Non-conscious processing of fear faces: a function of the implicit self-concept of anxiety.

BACKGROUND: Trait anxiety refers to a stable tendency to experience fears and worries across many situations. High trait anxiety is a vulnerability factor for the development of psychopathologies. Self-reported trait anxiety appears to be associated with an automatic processing advantage for threat-related information. Self-report measures assess aspects of the explicit self-concept of anxiety. Indirect measures can tap into the implicit self-concept of anxiety. METHODS: We examined automatic brain responsiveness to non-conscious threat as a function of trait anxiety using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Besides a self-report instrument, we administered the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess anxiety. We used a gender-decision paradigm presenting brief (17 ms) and backward-masked facial expressions depicting disgust and fear. RESULTS: Explicit trait anxiety was not associated with brain responsiveness to non-conscious threat. However, a relation of the implicit self-concept of anxiety with masked fear processing in the thalamus, precentral gyrus, and lateral prefrontal cortex was observed. CONCLUSIONS: We provide evidence that a measure of the implicit self-concept of anxiety is a valuable predictor of automatic neural responses to threat in cortical and subcortical areas. Hence, implicit anxiety measures could be a useful addition to explicit instruments. Our data support the notion that the thalamus may constitute an important neural substrate in biased non-conscious processing in anxiety.

#Insta personality: Personality expression in Instagram accounts, impression formation, and accuracy of personality judgments at zero acquaintance.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined personality expression, impression formation, and the consensus and accuracy of zero-acquaintance personality judgments that were based on people's Instagram accounts. METHOD: Self- and informant reports of the Big Five personality traits, self-esteem, and narcissism were collected for 102 Instagram users. Screenshots were taken of Instagram users' profiles, including up to the 102 latest available Instagram posts. A number of Instagram cues were objectively retrieved, counted, and rated by independent trained cue coders from the screenshots. 100 unacquainted observers then judged the Big Five traits, self-esteem, and narcissism on the basis of Instagram screenshots only. RESULTS: We identified Instagram account characteristics that were associated with users' personality traits (measured with self-reports, informant reports, and self-informant composites) and observers' zero-acquaintance personality judgments. Personality judgments that were based on Instagram accounts demonstrated consensus and significantly converged with Instagram users' Big Five traits, self-esteem, and narcissism across all three personality criteria. Averaged-observer accuracy correlations for self-informant composite scores ranged from r = .44 (p < .001) for extraversion to r = .25 (p = .013) for conscientiousness. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide insight into cue processes of online self-portrayal and impression formation on Instagram and the level of zero-acquaintance accuracy.

No evidence that economic inequality moderates the effect of income on generosity.

A landmark study published in PNAS [Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:15838-15843] showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the moderating role of economic inequality. On the basis of the importance of replicating a major finding before readily accepting it as evidence, we analyzed the effect of the interaction between income and inequality on generosity in three large representative datasets. We analyzed the donating behavior of 27,714 US households (study 1), the generosity of 1,334 German individuals in an economic game (study 2), and volunteering to participate in charitable activities in 30,985 participants from 30 countries (study 3). We found no evidence for the postulated moderation effect in any study. This result is especially remarkable because (i) our samples were very large, leading to high power to detect effects that exist, and (ii) the cross-country analysis employed in study 3 led to much greater variability in economic inequality. These findings indicate that the moderation effect might be rather specific and cannot be easily generalized. Consequently, economic inequality might not be a plausible explanation for the heterogeneous results on the effect of social class on prosociality.

Personality and eating habits revisited: Associations between the big five, food choices, and Body Mass Index in a representative Australian sample.

OBJECTIVE: Personality traits are related to health and health-related behavior such as eating habits. However, results are inconsistent regarding exactly which traits are related to eating habits. The eating habits assessed across studies are also not easily comparable, as they are based on different food items and on different computational methods. This study investigated eating habits and their relationship to both the Big Five personality traits and Body Mass Index (BMI; an objective criterion of health status) in a representative Australian sample. METHOD: Participants were 13,892 adults from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. An analysis of 14 food items yielded three salient eating habits: consuming carbohydrate-based food (e.g., bread, pasta, snacks), meat (e.g., red meat, poultry), and plant-based food and fish (e.g., vegetables, fruits, legumes, fish). RESULTS: These three eating habits showed differential associations with personality and BMI. Eating plant-based food and fish was positively associated with openness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability in hierarchical regression analyses (controlling for sociodemographic factors and other personality traits). By contrast, consuming meat was negatively associated with openness and emotional stability, and positively associated with extraversion. Consuming carbohydrate-based food was negatively associated with conscientiousness, extraversion, and emotional stability. BMI was negatively related to conscientiousness and emotional stability and positively associated with agreeableness; BMI was related to all three eating habits. CONCLUSION: The present findings highlight the links between personality and individual health-related behavior. Implications and recommendations for the further study of individual differences in eating habits are discussed.

