Dimensions Of Individual Differences Research Articles

Role of individual entrepreneurial orientation and innovation in SME performance: Gender perspectives

Individual entrepreneurial orientation and innovation are essentials for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to drive their performance, including surviving or even growing during economic crises. The entrepreneur’s gender might have an impact on those relationships. Hence, this study aims to analyze whether there were some differences in the five dimensions of individual entrepreneurial orientation and differences in the influence of individual entrepreneurial orientation and innovation on performance between male and female entrepreneurs. The study was performed through an online survey of 352 SME owners in Indonesia. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and multi-group analysis were conducted to test the hypotheses. The results demonstrated that all dimensions of individual entrepreneurial orientation are valid for developing this construct, but only the risk-taking dimension distinguishes male and female entrepreneurs the most. Male entrepreneurs are more willing to take risks than female. Furthermore, individual entrepreneurial orientation affects performance mediated by innovation, and this effect is not different between male and female entrepreneurs. These findings enrich the literature on the impact of gender on entrepreneurial orientation and the influence of innovation on SME performance. In Indonesia, individual entrepreneurial orientation affects performance assisted by innovation; however, this influence is not different for SMEs managed by male and female entrepreneurs. AcknowledgmentWe acknowledge and thank all of the respondents and parties who supported this research. This study was funded by the Directorate of Research and Community Engagement, Universitas Indonesia, contract number NKB-1782/UN2.RST/HKP.05.00/2020.

Mindreading measures misread? A multimethod investigation into the validity of self-report and task-based approaches.

Mindreading ability-also referred to as cognitive empathy or mentalizing-is typically conceptualized as a relatively stable dimension of individual differences in the ability to make accurate inferences about the mental states of others. This construct is primarily assessed using self-report questionnaires and task-based performance measures. However, the validity of these measures has been questioned: According to rival interpretations, mindreading tasks may capture general cognitive ability, whereas mindreading self-reports may capture perceived rather than actual mindreading ability. In this preregistered multimethod study involving 700 participants from the U.S. general population, we tested the validity of mindreading measures by examining the nomological network of self-reports and task-based methods using structural equation modeling. Specifically, we contrasted the empirical associations with theoretical predictions that assume mindreading measures are valid versus invalid. More consistent with rival interpretations, mindreading tasks showed a negligible latent correlation with mindreading self-reports (.05) and a large one with general cognitive ability (.85), whereas mindreading self-reports were specifically associated with perceived performance in mindreading tasks (.29). Also more consistent with rival interpretations, neither mindreading self-reports nor task-based measures showed positive unique associations with psychosocial functioning when controlling for general cognitive ability and general positive self-evaluation. Instead, negative unique associations emerged for both methods, although this effect was not robust for tasks. Overall, the results cast doubt on the validity of commonly used mindreading measures and support their rival interpretations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Scientific Theories and Their Psychological Corollaries: The Ecological Crisis as a Case Study in the Need for Synthesis

That policy makers will ever rationally respond to scientific warnings about the ecological crisis should be treated as a falsifiable hypothesis. After more than five decades of such warnings, there is a strong case for skepticism. Climate and other ecological tipping points constitute the quantitative thresholds beyond which current political systems can definitively be said to have failed. This presents a mandate to generate broad consensus on where tipping points lie, and at what proximity to them new strategies should be pursued. Central to any new strategy should be an understanding of why the old one failed—an understanding of why those in power almost exclusively derive from academic backgrounds other than physical science, and the psychological differences between those who issued or received so many warnings of collapse. To that end, a psychological trait syndrome relevant to political power is proposed, based on correlations between academic specialization, psychometric results, and the behavior of powerful people across a wide range of societies. This proposed syndrome consists of four covarying dimensions of individual difference. These are perceptions of hierarchy vs. egalitarianism, established knowledge vs. open inquiry, physical vs. symbolic action, and schematic vs. particular knowledge.

A panoramic view of personalization based on individual differences in persuasive and behavior change interventions.

