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”

Drawing firmer conclusions: autistic children show no evidence of a local processing bias in a controlled copying task

Drawing tasks are frequently used to test competing theories of visuospatial skills in autism. Yet, methodological differences between studies have led to inconsistent findings. To distinguish between accounts based on local bias or global deficit, we present a simple task that has previously revealed dissociable local/global impairments in neuropsychological patients. Autistic and typical children copied corner elements, arranged in a square configuration. Grouping cues were manipulated to test whether global properties affected the accuracy of reproduction. All children were similarly affected by these manipulations. There was no group difference in the reproduction of local elements, although global accuracy was negatively related to better local processing for autistic children. These data speak against influential theories of visuospatial differences in autism

Conceiving “personality”: Psychologist’s challenges and basic fundamentals of the Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals

Scientists exploring individuals, as such scientists are individuals themselves and thus not independent from their objects of research, encounter profound challenges; in particular, high risks for anthropo-, ethno- and ego-centric biases and various fallacies in reasoning. The Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals (TPS-Paradigm) aims to tackle these challenges by exploring and making explicit the philosophical presuppositions that are being made and the metatheories and methodologies that are used in the field. This article introduces basic fundamentals of the TPS-Paradigm including the epistemological principle of complementarity and metatheoretical concepts for exploring individuals as living organisms. Centrally, the TPS-Paradigm considers three metatheoretical properties (spatial location in relation to individuals’ bodies, temporal extension, and physicality versus “non-physicality”) that can be conceived in different forms for various kinds of phenomena explored in individuals (morphology, physiology, behaviour, the psyche, semiotic representations, artificially modified outer appearances and contexts). These properties, as they determine the phenomena’s accessibility in everyday life and research, are used to elaborate philosophy-of-science foundations and to derive general methodological implications for the elementary problem of phenomenon-methodology matching and for scientific quantification of the various kinds of phenomena studied. On the basis of these foundations, the article explores the metatheories and methodologies that are used or needed to empirically study each given kind of phenomenon in individuals in general. Building on these general implications, the article derives special implications for exploring individuals’ “personality”, which the TPS-Paradigm conceives of as individual-specificity in all of the various kinds of phenomena studied in individuals

Personality psychology: Lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts reveal only half of the story—Why it is time for a paradigm shift

This article develops a comprehensive philosophy-of-science for personality psychology that goes far beyond the scope of the lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts that currently prevail. One of the field’s most important guiding scientific assumptions, the lexical hypothesis, is analysed from meta-theoretical viewpoints to reveal that it explicitly describes two sets of phenomena that must be clearly differentiated: 1) lexical repertoires and the representations that they encode and 2) the kinds of phenomena that are represented. Thus far, personality psychologists largely explored only the former, but have seriously neglected studying the latter. Meta-theoretical analyses of these different kinds of phenomena and their distinct natures, commonalities, differences, and interrelations reveal that personality psychology’s focus on lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts entails a) erroneous meta-theoretical assumptions about what the phenomena being studied actually are, and thus how they can be analysed and interpreted, b) that contemporary personality psychology is largely based on everyday psychological knowledge, and c) a fundamental circularity in the scientific explanations used in trait psychology. These findings seriously challenge the widespread assumptions about the causal and universal status of the phenomena described by prominent personality models. The current state of knowledge about the lexical hypothesis is reviewed, and implications for personality psychology are discussed. Ten desiderata for future research are outlined to overcome the current paradigmatic fixations that are substantially hampering intellectual innovation and progress in the field

Drawing and memory

Grafiche sono le elaborazioni corporee o mentali che l’individuo produce tramite le sue funzioni percettive, cognitive ed esecutive. Appartiene a questo ambito lo studio dei comportamenti impliciti, ossia di quei comportamenti costituiti dai processi interni all’individuo, utili al fine di comprende-re “l’interpretazione” che questi fa dell’ambiente come variabile indipendente. Le modalità concorrenti alla formulazione di questo tipo di “interpretazione”, legata all’ambito della percezione, si sostanziano da una parte nei comportamenti e dall’altra nella narrazione verbale o scritta sia nell’accezione letterale che grafica. Questo intervento è volto ad illustrare l’interesse in particolare verso gli aspetti legati alla componente narrativa nella sua accezione grafica, contestualizzandone l’ambito alle specificità proprie del disegno mediato dalla memoria. Il contributo verte sulla prima valutazione degli esiti, derivanti da due decenni di prove grafiche proposte sul tema disegno e memoria, effettuati il primo giorno di corso da studenti del primo e del secondo anno delle Facoltà di Architettura e Ingegneria. È il caso di precisare che non si esporranno i risultati definitivi dell’analisi, ma una serie di prime considerazioni, circostanziate anche in relazione al livello di esperienza acquisita dagli studenti dopo un anno accademico.Graphics are physical or mental images that individuals produce through their perceptual, cognitive, and executive functions. Pertaining to this is the study of implicit behaviors, that is, behaviors consisting of an individual’s interior processes, which are useful for understanding the way they “interpret” the environment as independent variables. The concurrent means of formulating this type of “interpretation”, which is tied to the area of perception, are found in both the behavior and literal and graphical verbal or written narration. This contribution illustrates an interest in aspects tied, in particular, to the narrative component in its graphical acceptance, contextualizing the area to the specifics of drawing mediated by memory. It focuses on an initial evaluation of the results deriving from two decades of graphical tests on the theme of drawing and memory, made on the first day of class by students in the first and second years in the School of Architecture and Engineering. It should be noted that rather than presenting the definitive results of the analysis, a series of initial considerations are detailed in relation to the level of experience acquired by the students after an academic year