Oliver John

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

Previous work suggests that sometimes the more people value happiness, the less happy they are. For whom and why is this the case? To answer these questions, we examined a model of happiness pursuit that disentangles two previously conflated individual differences related to valuing happiness. The first individual difference operates at the strengt...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a childhood-onset neurodevelopmental condition characterized by developmentally extreme and impairing symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity. Great interest has emerged in the ways ADHD and its underlying symptom dimensions relate to the development of personality traits. Much ext...

Although the objective conditions of people’s lives are fairly stable from day to day, daily life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster. For some people, life satisfaction hitches a ride on the emotional rollercoaster (i.e., momentary emotions spill over into broader evaluations of life). The extent to which positive and negative emotions spill...

Objective: Emerging research challenges the one-factor model of the future time perspective (FTP) scale by demonstrating two- and three-factor models of the FTP scale. Method: Three samples (i.e., Switzerland and the United States; N = 2022) explored the factor structure, age pattern differences, tested the link between FTP factors, psychologica...

Many studies acknowledge the importance of social–emotional skills¹ (SEMS) to function in contemporary society. Understanding these skills and how these develop presents several conceptual and methodological challenges, with emerging consensus on what kind of skills should be fostered in education. Less work, however, has considered SEMS specifical...

Emotion globalizing is an individual difference variable referring to the extent to which daily variations in an individual’s current emotions spillover into their evaluations of life satisfaction. The present research sought to: 1) extend the conception of emotion globalizing to stressor-related emotions, 2) examine age differences in these proces...

The purpose of this study was to adapt a Japanese version of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2-J) to examine its factor structure, reliability, validity, and measurement invariance. The BFI-2-J assesses five domains and 15 facets of the Big Five personality traits. We analyzed two datasets: 487 Japanese undergraduates and 500 Japanese adults. The res...

The aim of this study was to realize a French adaptation of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2), and to further examine the BFI-2’s convergent and discriminant validity via a comparison with the NEO-PI-3 and with the syndromes assessed by the Symptom Checklist (SCL-90-R). Bifactor Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling almost fully supported the BFI...

Temporal distancing (TD) is a promising yet understudied emotion regulation strategy that involves reflecting on how one will feel much later in the future. Although limited, the available evidence suggests that TD is a beneficial way to appraise negative events. Experimental studies have demonstrated causality: Situational use of TD (e.g., when th...

After the publication of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) and its short versions, many validations in other languages have been published. Three studies (total N = 1,673) were conducted to validate a Spanish version of the BFI-2, BFI-2-S and BFI-2-XS). Study 1 first tested the structural validity at both the domain and facet levels of 60 BFI-2 item...

People form relationships with people from their own racial groups, a phenomenon called racial homophily, which reduces interracial contact and exacerbates inequality and prejudice. Although viewed as arising from environmental factors, we argue that racial homophily also involves individual choice and, thus, personality factors. We address three m...

The study was aimed to examine psychometric properties of short (BFI-2-S; 30 items) and extra-short (BFI-2-XS; 15 items) forms of the Russian version of the Big Five Inventory-2. Two samples were employed having comprised Internet users (N = 1787) and students (N = 1024). Scores on the BFI-2-X/BFI-2-XS scales and their subscales were distributed no...

Responding to the need for school-based, broadly applicable, low-cost, and brief assessments of socio-emotional skills, we describe the conceptual background and empirical development of the SENNA inventory and provide new psychometric information on its internal structure. Data were obtained through a computerized survey from 50,000 Brazilian stud...

Educational practitioners have been increasingly interested in the use of formative assessment and rubrics to develop social-emotional skills in children and adolescents. Although social-emotional rubrics are nowadays commonly used, a thorough evaluation of their psychometric properties has not been conducted. In this scoping review, we examine the...

We present two studies testing the validity and nomological properties of the Turkish adaptation of the Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) using a university student sample and a nationally representative community sample of young adults aged 18–35. Findings from the university student sample replicate the psychometric properties of the BFI-2. Findings f...