Persuasive technologies are designed to change human behavior or attitude using various persuasive strategies. Recent years have witnessed increasing evidence of the need to personalize and adapt persuasive interventions to various users and contextual factors because a persuasive strategy that works for one individual may rather demotivate others. As a result, several research studies have been conducted to investigate how to effectively personalize persuasive technologies. As research in this direction is gaining increasing attention, it becomes essential to conduct a systematic review to provide an overview of the current trends, challenges, approaches used for developing personalized persuasive technologies, and opportunities for future research in the area. To fill this need, we investigate approaches to personalize persuasive interventions by understanding user-related factors considered when personalizing persuasive technologies. Particularly, we conducted a systematic review of 72 research published in the last ten years in personalized and adaptive persuasive systems. The reviewed papers were evaluated based on different aspects, including metadata (e.g., year of publication and venue), technology, personalization dimension, personalization approaches, target outcome, individual differences, theories and scales, and evaluation approaches. Our results show (1) increased attention toward personalizing persuasive interventions, (2) personality trait is the most popular dimension of individual differences considered by existing research when tailoring their persuasive and behavior change systems, (3) students are among the most commonly targeted audience, and (4) education, health, and physical activity are the most considered domains in the surveyed papers. Based on our results, the paper provides insights and prospective future research directions.

Individual differences in autobiographical memory predict the tendency to engage in spontaneous thoughts

ABSTRACT Individual differences in autobiographical memory have become a research area of interest, but little is known about its associations with other individual differences dimensions, such as the tendency to engage in spontaneous cognition. We report two studies examining individual differences in autobiographical memory, as measured by the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART), in relation to eight trait-like measures of spontaneous thought and, in Study 2, also a measure of fantasy proneness. In Study 1, the ART correlated positively and systematically with six out of eight measures of spontaneous thought, even when controlling for age, gender, and trait positive and negative affect. The two exceptions concerned spontaneous thoughts specifically related to attentional deficits. Study 2 replicated these findings and extended them to a measure of fantasy proneness. The findings demonstrate that people who generally consider their autobiographical memories to be vivid, detailed, relevant, and coherent, report a higher tendency to engage in various forms of spontaneous cognition, including positive constructive daydreaming, spontaneous mind wandering, involuntary mental time travel, and vivid and immersive fantasy. We discuss these findings in terms of the role autobiographical memory plays in spontaneous thoughts.

Relationships between resting-state EEG functional networks organization and individual differences in mind wandering.

When performing cognitively demanding tasks, people tend to experience momentary distractions or personal associations that intercept their stream of consciousness. This phenomenon is known as Mind Wandering (MW) and it has become a subject of neuroscientific investigations. Off-task thoughts can be analyzed during task performance, but currently, MW is also understood as a dimension of individual differences in cognitive processing. We wanted to recognize the intrinsically-organized functional networks that could be considered the neuronal basis for MW dispositional variability. To achieve this goal we recruited a group of normal adults, and eventually divided the group in half, based on participants' scores on the scale measuring dispositional MW. Next, these groups were compared regarding the arrangement of preselected intrinsic functional networks, which were reconstructed based on multi-channel signal-source resting-state EEG. It appeared that subjects who tend to mind wander often exhibited decreased synchronization within the default mode network, and, simultaneously, strengthened connectivity between 'on-task' networks of diverse functional specificity. Such within- and between networks integrity patterns might suggest that greater Mind Wanderers present an atypical organization of resting-state brain activity, which may translate into attenuated resources needed to maintain attentional control in task-related conditions.

Individual differences in looking at persons in scenes.

Individuals freely viewing complex scenes vary in their fixation behavior. The most prominent and reliable dimension of such individual differences is the tendency to fixate faces. However, much less is known about how observers distribute fixations across other body parts of persons in scenes and how individuals may vary in this regard. Here, we aimed to close this gap. We expanded a popular annotated stimulus set (Xu, Jiang, Wang, Kankanhalli, & Zhao, 2014) with 6,365 hand-delineated pixel masks for the body parts of 1,136 persons embedded in 700 complex scenes, which we publish with this article (https://osf.io/ynujz/). This resource allowed us to analyze the person-directed fixations of 103 participants freely viewing these scenes. We found large and reliable individual differences in the distribution of fixations across person features. Individual fixation tendencies formed two anticorrelated clusters, one for the eyes, head, and the inner face and one for body features (torsi, arms, legs, and hands). Interestingly, the tendency to fixate mouths was independent of the face cluster. Finally, our results show that observers who tend to avoid person fixations in general, particularly do so for the face region. These findings underscore the role of individual differences in fixation behavior and reveal underlying dimensions. They are further in line with a recently proposed push-pull relationship between cortical tuning for faces and bodies. They may also aid the comparison of special populations to general variation.

