Judgments of personality are inferences about traits that underlie consistent, coherent patterns of behavior across diverse situations. Such judgments are relevant to mental health from both the clinician's and client's perspective. From the clinician's perspective, a better understanding of the bases of accurate interpersonal judgment is relevant to improvements in clinical assessment, evaluation, diagnosis, and subsequent treatment. From the client's perspective, many problems in living and several of the major personality disorders are directly relevant to or even stem directly from deficiencies in the accuracy of social perception. Patterns of paranoia, hostility, fearfulness, shyness, narcissism and others are produced, exacerbated and sometimes fundamentally characterized by inaccurate social perception. Research on accurate personality judgment over the past decade has settled several important issues, and opened others. Some of the unsettled issues are addressed by the PI's Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM, Funder, 1995), which describes how accurate personality judgment is the result of a social psychological process by which relevant information becomes available to and then is detected and correctly utilized by a judge. RAM yields hypotheses concerning the effect of informational context and individual differences among judges on the accuracy of personality judgment. To test these hypotheses and address other issues, 144 undergraduate subjects of both sexes and varied ethnicity will interact in one of 4 1-hour experimental contexts, and another 4-hour context. These contexts are designed to vary in the kind and amount of personality-relevant information that becomes available in them. Afterwards, subjects will provide their judgments of each others' personalities. The accuracy of these judgments will be assessed against and correlated with a wide range of measures of personality and mental health derived from self-reports, informants' reports, assessments by mental health professionals, and direct behavioral observations. Hypotheses predict differences in accuracy across experimental conditions as well as mediating individual differences in information pickup and judgmental ability within conditions. Data will be analyzed using profile analyses, item analyses, the social relations model, and structural equation modeling.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH042427-13
Application #
6391915
Study Section
Social and Group Processes Review Committee (SGP)
Program Officer
Morf, Carolyn
Project Start
1986-07-01
Project End
2003-05-31
Budget Start
2001-06-01
Budget End
2002-05-31
Support Year
13
Fiscal Year
2001
Total Cost
$184,652
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California Riverside
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
City
Riverside
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92521
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Sherman, Ryne A; Figueredo, Aurelio José; Funder, David C (2013) The behavioral correlates of overall and distinctive life history strategy. J Pers Soc Psychol 105:873-88
Fast, Lisa A; Funder, David C (2010) Gender differences in the correlates of self-referent word use: authority, entitlement, and depressive symptoms. J Pers 78:313-38
Letzring, Tera D (2008) The Good Judge of Personality: Characteristics, Behaviors, and Observer Accuracy. J Res Pers 42:914-932
Nave, Christopher S; Sherman, Ryne A; Funder, David C (2008) Beyond Self-Report in the Study of Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being: Correlations with Acquaintance Reports, Clinician Judgments and Directly Observed Social Behavior. J Res Pers 42:643-659
Fast, Lisa A; Funder, David C (2008) Personality as manifest in word use: correlations with self-report, acquaintance report, and behavior. J Pers Soc Psychol 94:334-46
Vazire, Simine; Funder, David C (2006) Impulsivity and the self-defeating behavior of narcissists. Pers Soc Psychol Rev 10:154-65
Letzring, Tera D; Wells, Shannon M; Funder, David C (2006) Information quantity and quality affect the realistic accuracy of personality judgment. J Pers Soc Psychol 91:111-23
Schimmack, Ulrich; Oishi, Shigehiro; Furr, R Michael et al. (2004) Personality and life satisfaction: a facet-level analysis. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 30:1062-75
Krueger, Joachim I; Funder, David C (2004) Towards a balanced social psychology: causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition. Behav Brain Sci 27:313-27; discussion 328-76

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