Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?

Wilson, Robert E.; Vazire, Simine

doi:10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0327

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

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“…Studies have established the value of not only investigating between-person differences in personality traits, but also investigating within-person fluctuations in personality states (e.g., Fleeson, 2001, 2017; Kuppens, 2015; Wilson & Vazire, 2015), and correlates of momentary affects, behaviors, and cognitions. For example, people tend to feel happier when they are around others and when they are acting more extraverted than usual, even if they are dispositional introverts (Lucas, Le, & Dyrenforth, 2008; Sun, Stevenson, Kabbani, Richardson, & Smillie, 2017; Zelenski et al, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

The language of well-being: Tracking fluctuations in emotion experience through everyday speech.

Sun¹,

Schwartz²,

Son³

et al. 2020

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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The words that people use have been found to reflect stable psychological traits, but less is known about the extent to which everyday fluctuations in spoken language reflect transient psychological states. We explored within-person associations between spoken words and self-reported state emotion among 185 participants who wore the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR; an unobtrusive audio recording device) and completed experience sampling reports of their positive and negative emotions 4 times per day for 7 days (1,579 observations). We examined language using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program (LIWC; theoretically created dictionaries) and open-vocabulary themes (clusters of data-driven semantically-related words). Although some studies give the impression that LIWC's positive and negative emotion dictionaries can be used as indicators of emotion experience, we found that when computed on spoken language, LIWC emotion scores were not significantly associated with self-reports of state emotion experience. Exploration of other categories of language variables suggests a number of hypotheses about substantive everyday correlates of momentary positive and negative emotion that can be tested in future studies. These findings (a) suggest that LIWC positive and negative emotion dictionaries may not capture self-reported subjective emotion experience when applied to everyday speech, (b) emphasize the importance of establishing the validity of language-based measures within one's target domain, (c) demonstrate the potential for developing new hypotheses about personality processes from the open-ended words that are used in everyday speech, and (d) extend perspectives on intraindividual variability to the domain of spoken language.

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confidence: 99%

The language of well-being: Tracking fluctuations in emotion experience through everyday speech.

Sun¹,

Schwartz²,

Son³

et al. 2020

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Methodologies for the Study of Posttraumatic Growth: Some New Directions

Jayawickreme

Blackie

2016

Exploring the Psychological Benefits of Hardship

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The incremental validity of average state self-reports over global self-reports of personality.

Finnigan

Vazire

2018

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Personality traits are most often assessed using global self-reports of one's general patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. However, recent theories have challenged the idea that global self-reports are the best way to assess traits. Whole Trait Theory postulates that repeated measures of a person's self-reported personality states (i.e., the average of many state self-reports) can be an alternative and potentially superior way of measuring a person's trait level (Fleeson& Jayawickreme, 2015). Our goal is to examine the validity of average state self-reports of personality for measuring between-person differences in what people are typically like. In order to validate average states as a measure of personality, we examine whether they are incrementally valid in predicting informant reports above and beyond global self-reports. In 2 samples, we find that average state self-reports tend to correlate with informant reports, although this relationship is weaker than the relationship between global self-reports and informant reports. Further, using structural equation modeling, we find that average state self-reports do not significantly predict informant reports independently of global self-reports. Our results suggest that average state self-reports may not contain information about between-person differences in personality traits beyond what is captured by global self-reports, and that average state self-reports may contain more self-bias than is commonly believed. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on daily manifestations of personality and the accuracy of self-reports. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?

Cited by 3 publications

References 27 publications

The language of well-being: Tracking fluctuations in emotion experience through everyday speech.

The language of well-being: Tracking fluctuations in emotion experience through everyday speech.

Methodologies for the Study of Posttraumatic Growth: Some New Directions

The incremental validity of average state self-reports over global self-reports of personality.

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