The Relationship Between Behavior Aspects of Executive Functions and Personality Traits in Healthy Young Adults.

Executive functions (ЕF) are complex cognitive processes that govern our behavior and thoughts. Associations between personality traits and executive functions clarify the mechanisms of a person's ability to function in everyday situations. The main goal of this study was to explore different personality dimensions relevant to the prediction of two different executive functions - Inhibition and Working Memory. The Big Five Inventory and the Adult Executive Functioning Inventory (ADEXI) were administered on a community sample comprising 549 young adults aged 18-35years (mean age 22.10years, SD 3.13). After controlling for age, gender and level of education, Conscientiousness and Extraversion were the most predictive personality traits, while Neuroticism and Agreeableness made specific contributions to the prediction of one of the two executive measures: Working Memory or Inhibition. Specifically, high Conscientiousness and Extraversion with low Neuroticism were significant predictors of Working Memory ability. On the other hand, high Conscientiousness and Agreeableness with low Extraversion predicted better Inhibition ability. These findings support the conclusion that these dimensions of individual differences seem to have numerous points of overlap at both psychological and neurobiological levels, but differences between these constructs are still significant.

GEOGRAPHY LEARNING DESCRIPTION REVIEWED FROM OPENNESS PERSONALITY STUDENTS OF MAN I MEDAN

The purpose of this study was to find out the description of geography learning in terms of the open personality of the students of MAN I Medan. This type of research is descriptive and quantitative. The sample in this study was the entire subject population, namely all 61 students consisting of two classes. The data collection technique was carried out by distributing a questionnaire (questionnaire) to respondents, which contained questions about the open personality of students and the geography learning experienced so far in the learning process. The descriptive percentage data analysis technique is intended to determine the status of variables, namely, to describe openness personality in geography learning. This study found that learning geography can put students in contact with their geographical environment to better understand modern processes and problems. The strongest openness personality of the MAN I Medan students is curiosity, while the lowest openness personality is smart and thinking. Curiosity is an action that always seeks to know deeper or wider than something learned, seen, and heard. Therefore, it is necessary to provide freedom by explaining the learning encyclopedia to develop and accommodate students' curiosity. This happens due to differences in all student’s abilities and personalities. Personality and ability are dimensions of individual differences in the tendency to exhibit consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. The nature of the personality focuses on identifying, describing, and measuring individual differences and is also a behavioral and mental mark typical of individuals who refer to differences through feelings, emotions, actions, motivations, and behaviors.Keywords: Geography, Openness Personality, Students

The Relations of Attention to and Clarity of Feelings With Facial Affect Perception.

Attention to emotions and emotional clarity are core dimensions of individual differences in emotion awareness. Findings from prior research based on self-report indicate that attention to and recognition of one’s own emotions are related to attention to and recognition of other people’s emotions. In the present experimental study, we examined the relations of attention to and clarity of emotions with the efficiency of facial affect perception. Moreover, it was explored whether attention to and clarity of emotions are linked to negative interpretations of facial expressions. A perception of facial expressions (PFE) task based on schematic faces with neutral, ambiguous, or unambiguous emotional expressions and a gender decision task were administered to healthy individuals along with measures of emotion awareness, state and trait anxiety, depression, and verbal intelligence. Participants had to decide how much the faces express six basic affects. Evaluative ratings and decision latencies were analyzed. Attention to feelings was negatively correlated with evaluative decision latency, whereas clarity of feelings was not related to decision latency in the PFE task. Attention to feelings was positively correlated with the perception of negative affects in ambiguous faces. Attention to feelings and emotional clarity were not related to gender decision latency. According to our results, dispositional attention to feelings goes along with an enhanced efficiency of facial affect perception. Habitually paying attention to one’s own emotions may facilitate processing of external emotional information. Preliminary evidence was obtained suggesting a relationship of dispositional attention to feelings with negative interpretations of facial expressions.

