condition, 2 experimental conditions that disclosed the purpose of assessment yielded significant mean shifts on a CRT. Study 2 explored whether CRTs could be faked when the purpose of assessment was not disclosed. Results indicated that when indirect measurement was maintained, CRTs appeared to be resistant to faking. Study 3 compared scores on the Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression across student, applicant, and incumbent samples. Results indicated no significant mean differences among these samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unitization and grouping mediate dissociations in memory for new associations.

Previous research has demonstrated performance dissociations between explicit and implicit memory for newly acquired associations between unrelated words. The present article accounts for this finding in terms of two factors: unitization and grouping. Unitization involves representing previously separate items as a single unit, and grouping involves forming associations among separate representations. We propose that grouping facilitates primarily explicit remembering by providing the routes for accessing encoded word pairs via the cues available during testing; in contrast, unitization affects primarily implicit remembering by enabling the reintegration of studied items in response to partial cues. Consistent with this view, the results from two experiments show that by focusing processing on the relation between target word pairs, explicit remembering can be manipulated independently of implicit remembering. Two further experiments reveal that a material manipulation (concreteness of words) affects both implicit and explicit remembering. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitude towards aggression and creative functioning in patients with breast cancer

Three projective personality tests were used to assess attitude to aggression (The Identification Test), anxiety and defenses (The Meta-Contrast Technique) and creative functioning (The Creative Functioning Test) in 70 patients with breast cancer. Discriminant analyses were applied pro primo to characterize psychologically patients with a better prognosis and patients with a poorer prognosis. A second aim was to characterize psychologically older (postmenopausal) and younger (premenopausal) women. Generally, high scores on the Identification Test indicated maladaptive attitudes towards aggression among all the patients. Patients with a poorer prognosis showed responses that in healthy subjects indicate acknowledgement of aggressive impulses, perhaps suggesting lack of "defenses" against such impulses among those patients. Another way to describe it would be that patients with a better prognosis seem to have (normally nonadaptive) "defenses" against aggressive impulses while those with poorer prognosis have not. Surprisingly, the patients with a better prognosis (but not those with a poorer prognosis) gave responses classified as depression in the Meta-Contrast Technique. Typical of premenopausal patients were responses classified as anxiety as well as reaction formation on the Identification Test. Responses classified as adaptive defenses (isolation) were seen in the Meta-Contrast Technique. A surprising finding was that many of these patients were characterized by high scores on the creativity test. These original statistically significant findings of attitudes towards aggression and creative functioning in breast cancer patients are discussed in relation to the underlying nature of aggression and creativity.     

Improved Explicit Method for Structural Dynamics

An explicit method, which simultaneously has the most promising advantages of the explicit and implicit methods, is presented. It is shown that numerical properties of the proposed explicit method are exactly the same as those of the constant average acceleration method for linear elastic systems. However, for nonlinear systems, it has unconditional stability for an instantaneous stiffness softening system and conditional stability for an instantaneous stiffness hardening system. This conditional stability property is much better than that of the Newmark explicit method. Hence, the proposed explicit method is possible to have the most important property of unconditional stability for an implicit method. On the other hand, this method can be implemented as simply as an explicit method, and hence, possesses the most important property of explicit implementation for an explicit method. Apparently, the integration of these two most important properties of explicit and implicit methods will allow the proposed explicit method to be competitive with other integration methods for structural dynamics.     

Characteristics of men who aggress sexually and of men who imagine aggressing: Risk and moderating variables.

The authors showed that the extent to which men's personalities were self-centered rather than sensitive to others' needs moderated the connection between risk-factors and sexually aggressive behavior. Men who were at risk for committing aggression but who were also sensitive to others' feelings aggressed less than the corresponding group, who had relatively self-centered personalities. However, both groups showed high levels of imagined sexual aggression. The authors suggest that imagined sexual aggression may reveal information about the presence of underlying risk factors even when actual aggression is inhibited by personality characteristics such as those studied here. The implications for therapeutic interventions of the finding of aggression attenuation are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived victimization moderates self-reports of workplace aggression and conflict.

