John Johnson

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Psychology

Most copyrighted personality inventories facilitate norm-referencing through illustrative tables, yet their application to the many fields relevant to personality measurement is constrained by the need for stakeholders to possess the requisite financial resources to access them. Using an IPIP-NEO-300 dataset from Johnson’s IPIP-NEO data repository,...

Paradoxically, villainous characters in film, literature, and video games can be very popular. Previous research in the traditions of cognitive media theory and affective disposition theory has assumed that villainous characters can inspire positive engagement only when audiences discount the villains’ immorality by focusing on positive traits or m...

One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study (n = 310) tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant...

One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study (n = 310) tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant...

The IPIP-NEO-300 is a 300-item, freely available personality inventory based on the OCEAN Model of 30 distinctive personality traits. The inventory measures human personality preferences and groups them into five distinct factors, namely Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. The inventory has been...

This article is presented as a case study illustrating the interplay between theory-testing, personality scale development, and construct validation. A new construct, hagioptasia, is proposed and scale development and initial construct validity research are described. Hagioptasia is conceptualized as a tendency to perceive certain persons and place...

By convention in individual personality assessment, scores on self-report questionnaires within ±.5 standard deviations of the mean score for that trait are considered "average," whereas scores outside that range are reported as "high" or "low" levels of the trait. To date, no one has examined how well this convention corresponds to perceptions of...

Project Aims to translate Big Five Model test into Urdu and collect the norms for urdu speaking population. It is first attempt of this sort that translated all 300 items.. Test is available on this link https://www.minhaaj.com/big-fiver-personality-in-urdu

Assessment of individual differences in personality traits is arguably one of the hallmarks of psychological research. Testing the structural validity of trait measurements is paramount in this endeavor. In the current study, we investigated 30 facet traits in one of the accessible and comprehensive public-domain Five Factor Model (FFM) personality...

Horror entertainment is a thriving and paradoxical industry. Who are the consumers of horror, and why do they seek out frightening media? We provide support for the threat simulation theory of horror, according to which horror media provides a form of benign masochism that offers negative emotional stimulation through simulation of threat scenarios...

The present study reports on the scope and size of sex differences in 30 personality facet traits, using one of the largest US samples to date (N = 320,128). The study was one of the first to utilize the open access version of the Five-Factor Model of personality (IPIP-NEO-120) in the large public. Overall, across age-groups 19–69 years old, women...

Psychologists often argue that sex roles direct different types of socializing behaviors toward males and females and that this differential treatment, in turn, leads to sex differences in personality. Widely cited in support of this thesis has been the Fels longitudinal study finding that dependency and passivity are stable from childhood to adult...

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs...

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs...

I examine how the authors apparently derived their Process and Reality Principles from the critical realism underlying Funder’s (1995) Realistic Accuracy Model to elegantly explain the interwovenness of persons and situation and to resolve the objective and subjective views of situations. However, I question whether heeding the Circularity Principl...

The IPIP-NEO (Goldberg, 1999) is a 300-item inventory that measures constructs similar to those in the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992). Despite evidence for its reliability and validity, the IPIP-NEO is even longer than the original 240-item NEO PI-R. This article details the development of a 120-item version of the IPIP-...

Building on findings in evolutionary psychology, we constructed a model of human nature and used it to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels. Characters were rated on the web by 519 scholars and students of Victorian literature. Rated categories include motives, criteria fo...

Literary Darwinists have produced numerous theoretical and interpretive essays. Until recently, though, most literary Darwinists have remained within the methodological boundaries of traditional humanistic scholarship. Their work has been speculative, discursive, and rhetorical. They have drawn on empirical research but have not, for the most part,...

We created an online questionnaire, listed about 2,000 characters from 201 canonical British novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and asked respondents to select individual characters and answer questions about them. Potential research participants were identified by scanning lists of faculty in hundreds of English departments wo...

Jane Austen bulks larger than any other single author in the data set. Out of the total of 435 characters in the data set, 56, or about 13 percent, are from Austen novels. All of her characters together received 423 codings, or about 29 percent of the 1,470 codings for the whole data set. Since we have averaged the ratings for characters who receiv...

Arguments on the adaptive function of literature and the other arts have occupied more of the shared attention of evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary literary scholars than any other topic. The amount of attention theorists have devoted to this issue signals that it is both crucially important and heavily disputed. By providing empirical ev...

The organization of characters into eight sets forms an implicit empirical hypothesis—the hypothesis that agonistic structure, differentiated by sex, is a fundamental shaping feature in the organization of characters in the novels. We predicted (1) that each of the eight character sets would be sharply defined by a distinct and integrated array of...

