Book review

Advances in Personality Psychology (Vol. 1)

Sarah E. Hampson (Ed.), Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Hove, East Sussex, 2000,xiv+242 pp., Hardback. ISBN 0-415-22768-2.

This is the first volume in a series ‘‘designed to bring together original reviews and criticalevaluations of important new developments in personality psychology’’. The Advances in Per-sonality Psychology series, edited by Ivan Mervielde and Sarah Hampson, aims to be ‘‘a scholarlysource of information on new theoretical developments, emerging research paradigms, and pro-mising applications of personality psychology’’ — a research area flourishing again after its‘demise’ in the 1970s. The volume editors are appointed by the series editors in consultation withthe executive committee of the European Association of Personality Psychology.

The chapters of the first volume, edited by S. Hampson, are based on the papers of a selectionof invited speakers at the Ninth European Conference on Personality Psychology held at theUniversity of Guilford, in 1998. Nevertheless, this is not a kind of conference book which usuallyfollows scientific gatherings like this. The authors were invited to produce an extended discussionof some issues in their fields according to guidelines suggested by the editors. In accordance, theywere asked, following a critical evaluation of the antecendents and the current developments oftheir research area, to delineate future directions of their topic based partly on results of theirown research. These chapters offer something more than the usual review articles, since the eva-luations and suggestions provided by the authors are always corroborated by their own recentempirical experience.

Although this book is not organized around one major theme, and is not polemic, the readermay identify some recurrent issues. Most of the chapters, from different points of view, touch onthe problems of personality description or the prediction of behavior. In Chapter 1, Saucier,Hampson and Goldberg summarize the results of the cross-cultural taxonomic research con-ducted by several researchers in the last 10 years, following the ‘emic’ or indigeous lexical strat-egy, in 12 different languages. The authors enumerate 18 methodological issues which, in additionto language or cultural differences, might affect the factor structures reported. Nevertheless, theconvergence of results is impressive in support of the Big Five as ‘cultural universals’ for cate-gorization of individual differences (Goldberg, 1981) but not necessarily of ‘human universals’(McCrae & Costa, 1997), according to which the ‘personality structure’ represented by the fivefactors is based on biological systems.

In Chapter 2, Mervielde and Asendorpf argue for a person-centered strategy or type-logic ofperson description, advocated first by William Stern, and later by Block and Block, who for along time ‘swam against the current of the variable centered mainstream’. This approach looksfor a configuration of multiple variables within the person based mainly on the Q-sort technique.

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Investigating individual differences among children, the authors confirmed three profiles ortypes — over-controlled, under-controlled, ego-resiliency — proposed by Robins, John, Caspi,Moffit, and Stouthamer-Loeber (1996), instead of two — ego-control, ego-resiliency — proposedoriginally by the Blocks. Therewith, the authors repeatedly identify these three types also inadults, using, among other rating measures, the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1991), suggestingthat the variable-centered and person-centered approaches are not incompatibile, but com-plementary research strategies.

The trait definiton in most cases involves the notion of consistency of behavior over time.Defining personality as ‘‘a relative enduring organization of motives and resources that helps theindividual to adapt to life changes’’, Helson and Kwan review the evidence of cross-sectional andlongitudinal studies concerning the systematic change of personality — increase in norm orienta-tion and decrease in social vitality — in adulthood. In a longitudinal study, investigating about100 women over 40 years using, among others, the CPI scales, referred to as the Mills Study, theauthors point to social factors, such as the changing tradition of womens’ social role or the women’smovement, that may have affected some aspects of the women’s personality during their adult life.

Since ‘‘self-reports [owing to perceiver and contrast effects] are a dubious data source in beha-vior-genetic research’’, Borkenau, Rieman, Spinath and Angleitner focus on observational twinand adoption studies. Their ‘‘narrative review instead of a meta-analysis’’ of 12 earlier studies,shows a more complex picture of genetic, non-shared and shared environmental effects, than thatusually seen in reviews of rating studies. On the basis of results of the German OvbservationalStudy of Adult Twins (GOSAT, including 169 MZ and 131 DZ twin pairs), the authors hypo-thesize that ‘‘genes tend to affect observed behavior at a more global level whereas environmentalinfluences tend to affect behaviour at a more specific level’’.