After the publication of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) and its short versions, many validations in other languages have been published. Three studies (total N=1,673) were conducted to validate a Spanish version of the BFI-2, BFI-2-S and BFI-2-XS). Study 1 first tested the structural validity both at the domain- and facet-levels of 60 BFI-2 item...

In three studies, we tried to create a novel scale within the existing Big Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2) structure to measure prosocial vs. antisocial personality traits, like the Dark Triad and honesty-humility. While our new scale converged strongly with dark personality and honesty-humility scales, we failed to establish sufficient discriminant valid...

Responding to the need for school-based, broadly applicable, low-cost, and brief assessments of socio-emotional skills, we describe the conceptual background and empirical development of the SENNA inventory and provide psychometric information on validity, reliability and norms.

The article is in Russian. For a related English-language paper, you may address: https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191119860901 The present article aims to assess psychometric characteristics of a Russian version of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2). This questionnaire measures five basic personality domains, as well as three facets per domain. We colle...

The Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) has received wide recognition since its publication because it strikes a good balance between content coverage and brevity. The current study translated the BFI-2 into Chinese, evaluated its psychometric properties in four diverse Chinese samples (college students, adult employees, adults treated for substance use,...

How do people come to know others’ feelings? One idea is that affective processes (e.g., physiological responses) play an important role, leading to the prediction that linkage between one’s physiological responses and others’ emotion relates to one’s ability to know how others feel (i.e., empathic accuracy). Participants (N = 96, 48 female friend...

Research on students’ understandings of their academic performance often faces limits with respect to sample diversity, statistical power, breadth of participant information, and ability to continuously track the development of participants. Government registry data do not face such limitations. We validate a brief measure of academic self-percepti...

Accumulating research points to the importance of incremental theories of emotion. Yet, little is known about whether these beliefs change in adulthood across long time spans, and if so, whether such changes are prospectively linked to emotion regulation outcomes. In the present investigation, we tested how incremental theories of emotion change du...

Despite the increasing attention to social-emotional skills' development, few attempts have been made to develop rubrics to formatively assess these skills in classrooms and evaluate their psychometric properties. This research aimed to develop rubrics for the social-emotional skill domains of Self-management and Open-mindedness and assess their ps...

Texte du résumé de la présentation : Nous présenterons la validation française de la forme très courte du Big Five Inventory (BFI) qui comporte 10 items (BFI-10). Il s’agissait d’examiner en la structure factorielle, la fiabilité et la validité de l’instrument, afin de déterminer s’il mesure de manière adéquate les domaines de la personnalité ou se...

Русская версия 30-пунктного Краткого BFI-2-S. Измеряет пять черт и 15 аспектов личности. Мишкевич А. М., Щебетенко С. А., Калугин А. Ю., Сото К. Дж., Джон О. П. Адаптация краткой и сверх-краткой версий вопросника Big Five Inventory-2: BFI-2-S и BFI-2-XS // Психологический журнал. 2022. Т. 43. № 1. С. 95-108.

Русская версия 15--пунктной Сверх-краткой формы вопросника Big Five Inventory-2. Измеряет 5 черт личности. Мишкевич А. М., Щебетенко С. А., Калугин А. Ю., Сото К. Дж., Джон О. П. Адаптация краткой и сверх-краткой версий вопросника Big Five Inventory-2: BFI-2-S и BFI-2-XS // Психологический журнал. 2022. Т. 43. № 1. С. 95-108.

Significance Are disagreeable individuals more likely to attain power than agreeable individuals? This question is important because highly disagreeable individuals in positions of power can do a lot of damage. For example, CEOs who are nasty and bullying create cultures of abuse and tend to lead their organizations to fail. In two longitudinal pro...

Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the la...

Personality can be described at different levels of abstraction. Whereas the Big Five domains are the dominant level of analysis, several researchers have called for more fine-grained approaches, such as facet-level analysis. Personality facets allow more comprehensive descriptions of individual differences, more accurate predictions of outcomes, a...