Keep your cool and win the game: Emotion regulation and performance in table tennis.

OBJECTIVE: People often feel anxious prior to performance situations, and this can lead to performance decrements. Thus, applying effective emotion regulation strategies could be crucial for achieving maximum performance. METHOD: We investigated the relation between dispositional precompetition emotion regulation and competition performance. Participants were 310 table tennis players (240 men, Mage  = 39.07, SD = 15.99). Self-reported emotion regulation behavior was matched with objective performance data. RESULTS: We found that positive cognitive change strategies were positively related and negative cognitive change strategies were negatively related to winning in competitions. Furthermore, athletes with a higher performance status more often used situation modification, positive cognitive change, and response modulation strategies. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings contribute to personality research by providing evidence for the (non)effectiveness of certain emotion regulation strategies.

Implicit and explicit self-concept of neuroticism in borderline personality disorder.

PURPOSE: In the past, research on personality in borderline personality disorder (BPD) used primarily questionnaires suggesting heightened neuroticism in BPD. Self-report instruments inform about the conscious or explicit self-concept. BPD patients are known to show negative distortion with exaggeration of negative affect in the self-report. Neuroticism represents a risk factor for mental disorders. Indirect measures are available that tap into the implicit self-concept of neuroticism. The implicit self-concept refers to individual differences in associative representations of the self. The present study examined for the first time the implicit in addition to the explicit self-concept of neuroticism in BPD. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Female BPD patients (N = 35) and healthy women (N = 39) completed an implicit association test and the NEO-FFI personality inventory. RESULTS: BPD patients showed higher implicit and explicit neuroticism compared to controls. The group difference for explicit neuroticism was four times larger than that for implicit neuroticism. Presence of comorbid depressive disorder was positively correlated with implicit neuroticism. The IAT neuroticism showed excellent split-half reliability for BPD patients. CONCLUSIONS: The present data suggest that BPD patients with comorbid clinical depression but not those without clinical depression differ from healthy individuals in their implicit self-concept of neuroticism. In the associative network, BPD patients with comorbid clinical depression exhibit stronger associations of the self with neuroticism-related characteristics, such as nervousness, fearfulness, and uncertainty than healthy individuals. Regardless of depression, BPD patients show increased explicit neuroticism. Our findings provide evidence that the IAT neuroticism can be applied reliably to BPD patients.

Examining the "Veggie" personality: Results from a representative German sample.

An increasing proportion of people choose to follow a vegetarian diet. To date, however, little is known about if and how individual differences in personality relate to following a vegetarian diet. In the two studies presented here, we aimed to (1) estimate the prevalence of self-defined vegetarians in two waves of a German representative sample (N = 4496 and 5125, respectively), (2) analyze the effect of socio-demographic variables on dietary behavior, and (3) examine individual differences between vegetarians and meat eaters in personality traits, political attitudes, and health-related variables. In Study 1, a strict definition of vegetarians was used, while in Study 2 the definition was laxer, to include also individuals who only predominantly followed a vegetarian diet. The prevalence of self-defined vegetarians was 2.74% in Study 1, and 5.97% in Study 2. Participants who were female, younger, and more educated were more likely to report following a vegetarian diet in both studies, and vegetarians had higher income as compared to meat eaters in Study 2. We also found differences between vegetarians and meat eaters with regard to personality traits, political attitudes, and health-related variables. Stepwise logistic regression analyses showed a unique effect beyond socio-demographic variables for openness (Studies 1 and 2), conscientiousness (Study 1), trust (Study 2), conservatism (Studies 1 and 2), and level of interest in politics (Study 1) on diet: Individuals with higher scores in openness and political interest had a higher probability of being vegetarian, whereas people with higher scores in conscientiousness and conservatism had a smaller likelihood of being vegetarian. We conclude that there are individual differences between vegetarians and meat eaters in socio-demographics, personality traits, and political attitudes.

Personality and attitudinal correlates of meat consumption: Results of two representative German samples.

