Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills matter for individuals' well-being and success. The behavioral, emotional, and social skills inventory (BESSI) uses 192 items to assess 32 specific SEB skills across five broad skill domains. This research developed three short forms of the BESSI-192 and explored their measurement properties, predictive validity, and cross-cultural comparability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe illustrate how standard psychometric inventories originally designed for assessing noncognitive human traits can be repurposed as diagnostic tools to evaluate analogous traits in large language models (LLMs). We start from the assumption that LLMs, inadvertently yet inevitably, acquire psychological traits (metaphorically speaking) from the vast text corpora on which they are trained. Such corpora contain sediments of the personalities, values, beliefs, and biases of the countless human authors of these texts, which LLMs learn through a complex training process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe construct of justice sensitivity has four perspectives that capture individual differences in the strength of reactions to injustice when becoming a victim of injustice (victim sensitivity), when witnessing injustice as an outsider (observer sensitivity), when passively benefitting from an injustice done to others (beneficiary sensitivity), or when committing an injustice (perpetrator sensitivity). Individual differences in these four justice sensitivity perspectives are highly relevant in moral research. With just eight items in total, the Justice Sensitivity Short Scales-8 (JSS-8) are a very efficient way to measure the four perspectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills comprise a broad set of abilities that are essential for building and maintaining relationships, regulating emotions, selecting and pursuing goals, or exploring novel stimuli. Toward an improved SEB skill assessment, Soto and colleagues recently introduced the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI). Measuring 32 facets from 5 domains with 192 items (assessment duration: ~15 min), BESSI constitutes the most extensive SEB inventory to date.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Impulsive Behavior Short Scale-8 (I-8) measures the psychological construct of impulsivity with four subscales comprising two items each (completion time < 1 min). The aim of the present study was threefold: (1) to assess the psychometric properties (objectivity, reliability, and validity) of the English-language I-8; (2) to compare these psychometric properties with those of the original German-language source version of the scale; and (3) to test the cross-national comparability of the scale via measurement invariance tests. For this purpose, we used heterogeneous quota samples from the UK and Germany.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Internal-External Locus of Control Short Scale-4 (IE-4) measures two dimensions of the personality trait locus of control with two items each. IE-4 was originally developed and validated in German and later translated into English. In the present study, we assessed the psychometric properties (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Big Five personality traits are established predictors of school grades. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not yet well understood. Effects of personality on grades might arise because behavioral tendencies facilitate learning and increase subject-specific competencies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSome researchers and policymakers advocate a stronger focus on fostering socio-emotional skills in the hope of helping students to succeed academically, especially those who are socially disadvantaged. Others have cautioned that this might increase, rather than reduce, social inequality because personality traits conducive to achievement are themselves unevenly distributed in disfavor of socially disadvantaged students. Our paper contributes to this debate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEducation involving active engagement in the arts, herein called , is often believed to foster the development of desirable personality traits and skills in children and adolescents. Yet the impact of arts education on personality development has rarely been systematically investigated. In the current article, we reviewed the literature on personality change through arts education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrit (effortful persistence) has received considerable attention as a personality trait relevant for success and performance. However, critics have questioned grit's construct validity and criterion validity. Here we report on two studies that contribute to the debate surrounding the grit construct.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA growing body of research supports the notion that cognitive abilities and personality are systematically related. However, this research has focused largely on global personality dimensions and single-often equally global-markers of cognitive ability. The present study offers a more fine-grained perspective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: Personality traits and cognitive ability are well-established predictors of academic performance. Yet, how consistent and generalizable are the associations between personality, cognitive ability, and performance? Building on theoretical arguments that trait-performance relations should vary depending on the demands and opportunities for trait expression in the learning environment, we investigated whether the associations of personality (Big Five) and cognitive ability (fluid intelligence) with academic performance (grades and tests scores) vary across school subjects (German and math) and across ability-grouped school tracks (academic, intermediate, and vocational).
Method: Multiple group structural equation models in a large representative sample of ninth-grade students (N = 12,915) from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS).
Acquiescence ('yea-saying') can seriously harm the validity of self-report questionnaire data. Towards a better understanding of why some individuals and groups acquiesce more strongly than others do, we developed a unified conceptual framework of acquiescent responding. Our framework posits that acquiescent responding is a joint function of respondent characteristics (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychother Psychosom Med Psychol
July 2016
Acquiescence, or the tendency to respond to descriptions of conceptually distinct personality attributes with agreement/affirmation, constitutes a major challenge in personality assessment. The aim of this study was to shed light on cognitive ability as a potential source of individual differences in acquiescent responding. We hypothesized that respondents with lower cognitive ability exhibit stronger acquiescent response tendencies than respondents with higher cognitive ability and that this leads to problems in establishing the Big Five structure by means of principal component analyses (exploratory factor analysis was not applicable to these data) in the former group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople differ systematically in their vulnerability to injustice. We present two-item scales for the efficient measurement of justice sensitivity from 4 perspectives (victim, observer, beneficiary, perpetrator). In Study 1 using a quota-based sample of German adults, a latent state-trait analysis revealed the factorial validity and high reliabilities of the scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcquiescence, or the tendency to respond to descriptions of conceptually distinct personality attributes with agreement/affirmation (acceptance acquiescence) or disagreement/opposition (counter-acquiescence), has been widely recognized as a source of bias that can substantially alter interitem correlations within scales. Acquiescence is also known to operate differently among some groups of persons; it is, for example, more pronounced among individuals with less formal education. Consequently, the biasing effects of acquiescence are of particular concern when the dimensionality underlying the item set of a measure is examined with representative samples comprised of persons with varying levels of educational attainment and evaluated with correlation-based statistical methods such as factor analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious findings suggest that the Big-Five factor structure is not guaranteed in samples with lower educational levels. The present study investigates the Big-Five factor structure in two large samples representative of the German adult population. In both samples, the Big-Five factor structure emerged only in a blurry way at lower educational levels, whereas for highly educated persons it emerged with textbook-like clarity.
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