L'objectif de cette étude est de valider une adaptation française de la forme très courte du Big Five Inventory (BFI) qui comporte 10 items (BFI-10). Notre but était d'examiner en profondeur, en plus de la structure factorielle et de la fiabilité, la validité de cet instrument, afin de déterminer s'il mesure de manière adéquate les domaines de la p...

The Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) is a recently published 60-item questionnaire that measures personality traits within the five-factor model framework. An important aspect of the BFI-2 is that it measures the traits at both the domain and facet levels and also controls acquiescence bias via the balanced number of true- and false-keyed items across...

Online supplementary material for paper: Slovak Adaptation of the Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): Psychometric Properties and Initial Validation

Following the publication of the Big Five Inventory- 2 (BFI-2) and its abbreviated forms (the 30-item BFI-2-S and 15-item BFI-2-XS), two studies were conducted to develop and validate a Danish translation of these measures. Study 1 first developed a preliminary Danish BFI-2 item pool consisting of translations of the 60 BFI-2 items, then tested and...

The article describes the process of adaptation of the Big Five Inventory-2 into the Slovak language and cultural context. The translation process of the Slovak BFI-2 was based on three data samples using item analysis and basic psychometric properties. The present study estimates the psychometric properties of the Slovak BFI-2 and its hierarchical...

Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one...

Whereas the structure of individual differences in many social and emotional attributes is well understood in adults, much less work has been done in children and adolescents. The main goals of this research were to specify the major content domains that are assessed across multiple socioemotional instruments (self-esteem, grit, self-efficacy, stre...

What type of items, keyed positively or negatively, makes social-emotional skill or personality scales more valid? The present study examines the different criterion validities of true- and false-keyed items, before and after correction for acquiescence. The sample included 12,987 children and adolescents from 425 schools of the State of São Paulo...

Daily life is full of emotional ups and downs. In contrast, the objective conditions of our lives usually remain relatively stable from day to day. The degree to which emotional ups and downs influence life satisfaction-which prima facie should be relatively stable-remains a puzzle. In the present article, we propose the Individual Differences in E...

Likert‐type self‐report scales are frequently used in large‐scale educational assessment of social‐emotional skills. Self‐report scales rely on the assumption that their items elicit information only about the trait they are supposed to measure. However, different response biases may threaten this assumption. Specifically, in children, the response...

The development and promotion of social-emotional skills in childhood and adolescence contributes to subsequent well-being and positive life outcomes. However, the assessment of these skills is associated with conceptual and methodological challenges. This review discusses how social-emotional skill measurement in youth could be improved in terms o...

Zusammenfassung. Die deutsche Version des Big Five Inventars 2 (BFI-2) erfasst die 5 Persönlichkeitsdomänen Extraversion, Verträglichkeit, Gewissenhaftigkeit, Negative Emotionalität (Neurotizismus) und Offenheit sowie insgesamt 15 Persönlichkeitsfacetten mit 60 Items. Das Inventar wurde im Rahmen eines mehrstufigen Übersetzungsprozesses vom Englisc...

This series of studies investigated whether the good psychometric properties of the English version of the Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI–2) could be replicated using its Dutch adaptation. Second, it aimed to further examine the predictive validity of both the Big Five domain and the more specific facet scales of the BFI–2 in a large and representative...

The purpose of this report on Uzbekistan Education Sector Analysis (ESA) is to provide a comprehensive overview of outcomes and challenges in the country’s education sector with a focus on access, quality, and relevance of education. The report focuses on providing a breadth of analysis, covering all levels of the education system, with in-depth an...

Бланк и ключ русской версии Big Five Inventory-2. Состоит из 60 пунктов. Измеряет пять базовых черт личности, а также по три аспекта в рамках каждой черты. Количество пунктов и модальность (положительные/отрицательные) сбалансированы на уровнях черт и аспектов.

