European Journal of Personality

Two studies have been performed in the frame of the Big Five model to describe personality. In the first study, the most useful adjectives for describing personality have been selected, trying to adopt a procedure as objective and empirically driven as possible. The resulting pool of adjectives (n = 492) has been administered to a sample of 274 subjects to verify the emergence of the Big Five in the Italian context. In the second study the pool of original adjectives has been reduced to 260 adjectives selecting the most representative terms (with regard to the factorial structure that has emerged). This pool of 260 adjectives has been administered to a sample of 862 subjects, together with the NEO‐PI and the BFQ to facilitate the interpretation of the resulting factorial structure. Results showed the emergence of an Italian Big Five factorial structure that resembles the ‘canonical’ Big Five, although some of the factors, viz. Agreeableness and Emotional Stability, emerged as ‘blended’ dimensions.

This study was undertaken to shed some light on problems that have arisen in measuring cognitive confrontation (monitoring) and cognitive avoidance (blunting) with a self‐report questionnaire, the Miller Behavioral Style Scale (MBSS; Miller, 1987). For this purpose, variants of both coping styles were studied in a naturalistic setting: 37 women who underwent prenatal diagnosis were interviewed at home about their ways of coping with different stages of the procedure, a few days before they expected the diagnostic results. Interview fragments pertaining to cognitive confrontation and avoidance were selected and analysed by two investigators in order to generate categories of avoidance and confrontation coping strategies. For some of the fragments, inter judge reliability was assessed using new judges. A comparison between the categories found and the kinds of items used in the MBSS shows that in real life more coping variants occur than those represented in the MBSS, in particular variants that involve a combination of cognitive confrontation and avoidance. Implications for the dimensionality of both concepts and for their measurement are discussed.

The effect of personal ideals on socially desirable responding (impression management or IM, and self‐deception or SDE) was examined in a study of 428 undergraduate students. The subjects indicated their endorsement of 56 values and filled in Paulhus's (1991) Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. Three IM types, viz. ingratiators, exemplificators, and intimidators, were defined from the subjects’ personal ideals. We hypothesized that both ingratiators and exemplificators score high and that intimidators score low on IM items. These hypotheses were confirmed, but the result for intimidators was only marginally reliable. Furthermore, it turned out that high IM scorers strove for collective values but high SDE scorers strove for individual values. The results are discussed as an expression of a self‐construction process, which is based on personal, rather than social, ideals. In addition, the implications of the results for controlling the effect of socially desirable responding are discussed.

This study focuses on explanations for the perceived consensus of one's own social value orientation. The prediction of the triangle hypothesis that the consensus expectation of individualistic and competitive people is higher than that of cooperative people was partially supported. Only individualists expected their own orientation more frequently of other people. According to a causal attribution explanation, it was expected that subjects' causal attributions for their own orientation to internal and external causes influenced their consensus expectations. Only attributions to internal causes differed significantly between subjects with different orientations and corresponded with their consensus estimates. Individualism was attributed least internally, cooperation most internally, and competition in between. Additionally, direct support for the effect of internal attributions on consensus expectations was found. Compared with subjects who attributed their own orientation more internally, subjects who attributed it less internally were more likely to expect their own orientation among other people. According to a self‐justification explanation, it was hypothesized that the consensus expectations of individualists and competitors would be higher when first their own social orientation was assessed and then the orientation they expected to predominate among others than in the reversed order. This hypothesis was not supported.