The act frequency approach to personality.

Personality dispositions are viewed as summaries of act frequencies that, in themselves, possess no explanatory status. As sociocultural emergents, dispositions function as natural cognitive categories with acts as members. Category boundaries are fuzzy, and acts within each category differ in their prototypicality of membership. This formulation is illustrated by a series of studies involving undergraduate raters, which focused on indices of act trends and on a comparative analysis of the internal structure of dispositions. The act frequency approach is placed within a taxonomic framework of the relations among act categories and hierarchic classification. Theoretical implications of the act frequency approach are examined. Dispositional consistency is distinguished from behavioral consistency, and several act frequency indices (e.g., dispositional versatility and situational scope) are defined. Situational analysis and personality coherence are viewed from the act frequency perspective. Discussion focuses on the possible origins and development of dispositional categories and implications of alternative middle-level constructs for act categorization and personality theory. (102 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)