The present study investigates the validity and utility of the German adaptations of the two short forms of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2), the 30-item BFI-2-S, and the 15-item BFI-2-XS, developed by Soto and John (2017b). Both scales assess the Big Five domains. The BFI-2-S allows, in addition, the brief assessment of three facets per domain. Ba...

Likert-type self-report scales are frequently used in large-scale educational assessment of social-emotional skills. Self-report questionnaires rely on the assumption that their items elicit information only about the trait they are supposed to measure. However, different response biases may threat this assumption. Specifically in children, the res...

Political action (volunteering, protesting) is central to functioning democracies, and action is often motivated by negative emotion. However, theories of emotion regulation suggest that people often strive to decrease such negative emotions. Thus, effective emotion regulation (e.g., reappraisal)—while helping people feel better—could have the unin...

How well can scores on a personality scale predict criteria such as behaviors and life outcomes? This question concerns external validity, which is a core aspect of personality assessment. The present research was conducted to examine how external validity is influenced by a trait scale’s internal characteristics, such as its length (number of item...

When analyzed via item response theory, Likert-type items are modeled by estimating a set of thresholds (i.e., parameters that inform on the latent trait level required for endorsing a given scale option) that are assumed to be invariant across the population of individuals. If persons vary in response styles this assumption may not hold. This is c...

Individuals differ in the degree to which they tend to habitually accept their emotions and thoughts without judging them—a process here referred to as habitual acceptance. Acceptance has been linked with greater psychological health, which we propose may be due to the role acceptance plays in negative emotional responses to stressors: acceptance h...

The Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) uses 60 items to hierarchically assess the Big Five personality domains and 15 more-specific facet traits. The present research develops two abbreviated forms of the BFI-2—the 30-item BFI-2-S and the 15-item BFI-2-XS—and then examines their measurement properties. At the level of the Big Five domains, we find that t...

Recent studies have begun to document the diversity of ways people regulate their emotions. However, one unanswered question is why people regulate their emotions as they do in everyday life. In the present research, we examined how social context and goals influence strategy selection in daily high points and low points. As expected, suppression w...

Die deutsche Version des Big Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2) erfasst die Big Five Persönlichkeitseigenschaften Extraversion, Verträglichkeit, Gewissenhaftigkeit, Negative Emotionalität (früher: Neurotizismus) und Offenheit mit jeweils drei Facetten. Die Skala basiert auf dem Big Five Inventory 2 von Christopher Soto und Oliver John. Die Items wurden in ei...

Recent experimental work demonstrates that temporal distancing from negative experiences reduces distress. Yet two central questions remain: (a) do people differ in the habitual tendency to temporally distance from negative experiences, and if so (b) what implications does this tendency have for well-being? Seven studies explored these questions. S...

Three studies were conducted to develop and validate the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2), a major revision of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). Study 1 specified a hierarchical model of personality structure with 15 facet traits nested within the Big Five domains, and developed a preliminary item pool to measure this structure. Study 2 used conceptual and...

Whereas past research has examined the use of emotion regulation strategies in terms of individual differences or responses to experimental manipulations, this research takes a naturalistic and repeated-measures approach to examine suppression use in specific situations. Using an experience sampling design, we find evidence across two samples (tota...

Individuals differ in the way they use rating scales to describe themselves, and these differences are particularly pronounced in children and early adolescents. One promising remedy is to correct (or “anchor”) an individual’s responses according to the way they use the scale when they rate an anchoring vignette (a set of hypothetical targets diffe...

Whereas the structure of individual differences in personal attributes is well understood in adults, much less work has been done in children and adolescents. On the assessment side, numerous instruments are in use for children but they measure discordant attributes, ranging from one single factor (self-esteem; grit) to three factors (social, emoti...

The present research uses a Social Relations Model approach to focus on individual differences in perceptual confidence - a person’s confidence in her or his impressions of others. Across two samples of group interactions, we found that the majority of variance in perceptual confidence was explained by individual differences in how people tended to...

