Europe’s Journal of Psychology (PsychOpen)
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“The Episodic Superhero and the Purpose of Winning”—Psychobiographer Dan McAdams on the Life and Personality of Donald Trump
No full textDan P. McAdams is one of the well-known United States (US) contemporary psychobiographers and personality psychologists. Professor in psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and author of the recently published book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams has previously published psychological accounts of the lives of extraordinary political figures such as Barack Obama and George W. Bush. He specializes in life story research
The Episodic Man: How a Psychological Biography of Donald J. Trump Casts New Light on Empirical Research Into Narrative Identity
No full textPeople make meaning through life narrative. The central thesis of my book-length psychological biography of Donald Trump is that the 45th president of the United States defied this general meaning-making tendency and epitomized instead the episodic man. Like no other president in modern history, Trump seems to be nearly devoid of a narrative identity, which is an internalized and evolving story of the self that reconstructs the personal past and imagines the future in order to provide life with temporal continuity and meaning. Instead, Trump has always lived in the emotionally vivid moment (episode), fighting to win each moment, moment by discrete moment. Seeing him through the lens of the episodic man helps to explain many puzzling features of Donald Trump’s personality, from his charismatic effect on millions of Americans to his penchant for lying and malice. Importantly, the analysis of Trump’s episodic nature informs the scientific study of narrative identity and meaning making more generally, suggesting that people vary not only with respect to the kinds of stories they create for their lives but also with respect to the extent to which they construe life in narrative terms. Therefore, the analysis of Trump illustrates the potentially reciprocal relationship between the idiographic case and the nomothetic effort to develop and evaluate more general scientific hypotheses
A Journey Towards Meaning: An Existential Psychobiography of Maya Angelou
No full textThis psychobiography focuses on meaning making in the early life and young adulthood of acclaimed African American author Maya Angelou (1928-2014) through the lens of Frankl’s existential psychology with a specific focus on the tri-dimensional nature of human beings and the fundamental triad. The primary data source was Angelou’s own published autobiographies, which contain an in-depth narrative of her early life and young adulthood. Data was extracted, organised and analysed according to established qualitative research methods as well as through the identification of psychological saliences. The search for meaning within Angelou’s own narrative of her life was clearly apparent in the thematic analysis. Angelou’s narrative of her journey through the physical (childhood and adolescence), psychological (travelling and searching years) and spiritual (sensemaking years) dimensions was core to her meaning making. The three tiers of the fundamental triad (awareness of meaning, will to meaning, freedom of will) were present in various aspects of Angelou’s existential journey, manifesting as a focus on choice, responsibility, purpose, and acceptance. This study provides a more in-depth understanding of meaning making processes in the lives of extraordinary individuals, as well as contributing to the development of the research method of psychobiography, with a specific focus on meaning making
Learning to Wait and Be Altruistic: Testing A Conversational Training in Economic Education for Primary School Children
No full textIndividual economic competence is important but increasingly challenging to manage due to the growing complexity of the nature of economic decisions people must make and the substantial impacts of some of these decisions on their lives. Decision-making ability develops from childhood and is closely related to specific economic components and prosocial behaviour such as fairness, altruism, and delay of gratification. However, while there are financial-education programs for children and young people focusing on financial products, few studies have examined training for the psychological abilities underlying economic decision-making. To promote those psychological skills that contribute to a more socially effective decision-making, we designed and tested a conversational-based training program for primary school children using reflective thinking. A total of 110 (male = 47, female = 63) children aged 8 to 10 years (Mean age = 9.71 years) from two schools in Northern Italy participated in the study with 55 children in a training group and 55 in a control group. All participated in pre-tests measuring their socio-economic background and economics-related skills and abilities. The training group were told stories relaying values of fairness, altruism, and delayed gratification. Both groups participated in task-based post-tests relating to fairness, altruism, and delayed gratification. Results revealed that children in the training group showed significant improvement at the post-test in altruistic and investment behaviour, showing the training efficacy, suggesting that similar programs could be implemented in primary schools as foundational teaching of economics and fiscal responsibility
A Pilot Study of Younger Sibling Adaptation: Contributions of Individual Variables, Daily Stress, Interparental Conflict and Older Sibling’s Variables
No full textOlder siblings are powerful socialization agents, playing a significant role in the sociocognitive, social, and emotional development of their younger siblings. However, there are few clues about the variables that explain younger sibling’s adaptation. The objective of this pilot study was to identify the determinants of younger siblings' adaptation and to analyze the role played by personal, sibling, family and older siblings’ variables using 50 dyads of siblings aged between 7 and 18 years. The variables considered were the sibling relationships and the maladaptation of older siblings, and individual (sex, number of siblings, extroversion, and agreeableness) and contextual variables (interparental conflict, daily stress) were controlled. Hierarchical multiple regressions provided evidence in favor of the model that analyzed the younger siblings' maladaptation to school, showing positive associations both with the older siblings' level of school maladaptation and with sibling conflict. In addition, the study highlighted the relevance of the trait of agreeableness and of family stress in the adaptation of younger siblings
Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Adapted and Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation
No full textEmotion regulation is a human adaptation process with important implications for daily life. Two specific emotion regulation strategies were the principle areas of study: reappraisal (cognitive change in which individuals adapt their state of mind about a given situation) and expressive suppression (response modulation in which individuals change their emotional response after its initiation). The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), that captures individual tendencies to reappraise and to suppress the expression of emotions, was also developed. Response modulation strategy was analyzed by considering two distinct processes: expressive suppression (down-regulation) and expressive enhancement (up-regulation). This latter modulation process has been less frequently studied by researchers. The present study investigates the psychometrical properties, individual differences and correlates of a French adapted version of the ERQ, which comprises reappraisal and the two response modulation tendencies – expressive suppression and expressive enhancement. Based on the initial ERQ, new items were created and added to the scale. The three-factor structure of the ERQ adapted was confirmed. As expected, emotion regulation is linked to individual differences: the tendency to reappraise has a positive low correlation with age; and men are significantly more disposed to suppress and to enhance than women. Finally, the tendency to suppress the expression of emotions is negatively correlated with extraversion, and the disposition to enhance the expression of emotions is negatively correlated with conscientiousness
Meaning-Making Narratives Within a Puzzle of Parts: A Psychobiographical Sketch of Sylvia Plath
No full textThis study aimed to unveil Sylvia Plath’s (1932–1963) meaning-making narratives, within her life’s puzzle of parts, by utilising the Internal Family System (IFS) model of Schwartz. Plath was purposively selected as subject since she has been proclaimed as one of the most renowned and influential voices in 20th century Anglo-American culture and literature. Although she only published one collection of poems, “The Collosus”, and one novel, “The Bell Jar”, in her lifetime, the plethora of short stories, poems, journal entries and letters which were published after her suicide secured her status as a powerful and creative voice. Methodological strategies utilised to sort and integrate the wealth of publically-available socio-historical data on Plath included the analysis of psychobiographical indicators of salience according to the model of Irving Alexander and the data analysis matrix procedure of Robert Yin. Findings suggest that each stage of Plath’s life was characterised by “parts-led” functioning as a result of transferred burdens, imperfect care-taking, existential anxiety and traumatic emotional experiences. This resulted in polarisation of her different parts, which blocked the healing energy of her Self and aggravated feelings of worthlessness, in spite of her creative meaning-making narratives. Since Sylvia used her creative genius to address socio-historical issues and injustices, her life lends itself to meaning-making narratives, especially those that empower and inspire future generations of previously disempowered groups
The Upsides and Downsides of High Self-Control: Evidence for Effects of Similarity and Situation Dependency
No full textHigh trait self-control is generally depicted as favorable. We investigated whether this holds for social perception. Using vignettes, we tested whether a person with high self-control is 1) preferred as a partner for all or only certain social situations, 2) perceived as less likeable than a person with low self-control, 3) liked more if the person is female and the behavior thus fits the sex-stereotype, and 4) perceived differently from a person with low self-control with respect to a wide range of adjectives used to describe personality. Competing theories are presented for each area. Results indicate that although high self-control is associated with a wide range of socially desirable traits, choice of partners 1) depends on the type of situation in which the interaction will occur, 2) depends on the similarity between the respondent and the partner, 3) does not depend on a stereotype match, and 4) does not depend or depends only to a small degree on the partner's high self-control. The perception of individuals with high self-control is thus variable and situationally contingent, and more than a single theory is needed to explain it
The Effects of Acute Exercise on Short- and Long-Term Memory: Considerations for the Timing of Exercise and Phases of Memory
No full textThe specific questions addressed from this research include: (1) Does high-intensity acute exercise improve memory?, (2) If so, do the mechanisms occur via encoding, consolidation, or retrieval? and (3) If acute exercise occurs in multiple phases of memory (e.g., before encoding and during consolidation), does this have an additive effect on memory? Three experimental, within-subject, counterbalanced studies were conducted among young adults. High-intensity exercise involved a 20-minutes bout of exercise at 75% of heart rate reserve. Memory was evaluated from a word-list task, including multiple evaluations out to 24-hours post-encoding. The timing of the exercise and memory assessments were carefully positioned to evaluate whether any improvements in memory were driven by mechanisms related to encoding, consolidation, and/or retrieval. We demonstrated that high-intensity acute exercise enhanced memory. This effect was robust (repeatable) and occurred through encoding, consolidation and retrieval-based mechanisms. Further, incorporating acute exercise into multiple phases of memory additively enhanced memory function
Person- and Situation-Specific Factors in Discounting Science via Scientific Impotence Excuses
No full textMunro (2010, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00588.x) found that individuals, when confronted with belief-disconfirming scientific evidence, resist this information by concluding that the topic at hand is not amenable to scientific investigation—a scientific impotence excuse. We strived to replicate this finding and to extend this work by analyzing other factors that might lead to scientific impotence excuses. As a person-specific factor, we analyzed the role of epistemic beliefs, and as a situational factor, we focused on the contradictoriness of the evidence at hand. Three sets of hypotheses were preregistered. In an experimental 2 × 3 online study drawing on a general population sample of N = 901 participants, we first assessed our participants’ prior beliefs on the effects of acupuncture versus massaging (pro acupuncture vs. no opinion). One experimental group then read fictitious empirical evidence claiming superiority of acupuncture, another group read evidence speaking against acupuncture, and a third group read conflicting evidence (i.e., a mix of pro- and contra-findings). Scientific impotence excuses were measured by a newly developed questionnaire. Our first hypothesis, which suggested that participants believing in the superiority of acupuncture would make stronger scientific impotence excuses when confronted with belief-disconfirming findings, was confirmed. A second hypothesis suggested that scientific impotence excuses would be stronger when individuals were confronted with evidence exhibiting a “nature” that contradicts their topic-specific epistemic beliefs. This hypothesis was partially supported. A third hypothesis suggested that individuals confronted with conflicting evidence would make stronger scientific impotence excuses, and this was again confirmed. Implications for theory and practice are discussed