The Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI): Psychometric Properties of a German-Language Adaptation, Temporal Stabilities of the Skills, and Associations with Personality and Intelligence.

Social, 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.

Big Five Personality Traits Predict Successful Transitions From School to Vocational Education and Training: A Large-Scale Study.

Educational transitions play a pivotal role in shaping educational careers, and ultimately social inequality. Whereas parental socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability have long been identified as key determinants of successful educational transitions, much less is known about the role of socio-emotional skills. To address this gap, the present study investigated whether Big Five personality traits predict success in the transition from secondary school to vocational education and training (VET) above and beyond SES, cognitive ability, and other covariates.

How state and trait versions of self-esteem and depressive symptoms affect their interplay: A longitudinal experimental investigation.

States and traits are important concepts in psychological research. They can be operationalized (a) by using measures that employ different time frames and (b) by applying statistical models that decompose the variance. However, the effects of using variations in states and traits by applying measurement and modeling approaches have yet to be merged and studied systematically.

RIASEC interests and the Big Five personality traits matter for life success-But do they already matter for educational track choices?

Objective: Educational track choices have far-reaching consequences because they are associated with long-term life success. Theoretical approaches and previous empirical research have nearly exclusively identified family background and achievement as determinants of these choices. Although students' educational track choices might fit their personality, individual differences in personality have not been explored.

The Relation of Personality and Intelligence-What Can the Brunswik Symmetry Principle Tell Us?

Personality and intelligence are defined as hierarchical constructs, ranging from broad -factors to (domain-)specific constructs. The present study investigated whether different combinations of hierarchical levels lead to different personality-intelligence correlations. Based on the integrative data analysis approach, we combined a total of five data sets.

School or Work? The Choice May Change Your Personality.

According to the social-investment principle, entering new environments is associated with new social roles that influence people's behaviors. In this study, we examined whether young adults' personality development is differentially related to their choice of either an academic or a vocational pathway (i.e.

The effects of getting a new teacher on the consistency of personality.

Objective: In the present research, we examined the effect of getting a new teacher on consistency in students' personality measures, including trait and social cognitive constructs.

Method: To test the effect of this kind of situational transition, we analyzed two large longitudinal samples (N = 5,628; N = 2,458) with quasi-experimental study designs. We used two consistency measures (i.

Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.

How much do people's personalities change or remain stable from high school to retirement? To address these questions, we used a large U.S. sample ( = 1,795) that assessed people's personality traits in adolescence and 50 years later.

Does the heritability of cognitive abilities vary as a function of parental education? Evidence from a German twin sample.

A well-known hypothesis in the behavioral genetic literature predicts that the heritability of cognitive abilities is higher in the presence of higher socioeconomic contexts. However, studies suggest that the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on the heritability of cognitive ability may not be universal, as it has mostly been demonstrated in the United States, but not in other Western nations. In the present study we tested whether the importance of genetic and environmental effects on cognitive abilities varies as a function of parental education in a German twin sample.

How you behave in school predicts life success above and beyond family background, broad traits, and cognitive ability.

In this study, we investigated the role of student characteristics and behaviors in a longitudinal study over a 50-year timespan (using a large U.S. representative sample of high school students).

The development of narcissistic admiration and machiavellianism in early adulthood.

We investigated the development of narcissistic admiration (i.e., the assertive or extraverted dimension of narcissism; Back et al.

What Drives the Development of Social Inequality Over the Life Course? The German TwinLife Study.

The German twin family study 'TwinLife' was designed to enhance our understanding of the development of social inequalities over the life course. The interdisciplinary project investigates mechanisms of social inequalities across the lifespan by taking into account psychological as well as social mechanisms, and their genetic origin as well as the interaction and covariation between these factors. Main characteristics of the study are: (1) a multidimensional perspective on social inequalities, (2) the assessment of developmental trajectories in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in a longitudinal design by using (3) a combination of a multi-cohort cross-sequential and an extended twin family design, while (4) capturing a large variation of behavioral and environmental factors in a representative sample of about 4,000 German twin families.

Student characteristics and behaviors at age 12 predict occupational success 40 years later over and above childhood IQ and parental socioeconomic status.

Drawing on a 2-wave longitudinal sample spanning 40 years from childhood (age 12) to middle adulthood (age 52), the present study was designed to examine how student characteristics and behaviors in late childhood (assessed in Wave 1 in 1968) predict career success in adulthood (assessed in Wave 2 in 2008). We examined the influence of parental socioeconomic status (SES), childhood intelligence, and student characteristics and behaviors (inattentiveness, school entitlement, responsible student, sense of inferiority, impatience, pessimism, rule breaking and defiance of parental authority, and teacher-rated studiousness) on 2 important real-life outcomes (i.e.

The Kind of Student You Were in Elementary School Predicts Mortality.

We examined the association of self-reported and teacher-rated student characteristics assessed at the end of primary school with all-cause mortality assessed through age 52. Data stem from a representative sample of students from Luxembourg assessed in 1968 (N = 2,543; M = 11.9 years, SD = 0.

Stability and change in intelligence from age 12 to age 52: results from the Luxembourg MAGRIP study.

The present longitudinal study tackled 2 key aspects of the development of intelligence across a 40-year time period from age 12 to age 52 concerning (a) stability and change in the structure of intelligence with reference to the age differentiation-dedifferentiation hypothesis (how different cognitive abilities relate to each other across age) and (b) differential stabilities (the rank ordering of persons' intelligence levels across time). To this end, we drew on 2 structural conceptions of intelligence: (a) the extended Gf-Gc model to study broad cognitive abilities and (b) the 3-stratum model to decompose cognitive change into processes that are shared by all broad abilities (attributable to general cognitive ability g) and processes specific to a certain ability (independent of g). Data were obtained for 344 persons (56.