The purpose of Chapter 5, written by the statistician, ten Berge, ‘‘is to communicate develop-ments in psychometrics to the audience of personality psychologists’’. He addresses two statisticalmethods, the reliability measures of a test and the common factor analysis, frequently used inresearch on individual differences. The theory underlying the ‘‘greatest lower bound to reliability’’introduced by the author some 20 years ago, was extended into factor analysis, and has led to thedevelopment of Minimum, Rank Order Factor Analysis (MRFA). The difficulty, remains how-ever, that the importance of these new developments is yet to be appreciated by many personalityand applied psychologists who are inclined to ‘‘cling to relatively simple classical methods’’.

The contradictory research literature of the last 40 years, reviewed thorougly by Whiteman,Deary and Fowkes, revealed a small but consistent association between Type A behaviour patternor hostility related traits, on the one side, and the different types of cardiovascular diseases, onthe other. In ‘‘a prospective, longitudinal cohort study of [809] men and [783] women in the gen-eral population’’, called the Edinburgh Artery Study, including a 5-year and a 12-year follow-up,conducted by the authors, hostility and dominance-related personality traits were related to cardio-vascular risk factors and actual disease. The authors’ recommendation for future, interdisciplinaryresearch includes the application of validated measures of broader personality traits such as thosebased on the five-factor model; measuring different behaviour/personality/physical risk factor ele-ments; separating the subjective and objective measures of the diseases; and investigating the inter-actions between personality, coping and cardiovascular responses, separately in men and women.

The role played by cognitive processes in the relation between stable personality dispositionsand transient emotional states is in the focus of the last chapter of the book, written by Matthew,

1294 Book review / Personality and Individual Differences 32 (2002) 1293–1295

Derryberry and Siegle. According to the presented integrative model, fertilized by the currentdevelopment of the cognitive science, this relation can be understood at three levels of explana-tion, each of which is exemplified in one of the three authors’ research programmes. The neural,or cognitive neuroscience, level of investigation is represented in the work of Derryberry and hisco-workers, and aims to reveal the role of spatial orienting, attentional focus and voluntarycontrol of attention in the manifestation of trait anxiety. The connectionist models at the level ofcognitive architecture are represented by a neural network model of emotional information pro-cessing elaborated, and used for the understanding of rumination as a trait and state, by Siegleand his co-workers. In a self-regulative model of personality traits, representing the knowledgelevel of understanding, Matthews and his co-workers propose that the stability of traits (e.g.neuroticism), implies individual differences in the knowledge representations in long-term mem-ory, mostly in procedural form, as ‘‘the traits may be distributed across a variety of the inde-pendent aspects of self-knowledge’’, such as biases in self-appraisal, enhanced metacognition andbiases in coping (the cognitive components of neuroticism). Emotions (distress), on the otherhand, might be related to the status of self-regulation, based on regulative plans, retreived alsofrom long-term memory.

Summing up, the reviewer whole-heartedly agrees with the blurb of the book: ‘‘this state-of-artvolume will provide students, teachers, and researchers of contemporary personality psychologywith a highly valuable resource on recent developments in this area’’. The only point, that can beadded to this, is that the first volume of this new series provides a high standard for the editors offorthcoming volumes.

References

Costa Jr., P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1991). The NEO Personality Inventory (NEO P1-R) and the NEO Five-FactorInventory (NEO-FFI). Professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Goldberg, L. R. (1981). Language and individual differences: the search for universals in personality lexicons. In L.

Wheeler, Review of personality and social psychology. Vol. 2. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.McCrae, R. R., & Costa Jr., P. L. (1997). Personality trait structure as a human universal. American Psychologist, 52,

509–516.

Robins, R. W., John, O. P., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (1996). Resilient, overcontrolled andundercontrolled boys: three replicable personality types. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 157–171.

Janos NagyDepartment of Personality and Health Psychology

Eotvos Lorand UniversityBudapestHungary

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