Relations of the Big-Five personality dimensions to autodestructive behavior in clinical and non-clinical adolescent populations.

AIM: To examine the relationship between the Big-Five personality model and autodestructive behavior symptoms, namely Autodestructiveness and Suicidal Depression in two groups of participants: clinical and non-clinical adolescents. METHODS: Two groups of participants, clinical (adolescents with diagnosis of psychiatric disorder based on clinical impression and according to valid diagnostic criteria, N=92) and non-clinical (high-school students, N=87), completed two sets of questionnaires: the Autodestructiveness Scale which provided data on Autodestructiveness and Suicidal Depression, and the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), which provided data on the Big -Five personality dimensions. RESULTS: Clinical group showed significantly higher values on the Autodestructiveness scale in general, as well as on Suicidal Depression, Aggressiveness, and Borderline subscales than the non-clinical group. Some of the dimensions of the Big-Five personality model, ie, Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness showed significant relationship (hierarchical regression analyses, P values for ß coefficients from 0.000 to 0.021) with Autodestructiveness and Suicidal Depression, even after controlling for the sex and group effects or, when analyzing Suicidal Depression, after controlling the effect of other subscales. CONCLUSION: The results indicate that dimensions of the Big-Five model are important when evaluating adolescent psychiatric patients and adolescents from general population at risk of self-destructive behavior.

The Impact of Our Personality on Others: The Lithuanian Comprehensive Lexical Taxonomy of Social Effects.

Social effects represent the psychological (emotional, cognitive, and motivational) reactions evoked in other people by the expression of traits in behavior and emotion. From the transactional view on personality, studying the psycholexical structures of social effects can help to discover unique vs. common thought and behavior patterns, affects, and motivations, which are primarily related to personality dispositions. Thus, we developed the comprehensive taxonomy of social effects following the principles of the psycholexical approach. In the first study, two judges selected 9,625 person-descriptive terms-adjectives, type-nouns, attribute-nouns, and participles-from the Dictionary of the Standard Lithuanian Language. In the second study, six judges classified all the selected descriptors using German psycholexical methodology. Finally, a principal component analysis was performed, followed by varimax rotation for the 208 social-effect descriptors, separately for ipsatized self-ratings and observer-ratings from 203 to 204 Lithuanian students, respectively. We found out that the five-component solution was the best fit for self-ratings, whereas for observer-ratings it was a four-component structure. In this article, we present the results from the factor analyses and discuss our findings in the context of previous studies, as well as cross-language personality models.

Dispositional resistance to change: measurement equivalence and the link to personal values across 17 nations.

The concept of dispositional resistance to change has been introduced in a series of exploratory and confirmatory analyses through which the validity of the Resistance to Change (RTC) Scale has been established (S. Oreg, 2003). However, the vast majority of participants with whom the scale was validated were from the United States. The purpose of the present work was to examine the meaningfulness of the construct and the validity of the scale across nations. Measurement equivalence analyses of data from 17 countries, representing 13 languages and 4 continents, confirmed the cross-national validity of the scale. Equivalent patterns of relationships between personal values and RTC across samples extend the nomological net of the construct and provide further evidence that dispositional resistance to change holds equivalent meanings across nations.

Only three factors of personality description are fully replicable across languages: a comparison of 14 trait taxonomies.

We tested the hypothesis that only 3 factors of personality description are replicable across many different languages if they are independently derived by a psycholexical approach. Our test was based on 14 trait taxonomies from 12 different languages. Factors were compared at each level of factor extraction with solutions with 1 to 6 factors. The 294 factors in the comparisons were identified using sets of markers of the 6-factor model by correlating the marker scales with the factors. The factor structures were pairwise compared in each case on the basis of the common variables that define the 2 sets of factors. Congruence coefficients were calculated between the varimax rotated structures after Procrustes rotation, where each structure in turn served as a target to which all other structures were rotated. On the basis of average congruence coefficients of all 91 comparisons, we conclude that factor solutions with 3 factors on average are replicable across languages; solutions with more factors are not.

An analysis of a cross-cultural personality inventory: the IPIP Big-Five factor markers in Croatia.

In this article, we describe the factor structure in both self-reports and peer ratings of the items in a cross-cultural Big-Five inventory in Croatia. Using 2 versions of an inventory developed from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999), this is one of the first cross-national analyses of these IPIP measures. A large sample of university students (N = 519) used the translated Croatian version of the 100-item IPIP Big Five inventory to describe themselves, and they were also described by 515 of their acquaintances on the same instrument. In separate analyses of both self-reports and peer ratings, the 100-item and 50-item versions of these IPIP measures showed clear Five-factor orthogonal structures that were nearly identical to the American structure. These factors were strongly related on a one-to-one basis with those derived from a Croatian translation of Goldberg's (1992) bipolar rating scales.