Alexander G. Stahlmann’s research while affiliated with University of Zurich and other places

Objective: Climate change is a serious threat. Personality psychologists can help address this threat by understanding what kind of people tend to endorse proenvironmental attitudes and engage in sustainable behavior. Previous research supports reliable associations between proenvironmental attitudes and personality traits. However, this research has generally aggregated different kinds of attitudes into a single composite and has focused on the domain level of personality traits. Method: This study explored how 10 lower-order aspects of the Big Five personality traits were related to eight different proenvironmental attitudes in three convenience samples from the United States (N = 1,234; 1,000) and the United Kingdom (N = 538). Results: All five trait domains were related to at least one proenvironmental attitude across all three samples. Seven of eight proenvironmental attitudes could be predicted by one or more traits in all three samples. We also found evidence that the Openness aspect of Openness to Experience was a more consistent predictor of proenvironmental attitudes than the Intellect aspect. In contrast, there was little benefit in distinguishing between the aspects of other trait domains. We did not find evidence that age or political orientation moderated the associations between proenvironmental attitudes and personality. Conclusion: Results point to the need for more fine-grained research on individual differences in proenvironmental attitudes and behavior.

People vary in their compassion for animals, likely due in part to more variation in more basic personality and interpersonal behavior attributes. Previous research has generally suggested that more communal and agreeable people also tend to be more compassionate to animals. However, this research is limited regarding the range and depth of individual differences used to examine this issue. The goal of this preregistered study was to extend previous research by examining associations between compassion for animals and a wider range of variables than has been previously examined. In a representative sample of American adults (n = 992), we tested associations between compassion for animals and (a) Big Five personality trait domains, (b) Big Five trait aspects, (c) maladaptive Big Five trait domains, (d) interpersonal values, and (e) interpersonal problems. Results supported our hypothesis that compassion for animals is related to communion/agreeableness and openness to experience. Consistent with our hypotheses, the compassionate aspect of agreeableness drove correlations with that trait. Contrary to our hypotheses, maladaptive antagonism was not more strongly related to compassion for animals than normal-range agreeableness. The results provide a fuller portrait of the personological foundation of compassion for animals. Specifically, people who are more communal/agreeable and open tend to be more compassionate toward animals. This suggests that personality-related patterns of behavior among humans extend to human-animal interactions. Results also provide a basis for future work examining the mechanisms underlying human compassion for animals.

Primal world beliefs–primals–are a category of beliefs about the overall character of the world (e.g., the world is a safe place). Theory suggests that such beliefs drive personality development–or at least reflect personality differences, such as character strengths. We examined the relationships of primals with character strengths among 1122 German-speaking adults. The primary primal good explained the most variance in most character strengths, especially hope, spirituality, zest, gratitude, curiosity, and leadership. Including specific secondary (e.g., safe, enticing, alive) and tertiary primals (e.g., beautiful, needs me, funny) often yielded better predictions, but, with few exceptions, increments were typically smaller than that of the primary primal. We recommend including these primals in positive psychology interventions and describe three couplings of primals and character strengths that may prove especially fruitful for future research and practice.

Affect is involved in many psychological phenomena, but a descriptive structure, long sought, has been elusive. Valence and arousal are fundamental, and a key question-the focus of the present study-is the relationship between them. Valence is sometimes thought to be independent of arousal, but, in some studies (representing too few societies in the world) arousal was found to vary with valence. One common finding is that arousal is lowest at neutral valence and increases with both positive and negative valence: a symmetric V-shaped relationship. In the study reported here of self-reported affect during a remembered moment (N = 8,590), we tested the valence-arousal relationship in 33 societies with 25 different languages. The two most common hypotheses in the literature-independence and a symmetric V-shaped relationship-were not supported. With data of all samples pooled, arousal increased with positive but not negative valence. Valence accounted for between 5% (Finland) and 43% (China Beijing) of the variance in arousal. Although there is evidence for a structural relationship between the two, there is also a large amount of variability in this relation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Primal world beliefs–primals–are a category of beliefs about the overall character of the world (e.g., the world is a safe place). Theory suggests that such beliefs drive personality development–or at least reflect personality differences, such as character strengths. We examined the relationships of primals with character strengths among 1122 German-speaking adults. The primary primal good explained the most variance in the majority of character strengths, especially hope, spirituality, zest, gratitude, curiosity, and leadership. Including specific secondary (e.g., safe, enticing, alive) and tertiary primals (e.g., beautiful, needs me, funny) often yielded better predictions, but, with few exceptions, increments were typically smaller than that of the primary primal. We recommend including these primals in positive psychology interventions and describe three couplings of primals and character strengths that may prove especially fruitful for future research and practice.