The vast amount of meat consumed in the Western world is critically discussed with regard to negative health consequences, environmental impact, and ethical concerns for animals, emphasizing the need to extend knowledge regarding the correlates of meat consumption in the general population. In the present article, we conducted two studies examining the associations between meat consumption and personality traits, political attitudes, and environmental attitudes in two large German representative samples (Ntotal = 8,879, aged 18-96 years). Cross-sectional data on frequency of meat consumption, socio-demographics, personality traits, and political and environmental attitudes were collected via self-reports. In both studies, male sex, younger age, and lower educational attainment were significantly positively related to meat consumption. In Study 1, results of the partial correlations and the hierarchical regression analysis controlling for socio-demographics showed that the personality traits of openness and agreeableness, as well as conservative political and social views, explained unique variance in meat consumption. In Study 2, partial correlations and hierarchical regression analyses showed that openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were all uniquely negatively related to meat consumption. Moreover, these analyses documented that people scoring high in right-wing attitudes and low in pro-environmental attitudes reported more overall meat consumption. Taken together, these two studies provided evidence that socio-demographics, personality traits, and attitudes are indeed related to how much meat is consumed. Implications and future prospects for the study of individual differences in meat consumption are discussed.

Personality and meat consumption: The importance of differentiating between type of meat.

Recent research has shown that sociodemographic factors and the Big Five personality traits are related to people's overall level of meat consumption. However, there are important differences among various types of meat (e.g., red meat, poultry, and fish) that might lead to differential patterns in how the consumption of specific types of meat is associated with personality and sociodemographic factors. To disentangle these general and specific relationships, we conducted two studies using two large-scale representative samples from different countries: Germany (N = 13,062) and Australia (N = 15,036). Mostly consistent with our expectations, personality and sociodemographic variables showed specific associations with meat consumption, depending on type of meat. For example, in both studies, openness was negatively associated with red meat consumption but positively related to fish consumption, whereas it was unrelated to poultry consumption and overall meat consumption in hierarchical regression analyses in which we controlled for sociodemographic factors. By contrast, extraverted people reported both more consumption of each individual type of meat and more overall meat consumption. In sum, results were largely consistent between the samples, but effect sizes were generally small. Taken together, these two studies underscore the importance of differentiating between meat types when examining individual differences in meat consumption. Implications and future avenues for investigating the link between personality and dietary habits are discussed.

Accuracy of Self-Esteem Judgments at Zero Acquaintance.

OBJECTIVE: Perceptions of strangers' self-esteem can have wide-ranging interpersonal consequences. Aiming to reconcile inconsistent results from previous research that had predominantly suggested that self-esteem is a trait that can hardly be accurately judged at zero acquaintance, we examined unaquainted others' accuracy in inferring individuals' actual self-esteem. METHOD: Ninety-nine target participants (77 female; Mage = 23.5 years) were videotaped in a self-introductory situation, and self-esteem self-reports and reports by well-known informants were obtained as separate accuracy criteria. Forty unacquainted observers judged targets' self-esteem on the basis of these short video sequences (M = 23s, SD = 7.7). RESULTS: Results showed that both self-reported (r = .31, p = .002) and informant-reported self-esteem (r = .21, p = .040) of targets could be inferred by strangers. The degree of accuracy in self-esteem judgments could be explained with lens model analyses: Self- and informant-reported self-esteem predicted nonverbal and vocal friendliness, both of which predicted self-esteem judgments by observers. In addition, observers' accuracy in inferring informant-reported self-esteem was mediated by the utilization of targets' physical attractiveness. Besides using valid behavioral information to infer strangers' self-esteem, observers inappropriately relied on invalid behavioral information reflecting nonverbal, vocal, and verbal self-assuredness. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings show that strangers can quite accurately detect individuals' self-reported and informant-reported self-esteem when targets are observed in a public self-presentational situation.

Examining the effects of birth order on personality.

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person's position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person's life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality has not yet resulted in conclusive findings. We used data from three large national panels from the United States (n = 5,240), Great Britain (n = 4,489), and Germany (n = 10,457) to resolve this open research question. This database allowed us to identify even very small effects of birth order on personality with sufficiently high statistical power and to investigate whether effects emerge across different samples. We furthermore used two different analytical strategies by comparing siblings with different birth-order positions (i) within the same family (within-family design) and (ii) between different families (between-family design). In our analyses, we confirmed the expected birth-order effect on intelligence. We also observed a significant decline of a 10th of a SD in self-reported intellect with increasing birth-order position, and this effect persisted after controlling for objectively measured intelligence. Most important, however, we consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination. On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.

To make innovations such as replication mainstream, publish them in mainstream journals.

It was a pleasure to read Zwaan et al.'s wise and balanced target article. Here, I use it as a shining example for bolstering the argument that to make innovations such as replication mainstream, it seems advisable to move the debates from social media to respected "mainstream" psychology journals. Only then will mainstream psychologists be reached and, we hope, convinced.

Probing Birth-Order Effects on Narrow Traits Using Specification-Curve Analysis.