Diagnostic Fluidity: Inter- and Intra-Disease Considerations

Traditionally, psychopathology has been classified based on the publications of authoritative bodies, such as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA’s DSM). Recently, researchers have expressed an interest in basing classification more on data, as opposed to authority. This movement led to the formation of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium. Working from data, the HiTOP approach emphasizes dimensions of human individual differences that are arranged hierarchically, as opposed to categories that are arranged based on traditional DSM chapter rubrics. In this talk, I will describe the origins and status of the HiTOP approach, as well as current and future HiTOP directions and priorities.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

The initial Polish adaptation of the Mind Wandering Questionnaire: translation and verification of the scale internal consistency

Abstract Introduction: The aim of the current study was to present the results of the first step of the Mind Wandering Questionnaire (MWQ) adaptation to the Polish sample. The adaptation involved performing translation of the scale, verification of the translated items’ accessibility and the analysis of the internal consistency. Material and methods: MWQ in original form is a single-factor short self-assessing questionnaire composed of five items with a 6-point Likert-type answering scale. The translation of items was performed by a professional language expert according to psychometric rules. The research group included 70 healthy young adults (students), aged 21.53, an equal number of males and females. Results: The adapted questionnaire exhibited a single-factorial structure and satisfactory parameters of internal consistency: Cronbach’s alpha was 0.78, all individual items were significantly correlated with MWQ total score, and the mean value of correlation reached 0.74. The mean value of the adopted MWQ total score reached 15.84 (SD = 4.11). The study showing the initial step of the questionnaire adaptation revealed that the scale in the Polish version has an internal structure comparable with the original one, and its internal consistency exhibited good parameters. Conclusions: In the next steps of the scale full adaptation, a convergent validity assessment should be carried out together with correlations with other scales assessing psychological constructs and dimensions of individual differences associated with Mind Wandering, such as neuroticism and impulsiveness.

Adapting Cohort-Component Methods to a Microsimulation: A case study

Social scientists generally take United Nations (UN) population projections as the baseline when considering the potential impact of any changes that could affect fertility, mortality or migration, and the UN typically does projections using the cohort-component method (CCM). The CCM technique is computationally simple and familiar to demographers. However, in order to avoid the exponential expansion of complexity as new dimensions of individual difference are added to projections, and to understand the sensitivity of projections to specific conditions, agent-based microsimulations are a better option. CCMs can mask hidden assumptions that are surfaced by the construction of microsimulations, and varying such assumptions can lead to quite different projections. CCM models are naturally the strongest form of validation for population projection microsimulations but there are many complexities and difficulties associated with matching microsimulation projections and CCM projections. Here, we describe our efforts to tackle these challenges as we validated a microsimulation for Norway by replicating a UN CCM projection. This provides guidance for other simulationists who seek to use CCMs to validate microsimulations. More importantly, it demonstrates the value of microsimulations for surfacing assumptions that frequently lie hidden, and thus unevaluated, within CCM projections.

Exploring Behavioral Patterns for Data-Driven Modeling of Learners' Individual Differences.

Educational data mining research has demonstrated that the large volume of learning data collected by modern e-learning systems could be used to recognize student behavior patterns and group students into cohorts with similar behavior. However, few attempts have been done to connect and compare behavioral patterns with known dimensions of individual differences. To what extent learner behavior is defined by known individual differences? Which of them could be a better predictor of learner engagement and performance? Could we use behavior patterns to build a data-driven model of individual differences that could be more useful for predicting critical outcomes of the learning process than traditional models? Our paper attempts to answer these questions using a large volume of learner data collected in an online practice system. We apply a sequential pattern mining approach to build individual models of learner practice behavior and reveal latent student subgroups that exhibit considerably different practice behavior. Using these models we explored the connections between learner behavior and both, the incoming and outgoing parameters of the learning process. Among incoming parameters we examined traditionally collected individual differences such as self-esteem, gender, and knowledge monitoring skills. We also attempted to bridge the gap between cluster-based behavior pattern models and traditional scale-based models of individual differences by quantifying learner behavior on a latent data-driven scale. Our research shows that this data-driven model of individual differences performs significantly better than traditional models of individual differences in predicting important parameters of the learning process, such as performance and engagement.

