A circumplex model of affect

The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life is the essence of humanness. Human agency is characterized by a number of core features that operate through phenomenal and functional consciousness. These include the temporal extension of agency through intentionality and forethought, self-regulation by self-reactive influence, and self-reflectiveness about one's capabilities, quality of functioning, and the meaning and purpose of one's life pursuits. Personal agency operates within a broad network of sociostructural influences. In these agentic transactions, people are producers as well as products of social systems. Social cognitive theory distinguishes among three modes of agency: direct personal agency, proxy agency that relies on others to act on one's behest to secure desired outcomes, and collective agency exercised through socially coordinative and interdependent effort. Growing transnational embeddedness and interdependence are placing a premium on collective efficacy to exercise control over personal destinies and national life.

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Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective

In this article, the author describes a new theoretical perspective on positive emotions and situates this new perspective within the emerging field of positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory posits that experiences of positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, which in turn serves to build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. Preliminary empirical evidence supporting the broaden-and-build theory is reviewed, and open empirical questions that remain to be tested are identified. The theory and findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.

http://www.elaborer.org/cours/A13/lectures/Fredrickson2001.pdf

The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

This chapter suggests that delinquency conceals two distinct categories of individuals, each with a unique natural history and etiology: A small group engages in antisocial behavior of one sort or another at every life stage, whereas a larger group is antisocial only during adolescence. According to the theory of life-course-persistent antisocial behavior, children's neuropsychological problems interact cumulatively with their criminogenic environments across development, culminating m a pathological personality. According to the theory of adolescence-limited antisocial behavior, a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive. There are marked individual differences in the stability of antisocial behavior. The chapter reviews the mysterious relationship between age and antisocial behavior. Some youths who refrain from antisocial behavior may, for some reason, not sense the maturity gap and therefore lack the hypothesized motivation for experimenting with crime.

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Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy.

Past work has documented and described major patterns of adaptive and maladaptive behavior: the mastery-oriented and the helpless patterns. In this article, we present a research-based model that accounts for these patterns in terms of underlying psychological processes. The model specifies how individuals' implicit theories orient them toward particular goals and how these goals set up the different patterns. Indeed, we show how each feature (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) of the adaptive and maladaptive patterns can be seen to follow directly from different goals. We then examine the generality of the model and use it to illuminate phenomena in a wide variety of domains. Finally, we place the model in its broadest context and examine its implications for our understanding of motivational and personality processes. The task for investigators of motivation and personality is to identify major patterns of behavior and link them to underlying psychological processes. In this article we (a) describe a research-based model that accounts for major patterns of behavior, (b) examine the generality of this model—its utility for understanding domains beyond the ones in which it was originally developed, and (c) explore the broader implications of the model for motivational and personality processes.

/pdf/a-social-cognitive-approach-to-motivation-and-personality-4r18vjg2jg.pdf

A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality

For what now approaches 30 years, we have been thinking about and 
investigating the implications of two personality parameters we have chosen 
to call ego-control and ego-resiliency. We began while graduate students at 
Stanford, many eras ago. Reasoning from the constructs as we then 
understood them, we sought to evaluate their behavioral relevance in a wide 
range of experim ental situations and psychological tests-response 
extinction in a partial reinforcement context, norm establishment while 
experiencing movement in an autokinetic situation, performance in the 
Gottschaldt Embedded Figures Test, reactions to authority, divergent 
thinking, level of aspiration, reactions to stress, psychological fatigue or 
sa tia tio n , percep tual s tan d ard s o f sim ilarity , e thnocen trism —all 
administered to the same group of college students. Our dissertation results 
(J. Block, 1950; J. H. Block, 1951; J. Block& J. H. Block, 1951; J. H. B lock* 
J. Block, 1952) were encouraging: In diverse areas of psychology-learning, 
perception, interpersonal behaviors, attitudes, problem solving-the 
observed individual differences (often considered then to be no more than 
“nuisance variance”) were frequently, reliably, and lawfully related to the 
personality constructs we had formulated. Especially powerful as a predictor 
was a composite variable generated by summing the behaviors of an 
individual over a variety of phenotypically diverse but conceptually related 
experimental situations (J. Block, 1950, Chapter 10).

