Background: Preliminary evidence indicates that fetal drug exposure may be associated with alterations in temperament. However, studies often do not dissociate the potential effects of drug exposure from other perinatal or environmental factors that could influence temperament phenotypes. Methods: High risk children (n = 120) were followed from…

We examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 (MMPI--2) measures of psychopathy, including the Clinical Scale 4, Restructured Clinical Scale 4 (RC4), Content Scale Antisocial Practices (ASP), and Personality Psychopathology Five Scale Disconstraint (DISC). Comparisons of the empirical…

Qualities of personal character would appear to play a significant role in the professional conduct of teachers. It is often said that we remember teachers as much for the kinds of people they were than for anything they may have taught us, and some kinds of professional expertise may best be understood as qualities of character. After (roughly)…

American social and educational interventions are often designed for children and youth who have risk factors or destructive behaviors. Effective strategies can be designed to assist youth to grow up to be happy, healthy, productive adults before they show negative characteristics. Restorative Practices, an emerging interdisciplinary field, offers…

I describe an assignment for personality psychology or introduction to psychology classes in which students used the Five Factor Model of personality to analyze the personality of entertainer Johnny Carson through his The New York Times obituary. Students evaluated this assignment highly: A majority indicated that the assignment was interesting,…

Three- to six-year-old children (n=28) and adults (n=46) participated in a two-dimensional search task that included geometry and feature conditions. During each of 24 trials, participants watched as a cartoon character hid behind one of three landmarks arranged in a triangle on a computer screen. The landmarks and character then disappeared and…

This study explored personality characteristics of female help-seeking caregivers. Female caregivers (N=45) of elderly demented relatives were actively recruited through mass media and special interest groups to participate in a psychoeducational class to alleviate the frustrations of caregiving and increase life satisfaction. The Weinberger…

The person with a borderline personality is considered to be neither neurotic nor psychotic, but to exist somewhere in between these two diagnostic categories. Psychoanalytic theorists who have researched the phenomenon of the borderline personality have shifted their emphasis away from Freud's instinct psychology and toward an ego psychology…

The following results are reported by this first stage of a longitudinal study of 2,994 new entrepreneurs' self-perceived odds for success and the relationship between entrepreneur background and those self-perceptions and between the nature of the new business and those self-perceptions: (1) women were considerably less optimistic about the…

The degree to which variations in the face validity of psychological tests affected students' willingness to accept personality interpretations was studied. Acceptance of personality interpretations was compared for four types of tests which varied in face validity. The relationship between judged accuracy and rated likability of the…

A novel statistical technique was used to look at the interactions of the reliabilities of personality measures with each other and with the personality scores themselves. (Author)