The idea that birth-order position has a lasting impact on personality has been discussed for the past 100 years. Recent large-scale studies have indicated that birth-order effects on the Big Five personality traits are negligible. In the current study, we examined a variety of more narrow personality traits in a large representative sample ( n = 6,500-10,500 in between-family analyses; n = 900-1,200 in within-family analyses). We used specification-curve analysis to assess evidence for birth-order effects across a range of models implementing defensible yet arbitrary analytical decisions (e.g., whether to control for age effects or to exclude participants on the basis of sibling spacing). Although specification-curve analysis clearly confirmed the previously reported birth-order effect on intellect, we found no meaningful effects on life satisfaction, locus of control, interpersonal trust, reciprocity, risk taking, patience, impulsivity, or political orientation. The lack of meaningful birth-order effects on self-reports of personality was not limited to broad traits but also held for more narrowly defined characteristics.

You are not alone - Social sharing as a necessary addition to the Embracing factor.

I argue that the Embracing factor cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the regulatory power of the social sharing of emotions. Humans tend to share their negative emotions with close others, and they benefit from it. I outline how this mechanism works in art reception by regulating and transforming negative emotions into positive experiences.

Only complementary voices tell the truth: a reevaluation of validity in multi-informant approaches of child and adolescent clinical assessments.

Multi-informant approaches are thought to be key to clinical assessment. Classical theories of psychological measurements assume that only convergence among different informants' reports allows for an estimate of the true nature and causes of clinical presentations. However, the integration of multiple accounts is fraught with problems because findings in child and adolescent psychiatry do not conform to the fundamental expectation of convergence. Indeed, reports provided by different sources (self, parents, teachers, peers) share little variance. Moreover, in some cases informant divergence may be meaningful and not error variance. In this review, we give an overview of conceptual and theoretical foundations of valid multi-informant assessment and discuss why our common concepts of validity need revaluation.

Accurate judgments of neuroticism at zero acquaintance: a question of relevance.

Prior studies have consistently found a surprising inaccuracy of people's neuroticism judgments at zero acquaintance. Based on the Realistic Accuracy Model (Funder, 1995), we hypothesize that this is due to a lack of relevance of the situation in which targets are typically observed. Fifty participants were videotaped in a highly trait-relevant (i.e., socially stressful) situation as well as three less relevant situations. An aggregate of self-reports and informant reports was used as the accuracy criterion. Four independent groups of unacquainted observers judged participants' neuroticism based on these short video sequences. Results showed that neuroticism judgments were significantly more accurate for the most trait-relevant situation compared with the other three situations. This finding can be explained using lens model analyses: Only in the most relevant situation did neuroticism predict both visual nervousness and vocal nervousness, both of which in turn predicted neuroticism judgments by lay observers. Our findings show that strangers are sensitive to interindividual differences in neuroticism as long as targets are observed in a trait-relevant situation.

Does a positive appraisal style work in all stressful situations and for all individuals?

Kalisch et al. posit that a positive appraisal style is the key to resilience. I will argue instead that the adaptiveness of a particular emotion-regulation strategy is determined by contextual factors. Hence, a positive appraisal style might not always result in positive consequences and is most likely not the only mediator of resilience.

Modifying the implicit illness-related self-concept in patients with somatoform disorders may reduce somatic symptoms.

BACKGROUND: According to dual process theories, not only do explicit but also implicit cognitive processes play a major role in the development and maintenance of somatoform disorders(SFDs). Recent evidence [1] suggests that patients with SFD shave a stronger implicit illness-related self-concept, which is related to the experience of medically unexplained symptoms. PURPOSE: The current study was designed to investigate a possible causal link between biased implicit associations and symptoms in SFD patients by experimentally modifying the implicit illness-related self-concept. METHODS: Twenty-nine patients with SFDs (according to the DSM-IV) initially completed an Implicit Association Test(IAT) for assessing the implicit illness-related self-concept.Two weeks later, they underwent an evaluative conditioning task to modify the implicit self-concept. RESULTS: After this procedure, a change toward a healthier implicit self-concept was apparent in the follow-up IAT. A reduction in symptom severity and changes in health- and body-related cognitions were observed 13 days after the training in the follow-up questionnaires. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that a biased implicit self-concept may be causally relevant for symptom experiences inpatients with SFDs. Existing cognitive behavioral treatments for SFDs might benefit from targeting implicit cognitive processes more directly.

Effects of matching climate change appeals to personal values.

The stronger people hold self-enhancing (that is, egoistic or hedonic) values, the less they tend agree with pro-environmental efforts. An exploratory (N = 901) and a confirmatory study (N = 404) examined the effectiveness of pro-environmental messages matched to individuals' values. Findings indicate that strong endorsement of self-transcendent (that is, altruistic or biospheric) values is associated with unspecific endorsement of pro-environmental messages, while individuals endorsing self-enhancement values respond positively only to value-matched appeals.