The Role of Ego-Control and Ego-Resiliency in the Organization of Behavior

The 5-factor approach (FFA) to personality description has been represented as a comprehensive and compelling rubric for assessment. In this article, various misgivings about the FFA are delineated. The algorithmic method of factor analysis may not provide dimensions that are incisive. The "discovery" of the five factors may be influenced by unrecognized constraints on the variable sets analyzed. Lexical analyses are based on questionable conceptual and methodological assumptions, and have achieved uncertain results. The questionnaire version of the FFA has not demonstrated the special merits and sufficiencies of the five factors settled upon. Serious uncertainties have arisen in regard to the claimed 5-factor structure and the substantive meanings of the factors. Some implications of these problems are drawn.

A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description.

The constructs of intelligence and ego-resiliency are discussed. The personality implications of "pure intelligence" and "pure ego-resilience" were identified. Intelligence (IQ) was indexed by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised and ego-resiliency by an inventory scale. Residual scores measuring "pure intelligence" and "pure ego-resilience" were correlated with the items of the observer-based California Q-sort, used to describe participants. Persons relatively high on ego-resilience tend to be more competent and comfortable in the "fuzzier" interpersonal world; persons defined primary by raw IQ tend to be effective in the "clearer" world of structured work but tend also to be uneasy with affect and less able to realize satisfying human connections. Gender differences exist in the relations of ego-resilience and intelligence and in their adaptive relevance.

IQ and ego-resiliency: conceptual and empirical connections and separateness.

The relation between psychological characteristics and drug use was investigated in subjects studied longitudinally, from preschool through age 18. Adolescents who had engaged in some drug experimentation (primarily with marijuana) were the best-adjusted in the sample. Adolescents who used drugs frequently were maladjusted, showing a distinct personality syndrome marked by interpersonal alienation, poor impulse control, and manifest emotional distress. Adolescents who, by age 18, had never experimented with any drug were relatively anxious, emotionally constricted, and lacking in social skills. Psychological differences between frequent drug users, experimenters, and abstainers could be traced to the earliest years of childhood and related to the quality of parenting received. The findings indicate that (a) problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment, and (b) the meaning of drug use can be understood only in the context of an individual's personality structure and developmental history. It is suggested that current efforts at drug prevention are misguided to the extent that they focus on symptoms, rather than on the psychological syndrome underlying drug abuse.

Adolescent drug use and psychological health: A longitudinal inquiry.

Just about a dozen years ago William Stephenson, then teaching in the University of Chicago, introduced American psychology to his Q-technique. As doctorate researches and publications appeared out of various teaching centers, and especially following publication of Stephenson's book, the turbulence of controversy filled the air. The high and low pressures of warm enthusiasms and cold, or acerb, criticisms were in collision. The atmosphere has now quieted, and the time is appropriate for a calm exposition and evaluation of the Q-technique. This is what the book under review is achieving. Within a fairly small volume, as such expositions go, Block provides a helpful orientation to this method. It undertakes, he states, to devise a language instrument for describing a personality in psychodynamic terms so that it can be subjected to quantitative comparisons and analysis. The major portion of the book describes the theoretical foundations for Q-technique, surveys the

/pdf/the-q-sort-method-in-personality-assessment-and-psychiatric-2ocdabaw3h.pdf

Jack Block

Papers

The Role of Ego-Control and Ego-Resiliency in the Organization of Behavior

A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description.

IQ and ego-resiliency: conceptual and empirical connections and separateness.

Adolescent drug use and psychological health: A longitudinal inquiry.

The Q-sort method in personality assessment and psychiatric research