Literary theorists have reached no consensus about whether literary “meaning” can be objectively determined. Most critics have an at least half-conscious conviction that in reading a novel they are deciphering a determinate structure of significations in the sequence of words and sentences. That kind of intuitive conviction is grounded in the evolv...

By obtaining quantitative results on readers’ responses to male and female characters, and by comparing those results with readers’ responses to good and bad characters and to major and minor characters, we can give decisive evidence as to whether responses to Sex vary independently of responses to Valence (good versus bad) and Salience (major vers...

For the novels of Jane Austen, quantitative methods provide new evidence on disputed issues, offer opportunities for confirming and refining the best insights of traditional criticism, and provide a deeper and more systematic understanding of her underlying designs. For The Mayor of Casterbridge, quantitative analysis gives occasion for a more radi...

After two long chapters devoted to one novelist each, it would perhaps not come amiss to recall that our chief findings have reference to novels covering the whole period from Austen through Forster. The large conclusions that we drew in chapters 2 through 5 are based on statistical results from questionnaires on 435 characters from 143 novels. (Fo...

Logical consistency demands that Mercier and Sperber's (M&S's) argumentative theory of reasoning apply to their own reasoning in the target article. Although they hint that their argument applies to professional reasoners such as scientists and philosophers, they do not develop this idea. In this commentary, I discuss the applicability of argumenta...

All literature embodies an implicit theory of personality and human nature (Hogan, 1976). The research described here investigates the implicit personality theory embedded in the behavior of 435 characters in 143 canonical Victorian novels. Characters were rated on the Web by 519 scholars and students of 19th-century British literature. Ratings inc...

The Mayor of Casterbridge constitutes an especially difficult challenge to interpretive criticism. The main interpretive models that have been made available for Mayor presuppose passional involvement with a protagonist and seek resolution in some kind of affirmation embodied in the protagonist's own experience-an affirmation of ethical order, gran...

The Internet is revolutionizing the way psychologists conduct behavioral research. Studies conducted online are not only less error prone and labor intensive but also rapidly reach large numbers of diverse participants at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. In addition to improving the efficiency and accuracy of data collection, online s...

Three broad ambitions animate this study. Building on research in evolutionary social science, we aimed (1) to construct a model of human nature—of motives, emotions, features of personality, and preferences in marital partners; (2) use that model to analyze some specific body of literary texts and the responses of readers to those texts, and (3) p...

The current research investigated the psychological differences between protagonists and antagonists in literature and the impact of these differences on readers. It was hypothesized that protagonists would embody cooperative motives and behaviors that are valued by egalitarian hunter-gatherers groups, whereas antagonists would demonstrate status-s...

This paper provides reflections on the lead symposium article, "Reaching the Top? - On Gender Balance in the Economics Profession," by Christina Jonung and Ann-Charlotte Stahlberg.

Using Canadian (n = 240) and Australian (n = 530) samples, this research evaluated NEO Five-Factor (NEO-FFI) item quality in terms of: (a) item- total correlations; (b) item-criterion (peer-report) correlations; (c) item principal component loadings; d) item 6-month test-retest correlations; and (e) a composite quality index. Across the 60 items, i...

Seven experts on personality measurement here discuss the viability of public-domain personality measures, focusing on the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) as a prototype. Since its inception in 1996, the use of items and scales from the IPIP has increased dramatically. Items from the IPIP have been translated from English into more than...

Responding to items on a personality questionnaire can evoke a variety of feelings, from discom-fort to indiVerence to pleasure. Harrison Gough reported that when he wrote items for the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough & Bradley, 1996), he tried to make the items as ego-syntonic as possible. Ego-syntonic items are those "which a respo...

Deception is the essence of all communication. Plants and animals con-stantly deceive predators and prey through mimicry, camouflage, and other duplicitous acts. Some animals, including humans, deceive mem-bers of their own species and even themselves in order to achieve status, build coalitions, attract mates, and realize other life goals. The abi...

The research described in this article estimated the relative incidence of protocols invalidated by linguistic incompetence, inattentiveness, and intentional misrepresentation in Web-based versus paper-and-pencil personality measures. Estimates of protocol invalidity were derived from a sample of 23,994 protocols produced by individuals who complet...

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 25(3) of European Journal of Psychological Assessment (see record 2009-17805-011). On p. 120 the SD for men’s Agreeableness scores using the revised scales should be 4.8, not 64.8.] A short five-factor personality inventory developed from the International Personality Item Pool...

This study describes the relation between personality items’ validities, defined as the items’ correlations with acquaintance ratings on the Big 5 personality factors, and other itemmetric properties including ambiguity, syntactic complexity, social desirability, content, and trait indicativity. Five external validity coefficients for each item on...

