Desire as an Independent Construct Related to the ABCs of Personality Inventories
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Authors
Rogers, Margaret E.
Issue Date
2011
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
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Abstract
Personality psychology seeks to predict, explain, and describe individual variations in behavior.
Personality is described as consistent and coherent patterns across time and space of affect,
behavior, cognition and desire (Revelle, 2008). Although previously, inventories have only
assessed the influence of affect, behavior, and cognition (Pytlik Zillig et al., 2007}, this study
includes desire as an important aspect of these dynamic constructs that shape personality. The
inclusion of desire in the ABC theory of personality is necessary to understand the inconstancies
and individual variance in behavior on both the everyday level and the longitudinal level. This
study assumes the argument that affect, behavior, cognition, and desire are the dynamic
components of personality that interact with the more stable traits or attributes to form an
individual's personality and affect their behavior. Many inventories have been created to assess
personality. The Five-Factor Model, including the five traits of extraversion, agreeableness,
openness, neuroticism, and contentiousness (Tupes & Christal, 1961 ), was used as the model for
this study. This study assessed whether the current inventories include equal representations of
all four of these domains. Based on the work of Pytlik Zillig, et al., participants were asked to
decide which portion of each item was reflected by each affect, behavior, cognition, and desire.
Ratings were completed by undergraduate students at Northwestern University, recruited to the
study through their introductory psychology class. Items were taken from the International
Personality Inventory Pool (Goldberg, 1992), which draws from popular personality inventories~
Results indicated that of the 599 items taken from four popular personality inventories, only a
small fraction of these examine the desire or motivation component of personality traits.
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v, 31 p.
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