A sample of 489 employed men between 32 and 36 years old responded to questions concerning rates of having engaged in workplace aggression and conflict. These individuals also completed a personality inventory and questionnaires related to past antisocial behavior and alcohol abuse. Consistent with prior research, workplace aggression and conflict were significantly correlated with particular personality variables (stress reaction, aggression, and control) as well as with general past antisocial behavior and alcohol abuse. Furthermore, these relationships were moderated by the perception of being victimized by others (alienation), with such perceptions strengthening associations between workplace aggression and other risk factors. These interaction effects, which cannot plausibly be attributed to the use of a self-report criterion, could have important implications for understanding and predicting aggression and conflict behavior within organizations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Diagnostic agreement between the SCID-II screening questionnaire and the Personality Disorder Examination

Instruments to assess personality disorders offer reliability, but at the cost of large amounts of a skilled clinician's time to make assessments. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III Axis II (SCID-II; Spitzer, Williams, Gibbon, & First, 1990), incorporates a self-report screening questionnaire, reducing the number of items needing evaluation by the interviewer. However, false negative responses may cause clinically important areas to be overlooked. To establish the rate of false negative responses, we compared participant self-report on the SCID-II with Axis II diagnostic assessment done by clinicians using the Personality Disorder Examination (Loranger, Susman, Oldham, & Russakoff, 1987). The false negative rate was low for every diagnosis, supporting validity of following up with clinician questioning only those diagnostic elements endorsed in the self-report. Avoidant and dependent personality disorders were accurately self-reported. This, an efficient assessment instrument for personality disorders might combine self-report of those disorders where self-report is reliable, with clinician assessment where needed.     

Effects of situational aggression cues: A quantitative review.

Meta-analytic procedures were used to assess the degree to which aggression-related cues present in the environment facilitate aggressive responding among negatively aroused subjects. The first study, which examined the so-called weapons effect, the effect of name-mediated cues, and other cue effects, showed clear evidence that aggression cues augment aggressive responses in negatively aroused subjects. This was true for the overall analysis and for name-mediated cues, but confirmation of the weapons effect was restricted to cases wherein subject sophistication and evaluation apprehension were low. A second study used partial correlation analysis to assess independently the effects of seven potential mediators of aggression cue effects. Of these, target-based facilitation and harm capacity of the aggressive response were found to mediate the magnitude of cue-facilitated aggression. A third study showed that these mediators augmented cue effects among neutral as well as negatively aroused subjects. These outcomes are interpreted as emphasizing the role of cognitive factors in the expression of both impulsive and nonimpulsive aggression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unintended influences of perception and memory: Attention, awareness, and control.

There has been a great deal of recent interest in the finding of dissociations between performance on implicit or indirect and explicit or direct tests of memory. Implicit tests are said to primarily reflect automatic or unconscious uses of memory, whereas explicit tests primarily reflect strategic or consciously-controlled uses of memory. Rather than identify different processes with different tasks, as is done by use of the implicit/explicit distinction, we have developed a method for separating the within-task contributions of unconscious and consciously-controlled influences. Our general approach starts with the assumption that unconscious or automatic influences and consciously-controlled influences make independent contributions to performance. Several experiments were reported to show the utility of the process-dissociation procedures. Among the findings of those experiments is that conditions traditionally associated with automaticity do have differential effects on consciously-controlled and unconscious (automatic) influences, as measured by the process-dissociation procedure. Other experiments were used to illustrate potential advantages of the process-dissociation procedure over reliance on implicit tests as a means of investigating unconscious influences. Still other experiments were briefly described to show that the process-dissociation procedure can be extended to separate the contributions of consciously-controlled and unconscious influences in a wide variety of domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measuring alcohol expectancies with the implicit association test.

Researchers have relied primarily on self-report questionnaires to measure alcohol expectancies. These questionnaires assess explicit expectancies about alcohol but do not provide any measure of the implicit processes that might also play an important role in determining drinking. The implicit association test (IAT: A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & L. K. Schwartz, 1998), a reaction time task, measures differential associations of 2 target concepts with an attribute. In this study, the IAT provided a measure of the strength of associations of alcohol concepts to positive or negative outcomes in memory. This implicit measure of alcohol expectancies successfully predicted alcohol use in 103 undergraduates. The findings also supported the hypothesis that an implicit measure of expectancy can add to the predictive power of existing questionnaire-based measures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit stereotyping in person judgment.

Three experiments demonstrated implicit gender stereotyping. A target's social category determined the use of previously primed stereotyped information, without Ss' awareness of such influence. After unscrambling sentences describing neutral or stereotyped behaviors about dependence or aggression, Ss evaluated a female or male target. Although ratings of female and male targets did not differ after exposure to neutral primes, Ss exposed to dependence primes rated a female target as more dependent than a male target who performed identical behaviors (Exp 1A). Likewise, Ss rated a male, but not a female, target as more aggressive after exposure to aggression primes compared with neutral primes (Exp 1B). Exp 2 replicated the implicit stereotyping effect and additionally showed no relationship between explicit memory for primes and judgment of target's dependence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)