We examined properties of culture-level personality traits in ratings of targets (N = 5,109) aged 12 to 17 in 24 cultures. Aggregate scores were generalizable across gender, age, and relationship groups and showed convergence with culture-level scores from previous studies of self-reports and observer ratings of adults, but they were unrelated to national character stereotypes. Trait profiles also showed cross-study agreement within most cultures, eight of which had not previously been studied. Multidimensional scaling showed that Western and non-Western cultures clustered along a dimension related to Extraversion. A culture-level factor analysis replicated earlier findings of a broad Extraversion factor, but generally resembled the factor structure found in individuals. Continued analysis of aggregate personality scores is warranted.The idea that the citizens of different nations have distinctive personalities can be traced to antiquity, and it was a central tenet of early 20th century culture and personality studies (LeVine, 2001). For a number of reasons, including the declining influence of psychoanalysis and ethical concerns about ethnocentrism (see Church, 2001), the topic fell out of favor, and interest has only recently been revived, this time from the perspective of trait psychology (Lynn & Martin, 1995; McCrae, Terracciano, & 79 Members of the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project, 2005;Schmitt et al., 2007). In this new approach, personality profiles of cultures can be obtained by averaging traits assessed in a sample of culture members, yielding a set of aggregate personality traits. This is an etic approach, in which the same set of traits (usually identified in one culture) are studied across a range of cultures.The validity of these culture-level scores must be established, and there are at least two reasons to be skeptical about their accuracy. The first is that the personality trait scales that NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript are aggregated may not themselves be commensurable across cultures: They may assess different constructs in different cultural contexts, or they may lack scalar equivalence (Nye, Roberts, Saucier, & Zhou, 2008;van de Vijver & Leung, 1997) because of problems in translation or in the relevance of particular items or to cultural differences in response styles. These are theoretical threats to the validity of all cross-cultural measures.The second reason to doubt the validity of aggregate personality scores is that research to date suggests that they do not correspond to national character stereotypes (Perugini & Richetin, 2007). It is widely believed, for example, that the English are reserved-yet their aggregate personality scores suggest that they are in fact quite extraverted (McCrae, Terracciano, & 79 Members, 2005). This finding is not a fluke; analyses of data from 49 cultures suggested that national stereotypes are almost completely unrelated to aggregate personality traits (Terracciano et al., 2005). Many stereot...

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The six days fasting in the month of Syawal is a voluntary fasting after the 30 days of obligatory fasting in the month of Ramadan. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of sixday fasting in the month of Syawal on the changes of personality among Muslims. A total of 111 participants comprised of students from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) took part in this study. All participants were Muslims, consisting 91 women and 20 men with age range of 20 years to 53 years old. The analysis method used was multilevel modeling using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) version 7.0. The LHM was used to test all the hypotheses of the study. The objective of the study was to identify the impact of the Syawal voluntary fasting on the personality change. The findings of this study showed that the quality of Syawal voluntary fasting gives effect to the change of personality which bring significant relationship with both positive and negative personalities. Hence, it can be concluded that the six days voluntary fasting in the month of Syawal contributed to the changes of personality among Muslims.

Brainstorming is a series of procedures (rules) designed to maximize the productivity of groups engaged in idea generation by reducing production loss, popularized by Osborn, an advertising executive. The main concern in this tool is increasing creativity in an organization. This study examines two main factors, production loss and ownership of the topic that influence the performance in group brainstorming. Production loss includes activities in production blocking, social loafing and evaluation apprehension among individuals, while ownership of the topic relates to the interest of individuals in engaging the brainstorming activities especially in industrial design. Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study reports on the participation of115 groups of university students from 6 different universities. The data is analyzed at group-level. The hypotheses of this study are tested using Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression. Results reveal that out of the three dimensions of production loss, production blocking, social loafing, and evaluation apprehension, production blocking is negatively related to the group brainstorming performance whereas evaluation apprehension is positively related to the performance or group brainstorming. As expected, ownership or the topic is related to the performance too. However, social loafing is not related to the performance or group brainstorming. The results are of potential interest to educators, and researchers. This study responds 10 a call for further brainstorming research. © 2016 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK.. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, UniversitiTeknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21834/aje-bs.v1i1.165 Keywords: Industrial Design, Brainstorming, Production loss, Ownership of the Topic, Group-level Analysis.