Daniel Ozer

University of California, Riverside | UCR · Department of Psychology

Decades of research have demonstrated that social connection is fundamental to health and well-being. The benefits of connection are observed with both close and distant others, within both new and established relationships, and even with exchanges that unfold over a relatively short timeframe. Because social connection is fundamental to well-being...

Unlabelled: Previous research has identified a robust connection between prosociality and happiness, suggesting that kindness has both hedonic and eudaimonic benefits-in the short term and in the long term. By contrast, our experiment aimed to examine people's momentary eudaimonic feelings while engaging in kind acts for others. To that end, we ra...

Well-being science has largely focused on subjective well-being, defined in terms of life satisfaction and positive and negative emotions. However, some philosophical accounts of well-being, like “eudaimonia” accounts, emphasize the attainment of goods, such as having deep social relationships and achieving one’s creative potential. We supplement p...

The Day Evaluation Q-sort (DEQ) is a measure designed to describe the day as it is experienced. In two undergraduate samples (Ns = 472 and 302), this research explores how the day is described, and how the evaluation of the day relates to personality attributes and to time spent in various daily activities. We find that individuals tend to describe...

Philosophers, psychologists, economists, and other social scientists continue to debate the nature of human well-being. The authors argue that this debate centers around five main conceptualizations of well-being: hedonic well-being, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonia, and non-eudaimonic objective list well-being. Although each type...

This article describes the development and validation of the Intrapersonal Problems Rating Scales (IPRS), a multidimensional measure of self-related problems in personality functioning. Results from a series of factor analyses performed on self-ratings of over 200 problems revealed seven distinct but interrelated domains of intrapersonal problems:...

Effect sizes are underappreciated and often misinterpreted—the most common mistakes being to describe them in ways that are uninformative (e.g., using arbitrary standards) or misleading (e.g., squaring effect-size rs). We propose that effect sizes can be usefully evaluated by comparing them with well-understood benchmarks or by considering them in...

This research explores the frequency and correlates of desires to change personality. In two student samples (Ns = 1339 and 447), participants listed personal goals and completed a measure of personality traits. Goals were coded for the expression of a desire to change an aspect of personality. The majority (66.8% and 74.7%) of participants listed...

The analysis of longitudinal dyadic data often requires complex structural models. Two models of dyadic change, the correlated growth model and the common fate growth model, differ in their description of change. The correlated growth model estimates separate but correlated growth trajectories for each member of a dyad. The common fate growth model...

Infants and children experience an intense form of intellectual engagement associated with learning a variety of new skills. A recent theory proposes that such broad learning experiences may be the key to maximal cognitive development not just during infancy and childhood but also during adulthood. To begin investigating this possibility, the prese...

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) has been the dominant measure of life satisfaction since its creation more than 30 years ago. We sought to develop an improved measure that includes indirect indicators of life satisfaction (e.g., wishing to change one's life) to increase the bandwidth of the measure and acc...

The interpersonal circumplex (IPC) is a well-established model of social behavior that spans basic personality and clinical science. Although several measures are available to assess interpersonal functioning (e.g., motives, traits) within an IPC framework, researchers studying interpersonal difficulties have relied primarily on a single measure, t...

The interpersonal circumplex (IPC) is a well-established model of social behavior that spans basic personality and clinical science. Although several measures are available to assess interpersonal functioning (e.g., motives, traits) within an IPC framework, researchers studying interpersonal difficulties have relied primarily on a single measure, t...

Goal conflict has long been an important aspect of motivation theories, but the results of research on the relationship between goal conflict and psychological well-being have been inconsistent. A meta-analytic review of the literature (k = 54) was conducted to examine this association. Higher levels of goal conflict are related to lower levels of...

The Five Factor Model (FFM) is a hierarchical taxonomy of personality traits. At the superordinate level are five factors labeled Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (vs Neuroticism), and Intellect (or Openness). Below this level are several more specific personality traits that are summarized by these five higher-or...

Vision is a basic cognitive ability that profoundly impacts an enormous range of personal and professional tasks. Accordingly, numerous studies of perceptual learning examine mechanisms that can improve vision. However a limit of extant studies is that learning effects often fail to transfer beyond the trained task or stimuli and even less so to re...

Our visual abilities profoundly impact performance on an enormous range of tasks. Numerous studies examine mechanisms that can improve vision [1]. One limitation of published studies is that learning effects often fail to transfer beyond the trained task or to real world conditions. Here we report the results of a novel integrative perceptual learn...