Despite sophisticated scale-generic guidance for adapting/translating self-report scales and widespread adherence to guidance, low invariance remains a problem in cross-cultural clinical research. This may be due to scale-specific translation challenges, and original scale-creation papers provide little information about item-writing choices. It is typically unexplained, for example, why important repeated terms are selected over synonyms, leaving translators in a lurch. To supplement scale-generic guidance, we specify conditions warranting the creation of scale-specific translation guides and offer a full exemplar guide concerning the Primals Inventory, a new measure of beliefs about the world’s general character (e.g., the world is dangerous) presumed to influence a variety of clinical outcomes. Primals Inventory-specific recommendations include how best to evoke the object of belief (e.g., world versus universe) and lessons learned from initial translation efforts (German and Italian). If this scale-specific guide proves useful, similar guides could be created for other scales, aiding cross-cultural research generally.

This study examines Peterson and Seligman’s (2004, p. 19) claim that every VIA character strength “(…) is morally valued in its own right, even in the absence of obvious beneficial outcomes”. Although this criterion assumes a pivotal role in distinguishing character from personality, no previous study has investigated its validity. Based on what Peterson and Seligman (2004) have provided us with, we describe how we built our study around indirectly testing every strength’s assumed moral evaluation, in which inclinations toward deontology (e.g., “torture is wrong regardless of tangible positive outcomes”) and consequentialism (e.g., “torture can be good if it accounts for more positive than negative outcomes”) may play a critical role. We used Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) handbook to construct four ultra-short stories for every strength: the stories depict various agents engaging in strength-related behavior (e.g., a young student courageously stepping up against school bullies). We prompted participants to rate these and twelve anchor stories multiple times as to whether the agents acted morally correct: In the first block, the actions’ consequences were undetermined while in the second block, the actions had either positive, negative, or mixed consequences, which we used to compute proxies of participants’ inclinations toward deontology and consequentialism. The ratings of N = 230 German-speaking laypersons suggest that the criterion stands: participants perceived every strength as positively morally valued when consequences were undetermined, and positive consequences did not account for or increase this effect. However, moral value seems to come in degrees, and some strengths were valued more strongly than others (top five: judgment, honesty, kindness, fairness, and hope). Furthermore, specific character strengths (measured by self-report) were connected with more positive evaluations (e.g., endorsing spirituality was connected with rating spirituality as more positively valued). Both deontology and consequentialism were connected with more positive evaluations, and we suggest two hypotheses to explain how such inclinations can lead to perceiving character strengths as positively valued. Our findings highlight the importance of scrutinizing the criteria for character strengths, and our experimental paradigm can offer a template to further investigate character strengths’ moral evaluation and other fundamental assumptions in upcoming studies.

Recent theoretical advances have grounded gelotophobia (Greek: gelos = laughter, phobos = fear) in a dynamic framework of causes, moderating factors, and consequences of the fear of being laughed at. This understanding corresponds to that of vulnerability and translates gelotophobia into a distinguishable pattern of lacking resources (i.e., misinterpretation of joy and laughter) that can result in negative consequences (e.g., reduced well-being and performance) if individuals have no access to further resources (e.g., social support) or are exposed to severe stressors (e.g., workplace bullying). Based on the panel data provided by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES (N = 2469 across six measurement intervals), this study takes the first step toward empirically testing this model’s assumptions: First, we computed exemplary zero-order correlations and showed that gelotophobia was negatively connected with social support (resource) and life and job satisfaction (consequences) and positively connected with perceived stress, work stress, and workplace bullying (stressors). Second, we used longitudinal cluster analyses (KmL; k-means-longitudinal) and showed that the panel data can be clustered into three stable patterns of life and job satisfaction and that gelotophobia is primarily related to the two clusters marked by lower levels of satisfaction. Third, we computed partial correlations and showed that social support, perceived stress, and work stress (but not workplace bullying) can weaken or completely resolve gelotophobia’s relationships with such diverging trajectories of life and job satisfaction. We concluded that seeing gelotophobia through the lens of vulnerability is useful and that such research warrants further attention using more dedicated, theoretically grounded projects.