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Objective: We asked authors of this Special Issue to answer the following four questions: (1) Is there evidence that personality and psychopathology can be integrated? (2) Is integration important? (3) Can they be distinguished? and (4) How can the difference be measured? Method: We review each of the papers and place the special issue in a historical context. Results: Authors uniformly agreed that personality and psychopathology can be integrated within a common structure and that this is important. The third and fourth questions were more challenging. Though authors generally agreed that there is a distinction between the person and their mental health problems, articulations of that distinction were fuzzy and it is clear that current methods cannot adequately delineate these domains. Conclusions: We summarize the issue by offering five directions for future research: (1) develop measurement tools that distinguish between the person, the context, and their transaction, (2) measure behavior and context at multiple timescales, (3) distinguish behavior and dysfunction in measurement, (4) use multimethod data to tap different levels of behavior, and (5) examine person‐specific processes. Each of these directions comes with challenges, but the payoff of resolving them will be a more principled, evidence‐based, and clinically useful model for the distinction between personality and psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in knowledge about personality will be fostered by improved research methods, but corresponding improvements in our theories will be needed also, better methods will not be enough. Theory itself can have methodological functions, and some methods provide strong impetus toward greater theoretical clarity and rigor. Distinctions between methodological developments in research design, measurement, and analysis need to be maintained, and we badly need more research directed specifically toward improving methodologies. Some papers in this volume point quite clearly to the need for all aspects of our research to be better rationalized and deliberate, casual and opportunistic decisions about how to carry out research simply will not do. These papers indicate, for example, that the trait vs situation controversy would likely never have occurred had the issues been addressed with greater methodological, and logical, rigor. This volume is not complete in its coverage of the potentially useful methods for personality research, and attention should ultimately be devoted to such methods as life histories and case studies and cross-cultural comparisons. In general, however, the papers in this volume offer an opportunity to raise the level of research in personality to a new plane of sophistication and revealingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might our expanding knowledge of gender contribute to a deeper understanding of personality? This paper offers a personological perspective for considering the import of contemporary work, and focuses on the ten substantive papers included in this issue of the Journal of Personality. An agenda for our future inquiry is proposed that includes (a) revising our ideology of science in a postpositivist era, (b) recognizing the complexity of personality as a domain distinguished from "human being theory," (c) developing richer and more comprehensive personality theory, and (d) studying persons over time. The papers reported in this issue contribute in various ways to the enrichment of personological understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on case studies surrounding the mental health of King George III of Great Britain. Simonton's paper, however, is based on a reexamination of psychological factors. His contribution to further understanding is to test empirically the association between stress and health. The literature on King George is extensive and even though the greater part of it derives specifically from interest in his malady, there is also historical record and later study of the individual. It is a fallacy, however, to assert that because porphyria is a biochemical disorder, it is divorced from psychological factors and that stressors as well as other exogenous factors are therefore irrelevant. At the conclusion of his paper, Simonton states that investigations have thus far found only modest relations between life events and illness. Indeed, the case of King George should entertain a hypothesis integrating what we know about personality and its relations with physical and mental factors. Furthermore, the question should be constructed in such a way as to engender additional differentiated hypotheses--but the process of integration should not stop with the attempt to understand the king's malady.

A fundamental aspect of Hans Eysenck's research was his emphasis upon using all the tools available to the researcher to study personality. This included correlational, experimental, physiological, and genetic approaches. Fifty years after Cronbach's call for the reunification of the two disciplines of psychology ( Cronbach, 1957 ) and 40 years after Eysenck's plea for experimental approaches to personality research ( H. J. Eysenck, 1966 ), what is the status of the unification? Should personality researchers use experimental techniques? Do experimental techniques allow us to tease out causality, and are we communicating the advantages of combining experimental with multivariate correlational techniques? We review the progress made since Cronbach's and Eysenck's original papers and suggest that although it is still uncommon to find experimental studies of personality, psychology would benefit from the joint use of correlational and experimental approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions of the idiographic-nomothetic debate were initially reviewed in this paper. Three important issues stemming from this debate were then expounded within the context of Personal Construct Theory and evaluated in an empirical study. Participants were required to rate themselves and people they knew on 25 marker items for the Big Five personality traits and on 12 of their own unique personal constructs. The ratings were analyzed using a number of novel statistical methods, including a simple type of confirmatory factor analysis and an informative graphing procedure. Results indicated that at least half of the statistical information derived from the idiographic, personal construct ratings was unique when compared to ratings on the nomothetic Big Five items. The implications of these methods and results for person-centered and trait conceptualizations of personality were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reports an experiment in which subjects received fictitious intelligence test feedback that was either negatively or positively discrepant with their self-evaluation. They were then given an opportunity to choose among several articles containing information that either derogated intelligence tests (test-disparaging information) or argued for their validity (test-supporting information). The main finding of this study consists of an interaction between the personality factor anxiety and the feedback variable: High-anxiety subjects prefer test-disparaging information significantly more in the negative feedback condition than in the positive feedback condition, whereas low-anxiety subjects show no difference in preference for test-related information as a function of the feedback condition. These results are in line with past theoretical reasoning and experimental findings showing that high-anxiety subjects feel more threatened by negative self-relevant feedback than do low-anxiety subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first provides a brief overview of some of the empirical and conceptual work in personality following Mischel's (1968) critique Strengths and weaknesses of traditional personality research designs including laboratory experiments, experimental personality designs, and preexperimental correlational studies are presented. Some more recent approaches to designing laboratory research that attempt to address issues of external validity and approaches to designing field investigations that attempt to address issues of internal validity are discussed Issues associated with the measurement of constructs, the broadening of measurement methods, and newer data analytic techniques are noted. Finally, a brief orientation to the other papers in the special issue is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sex differences in proneness to depression and paranoia are seen as reflecting caricatures of women's and men's stereotypical role in a male-dominated, exploitative society. Following its major hypothesis that mental illness arises out of failures in the sociability that is inherent in our species, the paper discusses some of the evidence for sex differences in sociability, and some evidence from studies of sex differences in field dependence which, taken together, suggest a sex difference in proneness to shame and guilt. This sex difference in `superego" style is a mediating factor in proneness to depression and paranoia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]