In the present study, we investigated the structural invariance of the Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFPI) across a variety of cultures. Self-report data sets from ten European and three non-European countries were available, representing the Germanic (Belgium, England, Germany, the Netherlands, USA), Romance (Italy, Spain), and Slavic branche...

All empirical research methods in psychology are concerned with the measurement of variation and covariation. Three methods for studying three types of variation and covariation can be identified. Experimental methods discern how behavior and experience vary across different environments. Developmental methods describe how behavior and experience v...

What I would like to do is first present a rationale for placing a personality inventory on the World Wide Web. Next I will present a brief history of my efforts at developing a Web-based inventory. Finally, I will describe several methods I developed for screening the data to weed out protocols with inappropriate response patterns. This is a signi...

The structure of virtue was investigated through the development and construct validation of the Virtues Scale (VS), a 140-item self-report measure of virtues. A factor analysis of responses from 390 participants revealed four factors: Empathy, Order, Resourcefulness, and Serenity. Four virtue subscales constructed from the highest loading items on...

The present study compares the ability of three widely used personality inventories to predict averaged acquaintance ratings. Scores from 135 individuals on the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1987), Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI; Hogan and Hogan, 1992) and NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa and McCrae, 1992) were correla...

This report explains the rationale behind setting up a 300-item personality inventory constructed by Lewis R. Goldberg (1999) on the WorldWide Web. It describes the methods used to enable web-based assessment and feedback, presents preliminary findings from the assessment project based on 4,472 respondents, and outlines future plans for web-based p...

An ambitious scientist dreams of overturning conventional wisdom and establishing a new paradigm that will provide a grand theoretical synthesis of the ®eld. This commentary examines the articles of this special issue to distinguish what might be new from what is deÂjaÁ vu to traditional, mainstream trait psychology. To accomplish this, the comment...

Situations and personality dispositions are often presented as different, competing forces. This is nonsensical because a disposition is the tendency to respond to a particular type of situation. Furthermore, a situation cannot affect a person unless the person possesses the disposition to respond to that situation. Some hypotheses derived from the...

This chapter focuses on the need for units of analysis. Every science has a nomenclature that describes and defines its domain of study. The list of the units of analysis used by personality psychologists is wildly diverse. The apparent diversity of the units of analysis masks a unity underlying them and that this unity is captured by the term trai...

This article describes the construction and validation of 7 scales for the California Psychological Inventory (Gough, 1975,1987) based on a socioanalytic interpretation of the Five-Factor Model. The scale construction differed from traditional rational and empirical approaches in that it regarded responses to personality items as speech acts-skille...

Every science has a nomenclature that describes and defines its domain of study. Nuclear physicists talk about subaton~ic particles; chemists analyze molecules and con~pounds; and evolutionary biologists ponder genes, populations, and species. In what sort of language do psychologists describe and explain personality? The list of the units of analy...

The Abridged Big Five-Dimensional Circumplex (AB5C) Model of Hofstee, De Raad and Goldberg (1992) represents trait terms as blends of factors. Analyses suggest that different scales for measuring Factor V (Mentality) may reflect blends of this factor with either Factor 111 (Constraint) or Factor I (Extraversion/Surgency). Measures saturated primari...

200 persons arrested for driving under the influence (DUI), 30 social drinkers, 30 depressed patients, 30 incarcerated criminals, and 30 alcoholics completed the Hogan Personality Inventory ([HPI]; R. Hogan, 1986) and Court Reporting Network (CRN) interview. A cluster analysis of HPI scores for the DUI group revealed 5 personality types: Impulsive-...

The lexical approach to personality measurement (John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 1988) employs single trait terms (adjectives, nouns) as its primary unit of measurement. Factor analyses of large sets of trait rating data by lexical researchers have suggested that the universe of trait-descriptive terms can be represented by five broad factors. Today...

This article shows how the Abridged Big Five Dimensional Circumplex (ABSC; W K. Hofstee, B. de Raad, & L. R. Goldberg, 1992) clarifies disputes about the Big Five or five-factor model. Trait ratings from instruments representing 4 versions of the Big Five (L. R. Goldberg, 1992: R. Hogan & J. A. Johnson, 198 I; R. R. McCrae & P. T. Costa, 1985b, 198...

The lexical approach to personality measurement (John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 1988) employs single trait terms (adjectives, nouns) as its primary unit of measurement. Factor analyses of large sets of trait rating data by lexical researchers have suggested that the universe of trait-descriptive terms can be represented by five broad factors. Today...

The present study examined the degree to which counsellors' philosophical worldviews affect their attitudes toward using background music and natural sounds before. during. and after counselling. Seventy-two counsellors (35 male. 37 female) rated excerpts of five musical selections and recordings of birdsongs and a waterfall on perceived usefulness...