Trait and motive concepts are widely used in the description and analysis of individual differences in per-sonality, but relatively little work has examined how these personality units relate to one another. In the present research, we report relations between self-generated, idiographic goals and the Big Five person-ality trait dimensions. Undergr...

The Multi-Context Problems Checklist (MCPC) is a new measure of personality-related problems designed for a young adult population. Previously published problem checklists either have little supporting empirical documentation to support their validity or focus on specific kinds of difficulties in specific contexts (e.g., interpersonal, close relati...

Although goal conflict is an important part of classic and contemporary theories of motivation, the correlates of goal conflict are not well understood. We identify and distinguish conflicting and facilitating goals, and assess relations with goal attainment and psychological well-being in a short-term, prospective study design. Results from multil...

College students report a variety of personal goals. Based on an open-ended listing, Kaiser & Ozer (1997) developed a taxonomy of undergraduates' goals. From this taxonomy, Howell et al. (2001) wrote 65 items to cover the broad range of college students' personal goals. The breadth and variety of goal content included in this 65-item measure incorp...

Born Jacob Block in Brooklyn, New York, on April 28, 1924, Jack received his bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College. Block is one of the most influential personality and developmental psychologists of his generation and of the 20th century; at the same time, he established himself as a pioneer and authority on applications of multivariate statisti...

This study explored the role of acculturation and bicultural identity processes in the interpersonal conflict resolution preferences of monoculturals (Koreans and European Americans) and biculturals (Korean Americans). Koreans and European Americans differed in their conflict resolution styles in a manner congruent with individualism-collectivism t...

This study examined the comparability of Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) [Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985, Social Indicators Research, 34: 7– 32] scores across U.S. and Russian student and community groups. Criteria for weak measurement invariance were met when comparing U.S. and Russian groups (combining student and community samples)....

Personality has consequences. Measures of personality have contemporaneous and predictive relations to a variety of important outcomes. Using the Big Five factors as heuristics for organizing the research literature, numerous consequential relations are identified. Personality dispositions are associated with happiness, physical and psychological h...

This study examined the comparability of Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) [Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985, Social Indicators Research, 34: 7–32] scores across U.S. and Russian student and community groups. Criteria for weak measurement invariance were met when comparing U.S. and Russian groups (combining student and community samples)....

To investigate recent hypotheses of replicable personality types, we examined data from 1540 self-sorts on the California Adult Q-Set (CAQ). Conventional factor analysis of the items showed the expected Five-Factor Model (FFM). Inverse factor analysis across random subsamples showed that none of the previously reported person-factors were replicate...

We continue to disagree with Asendorpf (2006) on the best way to analyse Q-sort data and on our priorities for personality research. We believe on statistical grounds that the large first factor found in inverse factor analyses of raw CAQ items tells us much about response norms, but little or nothing about individual differences. These emerge more...

The field of personality assessment has evolved the normative practice of centering scores on their means, evaluating associations among measures with Pearson correlations, and using factor analytic methods to reduce redundancy and provide putative explanatory variables. At least some of these explanatory variables, or factors, have become well-kno...

An important assumption of interpersonal theory is that during social interactions the behavior of one person tends to invite complementary behavior from the other person. Past research examining complementarity has usually used either confederates or fictitious interaction partners in their designs and has produced inconsistent results. The curren...

One hundred and sixty-five Mexican American and Euro-American preadolescents' and their parents' perceptions of healthy and attractive female body sizes and shapes were examined in this study. Participants' perceptions of healthy and attractive female figures were assessed using a pictorial measure that systematically manipulated 3 levels of body s...

Personality types are construed as constellations of features that uniquely define discrete groups of individuals. Types are conceptually convenient because they summarize many traits in a single label, but until recently most researchers agreed that there was little evidence for the existence of discrete personality types. Several groups of resear...

Elucidates what makes a personality assessment method or instrument "good." In brief, a good measure of personality is one that possesses strong evidence of construct validity for the intended assessment purpose. Thus, four principles to be discussed reduce to a conception of construct validity that follows largely from L. J. Cronbach and P. E. Mee...

An evaluation is made of Goldberg s (1992) 100 Unipolar Markers of the five-factor model of personality. The factor structure of these items in samples of older men from the Normative Aging Study and undergraduate students are examined, and both item transformation and consistency testing approaches are used to evaluate replications of the five-fac...