Emotional intelligence and coping with stress in foster parents

Although much research on emotional intelligence (EI) and coping with stress has been performed in recent years, little is known about these dimensions of individual differences in both foster and biological parents. The main purpose of this study is to examine emotional intelligence and coping styles in foster parents in comparison to biological parents. The study included 124 individual participants aged between 30 and 64 years old (M = 45.18, SD = 8.72), including foster parents (n = 63, 50.81%) and biological parents (n = 61, 49.19%). The cross-sectional survey study was conducted using the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) and Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS). In comparison to biological parents, foster parents demonstrated significantly higher levels of emotional intelligence (EI), more frequently used task-oriented coping styles, and less often pursued emotional and avoidant coping strategies to deal with stress. EI was positively correlated with task-oriented coping and negatively so with emotional coping. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that EI was a strong predictor of task-oriented coping. Training focused on the enhancement of both EI and coping with stress should be considered as an effective way to improve parents’ competence.

Brain-wide functional connectivity patterns support general cognitive ability and mediate effects of socioeconomic status in youth

General cognitive ability (GCA) is an individual difference dimension linked to important academic, occupational, and health-related outcomes and its development is strongly linked to differences in socioeconomic status (SES). Complex abilities of the human brain are realized through interconnections among distributed brain regions, but brain-wide connectivity patterns associated with GCA in youth, and the influence of SES on these connectivity patterns, are poorly understood. The present study examined functional connectomes from 5937 9- and 10-year-olds in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) multi-site study. Using multivariate predictive modeling methods, we identified whole-brain functional connectivity patterns linked to GCA. In leave-one-site-out cross-validation, we found these connectivity patterns exhibited strong and statistically reliable generalization at 19 out of 19 held-out sites accounting for 18.0% of the variance in GCA scores (cross-validated partial η2). GCA-related connections were remarkably dispersed across brain networks: across 120 sets of connections linking pairs of large-scale networks, significantly elevated GCA-related connectivity was found in 110 of them, and differences in levels of GCA-related connectivity across brain networks were notably modest. Consistent with prior work, socioeconomic status was a strong predictor of GCA in this sample, and we found that distributed GCA-related brain connectivity patterns significantly statistically mediated this relationship (mean proportion mediated: 15.6%, p < 2 × 10−16). These results demonstrate that socioeconomic status and GCA are related to broad and diffuse differences in functional connectivity architecture during early adolescence, potentially suggesting a mechanism through which socioeconomic status influences cognitive development.

Evidence for the existence of emotion dispositions and the effects of appraisal bias.

The concept of emotion disposition is proposed as an important dimension of individual differences. It refers to a stable tendency to experience certain emotions more or less frequently or intensely for similar classes of situations or events in daily experience than the majority of other people. In contrast to classic "trait affect" traditions, the theoretical framework described here proposes a specific mechanism based on the notion of appraisal bias, that is, the evaluation of events or situations in biased, often unrealistic, fashion. The bias toward internal versus external causal attribution is a classic example. It is suggested that such biases can affect virtually all appraisal criteria (e.g., novelty/expectedness, (un)pleasantness, goal conduciveness/obstruction, causation, control, power, and norm compliance), creating a disposition to experience specific emotions more frequently. In some cases, this process may lead to the development of affective disorders. Two studies are herein reported: (a) administering an emotion disposition assessment instrument to several thousand adults in personnel assessment contexts (N = 3,012), demonstrating the existence and intensity of emotion dispositions and identifying potential individual difference correlates; and (b) using an updated version of the instrument in a representative survey panel study (N = 190), assessing both emotion dispositions and appraisal biases, allowing analysis of their relationships (in addition to examining the effect of correlates). The results confirm the viability of the underlying theoretical assumptions as well as of the scenario method used for the assessment and provide leads for further research, particularly in the areas of emotional competence and affective disorders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive efficiency beats top-down control as a reliable individual difference dimension relevant to self-control

