Austin T. Church - US grants

Broad objectives include clarification of: (1) the structure of personality and emotion (i.e., the nature, number, and interrelationships of important personality and emotion dimensions; (2) the cross-cultural generalizability of personality and emotion taxonomies and dimensions; (3) the relationship between broad dimensions of culture and valued and modal personality; and (4) the generalizability across cultures of the determinants of mood. Personality and emotion lexicons and structures will be investigated in a non-Western culture (the Philippines), using a Malayo-Polynesian language (Pilipino). Comparisons will be made against Western taxonomies and dimensions. The research will contribute to mental health theory, assessment, and interventions by clarifying the structure and socio-cultural determinants of traits and emotions across cultures. Person-descriptive terms will be culled from a Pilipino dictionary and Filipino college students' judgments will be used to classify terms as referring to traits, emotions and moods, or both. Pilipino and English trait and emotion lexicons will be compared by having bilinguals sort the Pilipino terms into existing English taxonomies. Semantic structures of trait and emotion terms will be obtained by having Filipino college students sort terms based on meaning similarity, and by performing factor analyses, cluster analyses, and multidimensional scaling on the resulting similarity matrices. Peer-rating and self-report structures for Pilipino traits will be obtained by having Filipino students rate self and peers on Pilipino trait terms, and by factor analyzing the intercorrelations between rated traits. Self-report mood dimensions will be derived by factor analyzinq the intercorrelations between Pilipino mood adjectives rated by Filipino students and working adults. Comparisons of Filipino personality and mood dimensions against major Western dimensions will be made using confirmatory factor analysis. To determine if broad dimensions of culture underlie modal and valued personality, Filipino and American students' self-ratings and social-desirability ratings for Collectivist (Philippines) versus Individualistic (U.S.) traits will be compared using analysis of variance. To determine if Filipino mood dimensions have the same determin- ants as in Western studies, personality trait scores and the frequencies of various daily life events will be correlated with rated daily mood of students and working adults over a 90-day period.

DESCRIPTION (investigator's abstract): The importance of the trait concept for personality psychology, and in the prediction of mental health, is well-established in Western psychology, but has been challenged by cultural psychologists and individualism-collectivism theorists. The broad objectives of this research are: (a) to achieve a theoretical and empirical integration of the cultural psychology and trait psychology perspectives; and (b) to demonstrate the relevance of personality traits for self-concept, causal inferences about behavior, and the consistency and prediction of behavior in all cultures. Specific hypotheses will be tested in cross-cultural studies involving an individualistic culture (the U.S.) and a collectivistic culture (the Philippines). First, a new measure that measures the extent to which individuals believe that behavior is determined by personality traits (implicit trait theorists) or situational context (implicit contextual theorists) will be refined and validated across cultures. Then, free-response and objective inventory measures of self-concept will be used to test the hypothesis that individuals in all cultures incorporate personal attributes, including traits, in their self-concepts, but that individuals in collectivistic cultures (and implicit contextual theorists) do so less than individuals in individualistic cultures (and implicit trait theorists). Inferences about behaviors encountered in naturalistic settings will be used to test the hypothesis that individuals in all cultures make trait inferences from behavior, but that individuals in individualistic cultures (and implicit trait theorists) do so more readily, while individuals in collectivistic cultures (and implicit contextual theorists) make situational inferences more readily. Self and mean acquaintance ratings on personality traits will be compared across cultures to test the hypothesis that individuals in individualistic cultures (and implicit trait theorists) exhibit self-enhancement tendencies to a greater extent than do individuals in collectivistic cultures (and implicit contextual theorists). The extent of inter-judge and cross-role agreement in personality ratings will be compared across cultures to test the hypothesis that individuals in individualistic cultures, and those whose behavior is guided more by their traits than by the situational context (i.e., low self-monitors), exhibit greater consistency of trait relevant behavior across situational contexts and across roles than do individuals in collectivistic cultures (and those who are high in self-monitoring). Experience sampling methods will be used to test the hypothesis that cross-situational consistency and personality-prediction of behavior are greater for individuals in individualistic cultures (and low self-monitors) than for individuals in collectivistic cultures (and high self-monitors).