European Journal of Personality

This article describes the derivation of a taxonomy of personality‐descriptive verbs. In the introduction the verb domain is delineated relative to other domains of the language of personality. It is argued that verbs are theoretically useful in bridging the gap between trait language and act language. The aim is to provide a representative and effective instrument for registering judgements on personality. In a first study the steps are described that were followed to arrive at a list of personality‐descriptive verbs. Both the present authors and layjudges (n=22) took part in this. Five hundred and forty‐three verbs resulted from this study. Study 2 (n=200) describes the determination of the internal structure of the domain of verbs through factor analysis of both self‐ and partner‐ratings. By applying a method of rotation to perfectly congruent weights the verb‐structure turned out to be invariant under the self‐ and partner‐conditions. The last part of the study investigates the relationship between personality‐descriptive verbs and adjectives. Regressions of verb‐ratings on the adjective‐ratings and of adjective‐ratings on the verb‐ratings were calculated and factor analyses were performed on the residual matrices. The results show the existence of additional verb‐dimensions above those already established in the adjective domain.

Several implications of the cognitive viewpoint on personality are tested and the predictive validity of cognitive processing variables is assessed with judgements of parents and friends as a criterion measure. Free recall of items was related to cognitive schemas but reaction time during score recall was not. Ease of faking as well as response latency during faking were not related to cognitive schemas.

Intra‐individual analysis revealed a consistent non‐linear relationship between response latency and item score in all conditions of the experiment. Although some cognitive process variables were correlated with the criterion measures, adding these variables to item scores did not always increase the predictive validity.

In this study, the relations among depression, anxiety, and neuroticism measured by self‐report questionnaires were investigated. Subjects were 207 psychiatric patients. High correlations were found among self‐report scales purporting to measure depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. Results of a content analysis showed considerable overlap among these scales. A division of items into six content categories did not result in lower correlations compared to the original scales.

The Act Frequency Approach (AFA) proposed by Buss and Craik was summarized and critically reviewed on the basis of a German replication study using six interpersonal traits each with 100 translated acts. The six traits studied were dominant, gregarious, agreeable, submissive, aloof, and quarrelsome. The internal structure of these categories was examined via multiple prototypicality ratings. It was demonstrated that many acts are highly prototypical for more than one category. The manifested categorical structure was tested by gathering retrospective act reports about performance and frequency of exhibiting each of these 600 acts using a sample of 213 adults. Aggregation of the acts according to their prototypicality key yielded reliable subscales. The validities obtained on the basis of the 25 highly prototypical acts were slightly higher compared with those of the 100 act set, as well as the sets with lower prototypicality. The validity gradient proposed by Buss and Craik was found using selected personality scales as well as global self‐ratings and peer‐ratings on some of the respective trait terms. In general, the results of the German study replicated the findings of Buss and Craik.

The present study investigates the hypothesis that, within personality assessment, the predictive validity of a list of act descriptive sentences will be higher than the validity of a personality inventory on the one hand and that of an adjective checklist on the other. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that people can judge more reliably whether a person will perform a specific act than whether he or she possesses a particular personality trait. Within the validity study, predictors were self‐judgements whereas criteria were peer‐judgements. The predictive validity of the act list was found to be lower than that of the inventory as well as that of the adjective checklist. Moreover, both the act list and the adjective checklist predicted the personality inventory better than the latter predicted the former two. Because of the different functions of self‐ and peer‐judgements within the present study, the former being predictors and the latter criteria, the results are interpreted under the perspective of self‐other attribution differences. Suggestions for constructing a possibly more valid list of act descriptive sentences are given.

A long‐standing problem in the behavioural assessment of personality is the individual specificity of responses. Often, different persons externalize the same trait in different responses. One solution to this problem is to aggregate many different responses. The paper compares the power of response aggregation for predicting self‐and other‐ratings of personality with two alternative strategies of response selection: the nomothetic strategy of selecting the response with the highest overall predictive power, and the more idiographic strategy of selecting, for each individual, the most extreme response. Seventy subjects were videotaped in a sequence of social situations inducing shyness to various degrees. Five different nonverbal measures of shyness all correlated significantly with the subjects' self‐ or other‐rated shyness, and showed low correlations across subjects and a substantial cross‐situational consistency of response profiles. Response aggregation and both strategies of response selection were found to be equally powerful in predicting the subjects' self‐ and other‐ratings of shyness from the five behavioural responses. Therefore, these findings somewhat dampen the hope often expressed in recent theoretical discussions of personality assessment that more respect for the individual case may improve nomothetic assessment procedures.