MacKayfs initial chapter of this book demonstrates the complexity of the empathy construct by reviewing various definitions and conceptualizations of empathy. The present chapter analyzes empa-thy as a personality disposition. Empathy-like any personality disposition-possesses four levels of meaning. These four levels of meaning are: (1) global, ev...

Four groups of behavioral scientists with divergent theoretical persuasions--43 sociobiologists, 25 behaviorists, 35 personality psychologists, and 16 human developmentalists--showed significantly different mean scores on two measures of philosophical assumptions: the World Hypothesis Scale (WHS) and the Organicism-Mechanism Paradigm Inventory (OMP...

A major gap in Holland's theory of vocational identity has been specification of the developmental antecedents of the six personality types. The present paper extends Geoffrey Kelso's work on the developmental antecedents of Holland's types by examining the relationship between membership in adolescent social crowds and vocational identity in early...

Several researchers have recently suggested, on limited data, that personality measures are more valid for individuals for whom inter-item variance is low. Questions remain concerning the robustness of the effect reported in these studies and whether general traitedness or traitedness within specific dimensions will moderate correlations other than...

Eighty-three subjects completed the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and Self-Directed Search (SDS) under standard instructions. Subjects then completed a short version of the CPI six different times with instructions to respond as if they were applying for six different jobs. CPI scores shifted significantly under all six job-application i...

Factor analysis of R. Hogan's Empathy Scale, scored in Likert format, yielded 4 factors: Social Self-Confidence, Even Temperedness, Sensitivity, and Nonconformity. Data for the analysis were obtained from 168 undergraduates and from the 45 research scientists and 66 student engineers in Hogan's (1969) study; 65 males and 45 females also completed a...

This study identified stable components of Type A behavior as usually defined, and examined their relationships with more traditional psychological constructs. Overall scores on the most popular Type A measure (a version of the Jenkins Activity Survey) were moderately associated with ambition but largely unrelated to measures of adjustment. An item...

Factor analysis of Hogan's Empathy Scale, scored in Likert format, yielded four factors: Social Self-Confidence, Even Temperedness, Sensitivity, and Nonconformity. Correlations with 16 different personality measures and a set of 12 adjective rating scales confirmed the factors' unique psychological meanings. Empathy subscales, created from items lo...

Examined the effectiveness of specific psychoeducational tutoring methods on achievement in reading, self-esteem, auding, and verbal language, Ss (N = 132) were youths and adults reading below fifth level who volunteered to participate in an adult tutorial project. After the assessment of entry level achievement, Ss received psychoeducational tutor...

This study explored entry level achievement characteristics of 132 youth and adults who read below fifth grade equivalent who volunteered to participate in an adult tutorial project. Specifically, reading, self-esteem, listening comprehension, and verbal language levels were measured and analyzed to substantiate observed characteristics of adult il...

Contends that the personality assessment literature using deviant and antisocial S populations contains an interesting anomaly—that persons representing major criminal offense categories can be only weakly distinguished from one another by using standard scales of the best conventional inventories (e.g., the MMPI and the California Psychological In...

Investigated whether objective self-report measures of personality are better regarded as sources of factual information about the self (i.e., as self-disclosures) or as ways to instruct others about how one is to be regarded (i.e., as self-presentations). The 2 perspectives were compared by testing the unique, divergent predictions each perspectiv...

Scores on vocational interest inventories are commonly thought to be unrelated to job performance. A close examination of the literature suggests, however, that vocational scales other than those describing the occupational group in question may often predict job performance. A case in point is reported here, using Holland's Self Directed Search an...

Meehan, Woll, and Abbott (Journal of Research in Personality, 1979, 13, 25–38) have shown that scores on Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA) are affected by instructions to simulate politically liberal or conservative attitudes. They also found that scores are affected by instructions to present one's self in a socially desirable or undesirab...

Formal evaluation of two career development seminars was conducted to determine what kind of vocational interventions were helping what kind of people. Students experienced a wide variety of vocational treatments (e.g., standardized inventories, workbooks, writing exercises, discussions, individual counseling) and were asked to rate the helpfulness...

Two studies investigating attitudes toward authority using the Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA) clarify the dynamics of conformity. The SEA and a semantic differential were administered to 369 college students, who rated the concepts mother, father, police, and government on 10 evaluative adjective pairs. Ss endorsing the "ethics of social respo...

Two studies investigating attitudes toward authority using the Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA) clarify the dynamics of conformity. The SEA and a semantic differential were administered to 369 college students, who rated the concepts mother, father, police, and government on 10 evaluative adjective pairs. Ss endorsing the "ethics of social respons...

Moral development proceeds in three phases: rule attunement, social sensitivity, and self-awareness.