Hostility is an independent predictor of recurrent coronary heart disease events in men but not women: results from a population based study.
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Adult↗
Biomedical subjects
W F Chaplin
Publications and source records attributed to W F Chaplin.
The Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale: factor structure, reliability, and validity with older adults.
The Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale Form A (DAS-A), a self-report measure of depression-related attitudes, has been used in numerous depression studies. The DAS-A has a two-factor structure that has been found consistently with college student samples and clinically depressed samples of middle-aged adults, but it has not been validated with older adults. The present study examined the factor structure with a sample of 100 depressed older adults (average age = 68.19; average initial Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression [HRSD] score = 16.72) who participated in a depression treatment study. Results indicated the factor structure established with younger adults was not replicated with older adults. Furthermore, the factor structure with older adults was uncertain: a single factor structure, two-factor structure, and three-factor structure were essentially of equal validity. The uncertainty of the latent structure of the DAS-A suggests that it should be interpreted with caution whenever used with older adults.
Aged↗
Psychosocial and health status variables independently predict health care seeking in fibromyalgia.
OBJECTIVE: To determine whether variables derived from the self-regulatory model of health and illness behavior accurately predict status as a patient or nonpatient with fibromyalgia (FM). METHODS: Subjects were 79 patients who met American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria for FM and 39 community residents who met ACR criteria for FM but had not sought medical care for their symptoms (nonpatients). Subjects were administered 14 measures that produced 6 domains of variables: background demographics and pain duration; psychiatric morbidity; and personality, environmental, cognitive, and health status factors. These domains were entered in 4 different hierarchical logistic regression analyses to predict status as patient or nonpatient. RESULTS: The full regression model was statistically significant (P < 0.0001) and correctly identified 90.7% of the subjects with a sensitivity of 92.4% and a specificity of 87.2%. The best individual predictors of group status were self-reports of self-efficacy, negative affect, recent stressful events, and perceived pain. Relative to nonpatients, patients reported higher levels of negative affect and perceived pain and a greater number of recent stressful experiences, as well as lower levels of self-efficacy. CONCLUSION: Consistent with the self-regulatory model of health and illness behavior, psychosocial and health status variables predict health care-seeking behavior in persons with FM independently of background demographics and psychiatric morbidity. These variables may influence the severity of symptoms experienced by persons with this disorder as well as their health care-seeking behavior, but they are not necessary to produce abnormal pain sensitivity in FM.
Activities of Daily Living↗
Handshaking, gender, personality, and first impressions.
Although people's handshakes are thought to reflect their personality and influence our first impressions of them, these relations have seldom been formally investigated. One hundred twelve participants had their hand shaken twice by 4 trained coders (2 men and 2 women) and completed 4 personality measures. The participants' handshakes were stable and consistent across time and coders. There were also gender differences on most of the handshaking characteristics. A firm handshake was related positively to extraversion and emotional expressiveness and negatively to shyness and neuroticism; it was also positively related to openness to experience, but only for women. Finally, handshake characteristics were related to the impressions of the participants formed by the coders. These results demonstrate that personality traits, assessed through self-report, can predict specific behaviors assessed by trained observers. The pattern of relations among openness, gender, handshaking, and first impressions suggests that a firm handshake may be an effective form of self-promotion for women.
Adult↗
Coder gender and potential for hostility ratings.
This study examined the effects of coder gender on Potential for Hostility ratings. Six trained coders (3 men and 3 women) who were unaware of the coder gender effect hypothesis coded 30 male and 30 female undergraduates for Potential for Hostility. Although reliability estimates as calculated by Cronbach's alpha suggested that all coders were consistent, an analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect for coder gender, wherein female coders rated participants as displaying significantly less Potential for Hostility than did male coders. This significant difference was also meaningful, as coder gender accounted for 32% of the variance in Potential for Hostility scores. Thus, future Potential for Hostility investigations need to consider the gender of those coding, as this factor both significantly and substantially influences reported Potential for Hostility ratings.