Top-down control of responses is a key construct in cognitive science that is thought to be critical for self-control. It is typically measured by subtracting performance in experimental conditions in which top-down control is theoretically present against performance in matched conditions in which it is assumed to be absent. Recently, however, subtraction-based metrics of top-down control have been criticized for having low test-retest reliability, weak intercorrelations, and little relation to self-report measures of self-control. Concurrently, there is growing evidence that task-general cognitive efficiency, indexed by the drift rate parameter of the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978), constitutes a cohesive, reliable individual difference dimension relevant to self-control. However, no previous studies have directly compared latent factors for top-down control (derived from subtraction metrics) with factors for task-general efficiency “head-to-head” in the same sample in terms of their cohesiveness, temporal stability, and relation to self-control. In this re-analysis of a large open data set (Eisenberg et al., 2019; N = 522), we find that top-down control metrics fail to form cohesive latent factors, that the resulting factors have poor temporal stability, and that they exhibit tenuous connections to questionnaire measures of self-control. In contrast, cognitive efficiency measures—drawn from conditions of the same tasks that both are, and are not, assumed to demand top-down control—form a robust, temporally stable factor that correlates with questionnaire measures of self-control. These findings suggest that task-general efficiency is a central individual difference dimension relevant to self-control. Moreover, they go beyond recent measurement-based critiques of top-down control metrics, and instead suggest problems with key theoretical assumptions that have long guided this research paradigm.

Chronobiological traits predict the restrained, uncontrolled, and emotional eating behaviors of female university students

ABSTRACT Although significant associations between diurnal preference and restrained eating behaviors were previously reported, such reports are scarce and, in some respects, inconclusive. In this cross-sectional survey of 567 female university students aged between 17 and 23 years, we tried to clarify and extend the previous findings on chronobiological correlates of these behaviors. We administered the three-Factor-Eating-Questionnaire Revised and three questionnaires designed to assess trait-, ability-, and state-like differences in the domain of chronobiology, the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ), the Sleep-Wake Pattern Assessment Questionnaire, and the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire, respectively. Statistical analyses included factor, correlation, and regression analyses. We found that any of three aspects of unhealthy eating behaviors (i.e., lack of cognitive eating restraint, uncontrolled eating, and emotional eating) was linked to one or more dimensions of individual chronobiological differences. We explained the previously reported inconclusive results by the differential relationship of two subconstructs of diurnal preferences to eating behaviors. For instance, such relationship was found for two (morning and evening) subscales of the MEQ. Cognitive eating restraint and uncontrolled eating were related to the morning subscale, while emotional eating was related to the evening subscale. These associations were supported by the associations revealed for morning vs. evening components of earliness-lateness assessed with two other questionnaires, (e.g., morning lateness and sleep offset vs. evening lateness and sleep onset, respectively). We conclude that unhealthy eating behaviors seem to be linked to unhealthy sleep-wake habits and behaviors and to inabilities to wake or sleep on demand at certain times of the day.

Destination Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a prototypical neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive degeneration of motor neurons both in the brain and spinal cord. The constantly evolving nature of ALS represents a fundamental dimension of individual differences that underlie this disorder, yet it involves multiple levels of functional entities that alternate in different directions and finally converge functionally to define ALS disease progression. ALS may start from a single entity and gradually becomes multifactorial. However, the functional convergence of these diverse entities in eventually defining ALS progression is poorly understood. Various hypotheses have been proposed without any consensus between the for-and-against schools of thought. The present review aims to capture explanatory hierarchy both in terms of hypotheses and mechanisms to provide better insights on how they functionally connect. We can then integrate them within a common functional frame of reference for a better understanding of ALS and defining future treatments and possible therapeutic strategies. Here, we provide a philosophical understanding of how early leads are crucial to understanding the endpoints in ALS, because invariably, all early symptomatic leads are underpinned by neurodegeneration at the cellular, molecular and genomic levels. Consolidation of these ideas could be applied to other neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) and guide further critical thinking to unveil their roadmap of destination ALS.