Personality in Daily Life

Assigned Reading:  Chapter 12.  Social tasks and personality.  Skip pages 422-426 (Education) and pages 428-429 (Cognitive complexity).

Study Questions:
1.  List five characteristics of someone high in the Protestant Work Ethic.  How is this person different from a workaholic?  From a work enthusiast?  Describe a job a person high in the Protestant Work Ethic would enjoy and do well at.  (Make sure your job description matches the characteristics you have listed for the Protestant ethic).
2.  Briefly review the three predictors of divorce found by Jockin et al's (1996) study of personality and divorce.  For each of these, explain why it would be predictive of divorce.  Propose one other personality factor that you think might be related to divorce and explain why you have selected this factor.
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A.  Choice of career and behavior in the workplace
    1.  Motivation relates to career choice.
    2.  Vocational counseling scales (Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory or Holland's Vocational Preference Inventory) assume that one should choose a job where others already doing that job share ones personality characteristics.
    3.  Protestant Work Ethic.  Belief in the value of hard work. Related to, but different than achievement motivation.  Contrast this with being a workaholic or work enthusiast.
    4.  Feelings about work highly related to overall life satisfaction.
    5.  Many types of work stress.  An important one is burnout, which results in decreased work motivation, decreased feelings of accomplishment, and lack of respect for and dehuminization of clients.

B.  Personality and interpersonal relations
    1.  Different syles of loving--both a personality measure and a relationship variable.  Eros, mania, storge, agape, ludus, and pragma.
    2.  Attachment theory predicts secure, anxious/ambivalent or avoidant love in adults.
    3.  Marital compatibility dependent on personality of individuals and matching of personality in the couple.  Similarity on intuition-sensation, but not introversion-extraversion, correlated with stability.
    4.  Neuroticism predictive of divorce.  [Shows up in twin studies, so may have biological basis].
    5.  Jockin et al. (1996) study did find that both extraversion nd neuroticism correlated with divorce, while impulse control negatively correlated with divorce.
    6.  Parenting styles related to personality:  Permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative parenting styles.