			Home About us Contact

Basic Tendency (basic + tendency)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	50%

Selected Abstracts

Does personality change and, if so, what changes?,

CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR AND MENTAL HEALTH, Issue 1 2004
Conor Duggan
Background Although the question of whether or not personality changes is fundamental to much of what clinicians do, we do not appear to be very curious about the question itself. Method This paper considers three separate but related issues: (a) Does personality change? (b) If it does, then what changes? (c) How can we show that change has taken place? Costa and McCrea have produced a model of personality that helps to answer (a) and (b), as it distinguishes ,Basic Tendencies' from ,Characteristic Adaptations'. The former are largely innate, fixed dispositions that produce the latter (which are highly variable) depending on its interaction with differing environments. Thus, personality is both static and dynamic depending on its definition. It will also be argued that detecting change is complex as there are many alternative definitions of the relevant outcome variable. Moreover, measuring several different outcomes does not help as change in one measure is often not matched by a concordant change in another. Some practical examples are provided to support this position. Conclusions In the absence of a firm theoretical base, the author believes that only limited conclusions can be drawn about the efficacy of treatment in personality disorder. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd. [source]

Trait Psychology and Culture: Exploring Intercultural Comparisons

JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 6 2001
Robert R. McCrae
Personality traits, studied for decades by Western personality psychologists, have recently been reconceptualized as endogenous basic tendencies that, within a cultural context, give rise to habits, attitudes, skills, beliefs, and other characteristic adaptations. This conceptualization provides a new framework for studying personality and culture at three levels. Transcultural research focuses on identifying human universals, such as trait structure and development; intracultural studies examine the unique expression of traits in specific cultures; and intercultural research characterizes cultures and their subgroups in terms of mean levels of personality traits and seeks associations between cultural variables and aggregate personality traits. As an example of the problems and possibilities of intercultural analyses, data on mean levels of Revised NEO Personality Inventory scales from college age and adult samples (N = 23,031) of men and women from 26 cultures are examined. Results showed that age and gender differences resembled those found in American samples; different subsamples from each culture showed similar levels of personality traits; intercultural factor analysis yielded a close approximation to the Five-Factor Model; and factor scores were meaningfully related to other culture-level variables. However, mean trait levels were not apparent to expert raters, casting doubt on the accuracy of national stereotypes. Trait psychology can serve as a useful complement to cultural perspectives on human nature and personality. [source]

Self-Reliance and Empathy: The Enemies of Poverty,and of the Poor

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2001
Robert E. Lane
Starting with a brief review of why all post-industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution-affect-action model is used to show how dispositional attributes evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people's ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged. [source]

Distribution of several microorganisms and activity of alkaline phosphatase in sediments from Baihua Lake

ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING, Issue 5 2009
Jia-jun Deng
Abstract The distribution characteristics of ammonifiers, ammonium-oxidizing bacteria, nitrite-oxidizing bacteria, and denitrifiers, and activities of alkaline phosphatase (ALP) in sediments from Baihua Lake (a man-made deep plateau canyon reservoir in Guizhou Province, China) were studied. The results suggested that the population number of ammonifiers in the sediments was higher at sampling sites Pingpu, Laojiutu, Yapengzhai, and Jiangjiapu than at the other sites. Ammonium-oxidizing bacteria had the highest population number at sampling site Meituwan. The population number of nitrite-oxidizing bacteria in the upper and middle sections of the lake was higher than that in the lower section. The population of denitrifiers was the highest at sampling site Jiangjiapu, and all the other sampling sites gave lower population numbers. Change in the activity of ALP was of a strong regularity, and the basic tendency was that the activity increased from the upper to the lower portion of the lake. Specifically, the activity at sampling site Yapengzhai was the strongest. The statistical analysis for four groups of bacteria, ALP, organic matter, and so on were carried out to shed more light on their correlativity. This research will likely provide relevant data useful for establishment of bacteriological and zymological indicator systems for environmental monitoring. Copyright © 2009 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]