The developing consensus that much of the psychologically interesting variance in behavior will be found in the interaction between the person and the situation suggests the need for a common language of description for both persons and situations. Accordingly, we propose that a situation be characterized by a set of template-behavior pairs, which is a set of personality descriptions (Q sorts) of hypothetical "ideal" persons, each one associated with a particular behavior. The Q-sort description of a particular individual is then matched against each template, and he or she is predicted to display the behavior associated with the most similar template. The heuristic and predictive utility of this template matching technique is demonstrated in three classical experimental settings: (a) the delay-of-gratification situation, (b) the mixed-motive game, and (c) the forced-compliance experiment. It is shown that this technique can also be used to assess the ecological validity of laboratory experiments and to test competing theories of psychological phenomena.Behavior, as everybody knows, is a function of both the person and the situation. But despite our latter-day obeisance to this truism, we persistently continue to underestimate the influence of the situation. As lay "intuitive" psychologists, we display this bias so pervasively that it is now known as the "fundamental attribution error" (Ross, 1977); and, as professional psychologists, we continue to stand bemused as seemingly trivial alterations in experimental procedure continue to produce nontrivial changes in our subjects' behaviors. For We are grateful to Jack Block and Walter Mischel for helpful comments on this article.

Top-down and bottom-up approaches were combined to assess the relative impact of extraversion, neuroticism, and daily events on daily mood. Ninety-six community-residing men completed diaries for 8 consecutive nights. Extraversion predicted positive mood, whereas neuroticism predicted positive and negative mood. Undesirable events predicted negative mood and, more modestly, positive mood. Desirable events predicted positive mood. Negative dispositional and situational factors play a larger role in daily positive affect than positive factors do in daily negative affect.

A naturalistic diary study was conducted to investigate the degree to which agreeableness and neuroticism moderate emotional reactions to conflict and nonconflict problems. Healthy community-residing males made diary recordings at the end of each of 8 successive days concerning problem occurrence and daily mood. Consistent with predictions based on person-environment fit, participants who scored higher in agreeableness experienced more subjective distress when they encountered more interpersonal conflicts than did their less agreeable counterparts. Neuroticism was related to a small but consistent reactivity to both conflict and nonconflict problems, contrary to person-environment fit. Reasons for the differences in the affective dynamics of agreeableness and neuroticism are discussed.

This article introduces the Journal of Personality's special issue on coping and personality. It first presents a historical overview of the psychological study of how people cope with stress and identifies three generations of theory and research: (a) the psychoanalysts and the ego development school, which tended to equate personality and coping strategies; (b) the transactional approach, which appeared in the 1960s and emphasized situational and cognitive influences on coping while downplaying the role of individual differences; and (c) the most recent, "third generation," whose work is represented in this special issue and focuses on the role of personality in coping while maintaining strong operational distinctions among coping, personality, appraisal, and adaptational outcomes. This introduction concludes with a discussion of unresolved conceptual and methodological issues and a brief orientation to the third-generation articles that follow in this special issue.

Huntington disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that involves preferential atrophy in the striatal complex and related subcortical nuclei. In this paper, which is based on a dataset extracted from the PREDICT-HD study, we use statistical shape analysis with deformation markers obtained through Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping of cortical surfaces to highlight specific atrophy patterns in the caudate, putamen, and globus pallidus, at different prodromal stages of the disease. Based on the relation to cortico-basal-ganglia circuitry, we propose that statistical shape analysis, along with other structural and functional imaging studies, may help expand our understanding of the brain circuitry affected and other aspects of the neurobiology of HD, and also guide the most effective strategies for intervention.