Adult↗
The next generation of moderator research in personality psychology.
The concept of a moderator variable has a long and checkered history in personality psychology. In this article I review the methodological and conceptual advances in recent moderator variable research. I then report the results of a number of empirical analyses of three newly proposed idiographic moderator variables: scalability, metatraits, and construct similarity, as well as the ipsatized variance index. The results of these analyses indicate that moderator effect sizes in personality can be expected to correspond to a correlation of about .10. I then consider two recent prescriptions, (a) aggregating trait-specific moderators into general ones, and (b) evaluating joint (e.g., triple interaction) moderator effects. Following these prescriptions did not increase the size of the moderator effects in these data. I conclude that moderator effects in personality will be small, and will thus be most reliably detected in very large samples with predictors that are strongly related to the criteria. Even small moderator effects can be important and interesting in the context of theory disconfirmation. However, moderator variables generally will not serve to transform weak relations among personality variables into strong ones.
Female↗
Conceptions of states and traits: dimensional attributes with ideals as prototypes.
Traits and states are concepts that people use to both describe and understand themselves and others. We show that people view these concepts as prototype-based categories that have a graded internal structure and fuzzy boundaries and identify a set of attributes that define the prototypical cores of two categories: traits and states. Prototypical traits are stable, long-lasting, and internally caused. Prototypical states are temporary, brief, and caused by external circumstances. These prototypes are not defined by averages, as the family-resemblance principle would suggest, but by ideal (or extreme) attribute values. Like other ideal-based categories, traits and states serve particular goals. Trait concepts permit people to predict the present from the past; state concepts identify those behaviors that can be controlled by manipulating the situation. These two complementary schemas are part of the extensive theory of psychological causality that is implicit in language. Abstract social concepts differ from object categories in their category standards, the nature of their attributes, and the interrelations among those attributes.
Behavior↗
Self-ratings of personality: a naturalistic comparison of normative, ipsative, and idiothetic standards.
The purpose of this research is to examine some of the implicit standards that individuals may use when they rate themselves on personality dimensions. Specifically, we compared ratings based on instructions that specified normative, ipsative, or idiothetic criteria with ratings obtained when subjects used their own (implicit) standards. In a series of three studies, we found that each of the explicit ratings was highly similar to the implicit-standard ratings and that there were substantial individual differences in the relative similarity of each of the explicit ratings to the implicit ratings. However, because the normative instructions elicited less extreme responses than any of the other instructions, there was a small but consistent tendency for them to be less similar to the ratings based on implicit standards than the ipsative or idiothetic ratings. The implications of this research for personality assessment and self-evaluation are discussed.
Female↗
Type III error in research on interpersonal models of depression.
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Depressive Disorder↗
A failure to replicate the Bem and Allen study of individual differences in cross-situational consistency.
Bem and Allen (1974) purportedly found evidence that, by using self-report measures of cross-situational consistency as moderator variables, it was possible to substantially increase the size of correlation coefficients computed among measures of each of two personality traits. The present study was undertaken to (a) replicate the Bem and Allen finding on a larger set of personality traits, (b) determine if the results hold differentially for self-report, other-report, and objective personality measures, and (c) compare different methods for dividing subjects into high and low consistent groups. One hundred twelve subjects (64 men and 48 women) were divided into high and low consistent groups using three different methods. Within each group correlations were computed among and between 6 self-report measures, 10 other-report measures, and when possible a few objective measures, for each of eight traits. In general, none of the methods of consistency classification replicated the Bem and Allen finding. In cases where the high consistent group had a larger average correlation among the measures than their low consistent counterparts, the size of that difference was negligible. Moreover, there were about as many instances in which the low consistent group actually had larger average correlations. Finally, there was essentially no agreement among the various consistency classification methods in dividing subjects into high and low consistent subsamples.
Assertiveness↗