Personality traits below facets: The consensual validity, longitudinal stability, heritability, and utility of personality nuances.

Abstract

It has been argued that facets do not represent the bottom of the personality hierarchy-even more specific personality characteristics, nuances, could be useful for describing and understanding individuals and their differences. Combining 2 samples of German twins, we assessed the consensual validity (correlations across different observers), rank-order stability, and heritability of nuances. Personality nuances were operationalized as the 240 items of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). Their attributes were examined by analyzing item residuals, controlling for the variance of the facet the item had been assigned to and all other facets. Most nuances demonstrated significant (p < .0002) cross-method agreement and rank-order stability. A substantial proportion of them (48% in self-reports, 20% in informant ratings, and 50% in combined ratings) demonstrated a significant (p < .0002) component of additive genetic variance, whereas evidence for environmental influences shared by twins was modest. Applying a procedure to estimate stability and heritability of true scores of item residuals yielded estimates comparable with those of higher-order personality traits, with median estimates of rank-order stability and heritability being .77 and .52, respectively. Few nuances demonstrated robust associations with age and gender, but many showed incremental, conceptually meaningful, and replicable (across methods and/or samples) predictive validity for a range of interest domains and body mass index. We argue that these narrow personality characteristics constitute a valid level of the personality hierarchy. They may be especially useful for providing a deep and contextualized description of the individual, but also for the prediction of specific outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) personality.

“…The interrater reliabilities of single ratings were lower but within the range of those in studies of humans and other species (Morton et al, 2013;Weiss et al, 2011Weiss et al, , 2015Mõttus et al, 2017) and considered as acceptable (e.g. Mõttus et al, 2014).…”

Is grit relevant to well‐being and strengths? Evidence across the globe for separating perseverance of effort and consistency of interests

“…One correlated error between Items 3 and 6 was added ( r = .32), which significantly decreased the chi‐square value, Δχ²(1) = 857.64, p < .001. The correlated error likely reflects the grit nuance (i.e., personality attribute below facets) of work ethic under the facet of perseverance of effort (Mottus, Kandler, Bleidorn, Reimann, & McCrae, ). Although adding in correlated errors between items 8 and 12 as well as Items 1 and 2 from the modified two‐factor model significantly decreased the chi‐square value, Δχ²(2) = 36.69, p < .001, the model fit indices remained or worsened: The CFI stayed the same, the NNFI decreased .001, the RMSEA increased .001, and the WRMR increased 0.61.…”

Personality traits across countries: Support for similarities rather than differences

“…For the sake of parsimony, we report unconstrained models that do not make use of covariance error residuals or modification indices. As there are reasons to believe that there are trait-levels below facets on item-level [8], an alternative would have been to correlate residuals, but it was decided that this would complicate the parsimony and current use of the FFM.…”

“…Extraversion, for instance, is composed of facets such as friendliness, cheerfulness, and assertiveness, while Conscientiousness is composed of facets such as self-efficacy, orderliness and dutifulness. These specific traits are in turn informed by four separate questionnaire items, which also have shown trait-like features such as heritability and stability [8]. For a full list of the 30 facet-traits investigated in the present study, see Table 3.…”