Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview on the development of a theoretical framework for research on action control. It discusses that a person may have all the cognitive abilities that are necessary to solve a given anagram task and he or she may be sufficiently motivated to find the solution, and he or she may still fail to perform the necessary cognitive activities because he or she is unable to shield the task-oriented intention against competing action tendencies, for example, thinking about the self-evaluative implications of past failures to solve some other task. Likewise, persistence has been regarded as a pure motivational phenomenon. The duration of the time period a person persists on a task is not only a function of the strength of his or her motivation to solve the task as compared to the motivation to engage in some alternative activity, but also a function of the ability to protect the task-oriented action tendency against the interfering effect of competing action tendencies. The chapter discusses several historical reasons for the neglect of volitional processes in theories of action and it also presents several approaches in various subfields of psychology that are related to the problem of action control.

This chapter discusses the concept of self-presentation into that of reputation management and explains how this clarifies the aspects of pattern of differential involvement in delinquency. Clues to sex differences in delinquent involvement are provided by the possibility of sex differences in several of the factors that are otherwise related to delinquency. These include differential parental supervision and consequent segregation of audiences, the differential significance of educational achievement for boys and girls, and possibly differences in relevant knowledge. The strong sex differences that have been found in attitudes to authority are more a reflection of differential inclination to choose a delinquent identity than an explanation of it. The generality of individual differences reflects not so much a common psychological structure as communality of social meaning. Those activities that distinguish the high from the low scorer on self-report measures are those that exemplify and express a delinquent identity. These diverse activities have similarity of social meaning in common. The chapter also discusses that the age pattern reflects the fact that the contingencies in the social environment, although relatively stable, are not entirely so. Between childhood and adolescence, the pattern of social participation changes as the individual moves increasingly beyond the supervision and protection of the family home, from a small school to a bigger school and from parent–child to peer–peer relationships. It changes again with the progress of educational career, with the move beyond school and possibly into work, and with a shift from single-sex to mixed-sex participation and possibly marriage.

Publisher Summary The research employing the Bern Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), and other instruments containing separate M and F scales has fundamentally been inspired by a shift in societal attitudes, shared by most social scientists, toward a more egalitarian view of the status of women and the relationships between the sexes. Substitution of traditional bipolar theories with the proposition that masculinity and femininity are independent dimensions and that androgyny, a combination of both, is associated with greater psychological competency than sex-typing held out the promise that a society, in which roles are not differentially assigned to men and women, except as dictated by biology, is both feasible and desirable. The chapter discusses that the multidimensional nature of sex-role and other gender-related phenomena is also beginning to be recognized. Although gender identity is essentially dimorphic, the general statement that masculine and feminine attributes and behaviors cannot or do not coexist has been effectively refuted. Androgyny, defined as the possession of substantial numbers of desirable attributes and response dispositions currently stereotyped as masculine and feminine, or as an indifference to sex-role standards that leads the person to behave according to his or her individual predilections may turn out to have the benefits assigned to it.

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the features and characteristics of individuals that are associated with chronic headache. It also presents comparisons made among four different diagnostic groups of headache sufferers and nonheadache controls on a variety of personality measures; the relation of personality factors to headache activity in an untreated population suffering from chronic headache; and an examination of the ability of these various measures to predict the outcome of psychological treatment of headache. Patients with chronic headache, as a group, are more psychologically distressed and show more deviant personality characteristics than nonheadache sufferers do. Years of suffering chronic headache leads to personality changes, but the personality deviations predispose the individual to headache.

This chapter provides an overview on the act frequency approach and discusses the empirical and conceptual issues. Dispositional concepts have been viewed from three basic perspectives. The first and most prevalent is the purposive–cognitive concept of disposition, in which needs, beliefs, or desires constitute the focal attributes. A second concept of disposition is a hypothetical proposition, which invokes situational specifications in the explication of dispositions. The third basic form of dispositional concept is as a categorical summary statement. The act frequency approach modifies and extends the summary view of dispositions and fashions a general research program for personality psychology. The frequency analysis of dispositional constructs focuses on specifying the occurrence of acts within circumscribed categories over specified periods of observation. From a frequency perspective, no single act serves as a measure or index from which dispositional inferences can be drawn. Instead, multiple-act criteria consisting of composites of observed acts within each dispositional category over a specified period of observation, serve as the fundamental measures of an individual's dispositions. A fundamental division occurs in personality psychology in regard to the explanatory status of dispositions. Relations among three elements have been considered in philosophical treatments of this issue: (1) the disposition, (2) manifestations of the disposition, and (3) a causal account of dispositional manifestations.

This chapter discusses the theory of cognitive orientation. The chapter reviews that most people would like to know how other persons will behave, and many people are in need of this knowledge to fulfill their tasks as planners in one or another domain of life. On the other hand, the deterministic notion, so frequently associated with behavior prediction, is an anathema to the majority of people living in what is presently called the western world. They cherish the idea of free will and, are afraid that an instrument enabling behavior prediction could be misused for controlling and manipulating their lives and, thus, curtailing their individual freedom. Nevertheless, even these behavior predictions would not be perfect, partly because one out of the myriads of involved meaning values or beliefs could pop up in the last instant and modify the predicted constellation, but mainly because of the same hurdle that has ultimately shattered the traditional determinism of classical physics, that is, the unavoidable interference of the observing system with the function of the system to be observed.

This chapter discusses the psychology of personality. The chapter presents three critical facets of the overriding meta theoretical objectives of the scientific study of personality: (1) the discipline requires a viable framework for empirical personality description; (2) given such a framework, programmatic personality research should be directed toward an understanding of the process of personality development; and (3) the scientific study of personality seeks ultimately to establish general principles that contribute to an understanding of human behavior/psychological functioning at the level of the individual. The chapter also presents formal properties of the alternative measurement models that could conceivably be brought to bear on the task of empirical personality. The discussion was concluded by noting that, as any one of the alternative measurement models could in principle be used as the basis for constructing attributes-by-measurement occasion profiles for single individuals, any one of those models could therefore be defended, in principle, as a formal approach to the problem of empirical personality description.