This study provides a strategy for examining the traits of the Five Factor Model in a situation where no direct measure is available. Big Five wcales were rationally created from the 43-item Adjective Q-Sort adapted from Block 's Self-Descriptive Q-Set (Block & Block 1980). In the first study, expert judges evaluated each of the Q-Sort items on the...

The experience of anticipatory and reactive stress associated with goals was examined as a function of the trait of emotional stability. During the first few weeks of the academic year, first-year college students completed a measure of emotional stability, provided a set of their goals, rated these goals on anticipated stress, and 6 months later,...

Two hypotheses concerning the hostile and depressive components of envy were tested: that hostile feelings are associated with a subjective belief that the envy-producing difference is unfair and that depressive feelings are associated with a sense of inferiority evoked by the envied person's advantage. Subjects wrote autobiographical accounts of e...

The just noticeable difference (jnd) unit of classical psycho-physics is introduced as a new way to describe accuracy and agreement in observer evaluations of personality. A formula for estimating jnd's from typically available summary statistics is derived from Thurstone's law of comparative judgment. A study examining four traits judged in 10 sam...

Validation of Scheier and Carver's (1985) Life Orientation Test (LOT) has identified associations between bipolar optimism and several external constructs. However, optimism and pessimism may be not bipolar, but rather separate constructs. Furthermore, these constructs may be indistinguishable from personality traits, such as neuroticism and extrav...

Validation of Scheier and Carver's (1985) Life Orientation Test (LOT) has identified associations between bipolar optimism and several external constructs. However, optimism and pessimism may be not bipolar, but rather separate constructs. Furthermore, these constructs may be indistinguishable from personality traits, such as neuroticism and extrav...

Do spouses become more similar over time? What processes contribute to enduring similarities between them? Using the 20-year Kelly Longitudinal Study of couples, no support for the hypothesis that couples increasingly resemble each other with time was found. Rather, couples maintain the same degree of similarity across 20 years. Structural equation...

Individual differences in human behavior are ubiquitous; and many personality psychologists understand their task as including the description and explanation of these differences. But personality psychology is, or at least should be, more than the study of individual differences. On these points, Lamiell and I are apparently in agreement. Lamiell...

Consistency and change in personality development is typically studied through examination of correlations indexing the consistency of individual differences over time. Despite well-known difficulties which inherently limit this approach, few empirical efforts take advantage of alternative methods. We utilize a "person-centered" approach which perm...

In recent years, the conceptualization and assessment of validity in psychological measurement has been transformed. Where one could formerly denote various types of validity (i.e., construct, content, and criterion validity), there is a now widespread understanding that construct validity subsumes all that was previously seen as disparate (Guion,...

In the context of a longitudinal study of cognitive and personality development, I examined various correlates of spatial visualization ability, as measured by Vandenberg's Mental Rotations Test, in order to elaborate the meaning of the known sex difference on this factor. Spatial visualization ability in females was correlated with verbal IQ and v...

Contends that both the interpretation of an effect size and the actual estimation of a coefficient of determination are partially theory-dependent. Two theoretical models for the variables cases are considered. In a variety of circumstances where the square of the correlation is used, the required assumptions are not tenable. In the alternate model...

The power of several well-known and important situational factors to affect behavior is assessed in terms usually reserved for measuring the power of dispositions. The linear effects of incentive for counterattitudinal advocacy on attitude change, of degree of "hurry" and number of onlookers on bystander intervention, and of proximity of authority...

The power of several well-known and important situational factors to affect behavior is assessed in terms usually reserved for measuring the power of dispositions. The linear effects of incentive for counterattitudinal advocacy on attitude change, of degree of "hurry" and number of onlookers on bystander intervention, and of proximity of authority...

Argues that G. A. Mendelsohn et al (see record 1983-00168-001) (1) demolished a straw man of their own construction—that J. Block et al (1973) did not seek to create a typology nor did they offer one, (2) were unable to recover via their preferred analytic approach crucial and dependable findings manifested via the Block et al approach, and (3) di...

The rich complexity of the concepts of masculinity and femininity has been reflected in personality measures in at least two different ways: by employing a variety of subscales with comparatively homogeneous items or by using a single scale with comparatively heterogeneous items. The Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) was the subject of an int...

Comments on W. W. Tryon's (see record 1979-25055-001) article on the test–trait fallacy, which questions the validity of assuming that test scores reflect basic properties of persons. However, the syllogism criticized by Tryon is not logically fallacious, and the truth value of its premises is a matter for empirical validation. (PsycINFO Database...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Psychology)--University of California, Berkeley, Dec. 1982. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-184).