Developing "personality" taxonomies: Metatheoretical and methodological rationales underlying selection approaches, methods of data generation and reduction principles

Taxonomic "personality" models are widely used in research and applied fields. This article applies the Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals (TPS-Paradigm) to scrutinise the three methodological steps that are required for developing comprehensive “personality” taxonomies: 1) the approaches used to select the phenomena and events to be studied, 2) the methods used to generate data about the selected phenomena and events and 3) the reduction principles used to extract the “most important” individual-specific variations for constructing “personality” taxonomies. Analyses of some currently popular taxonomies reveal frequent mismatches between the researchers’ explicit and implicit metatheories about “personality” and the abilities of previous methodologies to capture the particular kinds of phenomena toward which they are targeted. Serious deficiencies that preclude scientific quantifications are identified in standardised questionnaires, psychology’s established standard method of investigation. These mismatches and deficiencies derive from the lack of an explicit formulation and critical reflection on the philosophical and metatheoretical assumptions being made by scientists and from the established practice of radically matching the methodological tools to researchers’ preconceived ideas and to pre-existing statistical theories rather than to the particular phenomena and individuals under study. These findings raise serious doubts about the ability of previous taxonomies to appropriately and comprehensively reflect the phenomena towards which they are targeted and the structures of individual-specificity occurring in them. The article elaborates and illustrates with empirical examples methodological principles that allow researchers to appropriately meet the metatheoretical requirements and that are suitable for comprehensively exploring individuals’ “personality”

Exploring the binding pocket for pyridopyrimidine ligands at the CCK1 receptor by molecular docking.

International audiencePyridopyrimidine-based analogues are among the most highly potent and selective antagonists of cholecystokinin receptor subtype-1 (CCK1R) described to date. To better understand the structural and chemical features responsible for the recognition mechanism, and to explore the binding pocket of these compounds, we performed automated molecular docking using GOLD2.2 software on some derivatives with structural diversity, and propose a putative binding conformation for each compound. The docking protocol was guided by the key role of the Asn333 residue, as revealed by site directed mutagenesis studies. The results suggest two putative binding modes located in the same pocket. Both are characterized by interaction with the main residues revealed by experiment, Asn333 and Arg336, and differ in the spatial position of the Boc-Trp moiety of these compounds. Hydrophobic contacts with residues Thr117, Phe107, Ile352 and Ile329 are also in agreement with experimental data. Despite the poor correlation obtained between the estimated binding energies and the experimental activity, the proposed models allow us to suggest a plausible explanation of the observed binding data in accordance with chemical characteristics of the compounds, and also to explain the observed diastereoselectivity of this family of antagonists towards CCK1R. The most reasonable selected binding conformations could be the starting point for future studies