Neubert, Mainert, Kretzschmar, and Greiff (2015) plea to integrate the 21st century skills of complex problem solving (CPS) and collaborative problem solving (ColPS) in the assessment and development suite of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists, given the expected increase in nonroutine and interactive tasks in the new workplace. At t...

Researchers have noted strong parallels in the symptoms of mania—including grandiosity, hostility, goal-driven behavior, and overly sexualized behavior—and dominance. Drawing on these parallels, it has been hypothesized that bipolar disorder might be related to dysregulations of the dominance system, which includes dominance motivation, power, and...

OBJECTIVE: The present research was conducted to map the hierarchical structure of youths' personality traits, to identify the foundational level of this structure, and to test whether the meanings of some youth personality dimensions shift with age. METHOD: We addressed these issues by analyzing personality parent-reports for a cross-sectional sam...

Resting state fMRI may help identify markers of risk for affective disorder. Given the comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders and the heterogeneity of these disorders as defined by DSM, an important challenge is to identify alterations in resting state brain connectivity uniquely associated with distinct profiles of negative affect. The cu...

Disgust plays an important role in conservatives' moral and political judgments, helping to explain why conservatives and liberals differ in their attitudes on issues related to purity. We examined the extent to which the emotion-regulation strategy reappraisal drives the disgust-conservatism relationship. We hypothesized that disgust has less infl...

In the current research we tested a comprehensive model of spirituality, religiosity, compassion, and altruism, investigating the independent effects of spirituality and religiosity on compassion and altruism. We hypothesized that, even though spirituality and religiosity are closely related, spirituality and religiosity would have different and un...

Different emotion regulation strategies have been linked to distinct social outcomes, but only concurrently or in the short-term. The present research employed a four-year longitudinal design with peer-reported measures of social functioning to examine the long-term social effects of emotion regulation. Individual differences in suppression before...

Objective: Although Loevinger's model of ego development is a theory of personality growth, there are few studies that have examined age-related change in ego level over developmentally significant periods of adulthood. To address this gap in the literature, we examined mean-level change and individual differences in change in ego level over 18 ye...

This chapter tries to strike a balance between "what is" and "what should be" the practice of measurement in social-personality research. The authors review the traditional reliability coefficients but urge the reader to think about facets of generalizability, such as time, items, and observers, and to explicitly adopt a generalizability framework....

Individuals differ in the strategies they use to regulate their emotions (e.g., suppression, reappraisal), and these regulatory strategies can differentially influence social outcomes. However, the mechanisms underlying these social effects remain to be specified. We examined one potential mediator that arises directly from emotion-regulatory effor...

Data from a cross-sectional sample (N = 601 men and women) and a longitudinal sample (N = 125 women) were used to test hypotheses about the development of Big Five domains and facets from early adulthood through middle age. Analyses of mean-level age trends indicated that overall Agreeableness and Conscientiousness increased with age and that sever...

A classic problem in moral psychology concerns whether and when moral judgments are driven by intuition versus deliberate reasoning. In this investigation, we explored the role of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that involves construing an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that diminishes the intensity of the emotional experience. We...

What happens when people suppress their emotions when they sacrifice for a romantic partner? This multimethod study investigates how suppressing emotions during sacrifice shapes affective and relationship outcomes. In Part 1, dating couples came into the laboratory to discuss important romantic relationship sacrifices. Suppressing emotions was asso...

Beliefs that are negatively biased, inaccurate, and rigid are thought to play a key role in the mood and anxiety disorders. Our goal in this study was to examine whether a change in maladaptive beliefs mediated the outcome of individual cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD). In a sample of 47 individuals with SAD rece...

Reappraisal is generally viewed as an adaptive emotion regulation strategy. Reappraisal frequency has been associated with greater well-being, and reappraisal ability is thought to be composed of several crucial cognitive control processes. However, the relationships among reappraisal ability, reappraisal frequency, well-being, and various cognitiv...