Stress, Coping And Personality In Aging Men And Women

Aging

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

Summary of work: For the Personal Profiles of Cultures Project (PPOCP), we recruited collaborators to collect data on personality and on perceptions of national character. We obtained data from 51 cultures representing six continents, using translations of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) into Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Daic, Uralic, Malayo-Polynesian, Dravidian, and Altaic languages. In each culture, 200 college students were randomly assigned to one of four target conditions asking for NEO-PI-R ratings of a college-age woman, college-age man, adult (over 40) man or adult woman whom the rater knew well. An additional 50 volunteers were asked to rate the typical member of their culture, and the typical American, on the National Character Survey (NCS), with 30 items designed to parallel the 30 facets of the NEO-PI-R.[unreadable] [unreadable] Because the aggregate personality scores had been shown in earlier work to be valid measures of the average level of personality traits in a culture, they could be used to assess the validity of perceived national character. Ratings on the NCS from 3,989 respondents in 49 cultures showed high interrater reliability (ICCs = .89 to .97) and approximated the factor structure of the Five-Factor Model. In a first set of analyses, intraclass correlations were computed between the aggregate personality profile of each culture and the mean profile on the NCS for the 30 facets. These ICCs ranged from -.57 to .40 in 47 cultures with observer rating personality data, with a median of 0.00. ICCs ranged from -.46 to .46 (Mdn = -0.02) in a subsample of 30 cultures with self-report personality data. In a second analysis, NCS scales were correlated with NEO-PI-R facets across the subsamples of 47 or 30 cultures. The median correlation was .04. These analyses suggested that national character stereotypes are unfounded.[unreadable] [unreadable] At the suggestion of colleagues in Belgium, a new Adolescent Personality Profiles of Cultures Project (APPOCP) has been begun. In this study, younger (12-16) and older (15-17) adolescents will be rated by college students in over 30 cultures using a new, more readable version of the NEO-PI-R, the NEO-PI-3. This will allow a cross-sectional examination of age differences in this portion of the lifespan, as well as a replication of cultural differences in aggregate personality scores. In addition, other college students will be asked to use the NCS to rate the typical adolescent, adult, and older man or woman in their culture. These data speak to the universality of or cultural variation in age stereotypes. Correlations of these NCS data with known patterns of age differences in personality will allow us to assess their accuracy.[unreadable] [unreadable] The study of aggregate personality traits is important for an understanding of health and aging because through them the many associations between personality and health may be writ large. For example, with colleagues in Russia, we recently found that at the individual level within cultures, HIV stigmatization was negatively related to Openness, especially O6: Values. This effect appears to be magnified at the aggregate level: Cultures with very low levels of O6 include South Africa and Zimbabwe, where official reluctance to deal with HIV infection has led to devastating epidemics. The full range of aggregate personality traits might be relevant to a host of social, economic, and health outcomes. However, subsequent analyses also showed that factors like national wealth are important confounders, and need to be carefully controlled.