Personality has been found to be more strongly associated with subjective well-being in many instances than are life circumstances. In part, this might be due to the fact that temperament and other individual differences can influence people’s feelings and evaluations of their lives, but also because people’s emotions are an inherent part of personality. This chapter discusses the heritability of “happiness,” that portion of subjective well-being that is due to genetic differences between individuals. The stability of subjective well-being over time is substantial, and this is likely due in part to the stability of personality. Specific personality traits are related to various types of well-being. For example, extroversion appears to be more strongly related to positive emotions, while neuroticism is more related to negative feelings. Although personality is an important correlate of subjective well-being, situations and life circumstances can in some cases have a considerable influence as well. Furthermore, personality can to some degree change over time, and with it, levels of subjective well-being can change.

Personality and Subjective Well-Being

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

Understanding subjective well-being (SWB) has historically been a core human endeavor and presently spans fields from management to mental health. Previous meta-analyses have indicated that personality traits are one of the best predictors. Still, these past results indicate only a moderate relationship, weaker than suggested by several lines of reasoning. This may be because of commensurability, where researchers have grouped together substantively disparate measures in their analyses. In this article, the authors review and address this problem directly, focusing on individual measures of personality (e.g., the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Personality Inventory; P. T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, 1992) and categories of SWB (e.g., life satisfaction). In addition, the authors take a multivariate approach, assessing how much variance personality traits account for individually as well as together. Results indicate that different personality and SWB scales can be substantively different and that the relationship between the two is typically much larger (e.g., 4 times) than previous meta-analyses have indicated. Total SWB variance accounted for by personality can reach as high as 39% or 63% disattenuated. These results also speak to meta-analyses in general and the need to account for scale differences once a sufficient research base has been generated.

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Refining the relationship between personality and subjective well-being.

Personality may directly facilitate or constrain coping, but relations of personality to coping have been inconsistent across studies, suggesting a need for greater attention to methods and samples. This meta-analysis tested moderators of relations between Big Five personality traits and coping using 2,653 effect sizes drawn from 165 samples and 33,094 participants. Personality was weakly related to broad coping (e.g., Engagement or Disengagement), but all 5 traits predicted specific strategies. Extraversion and Conscientiousness predicted more problem-solving and cognitive restructuring, Neuroticism less. Neuroticism predicted problematic strategies like wishful thinking, withdrawal, and emotion-focused coping but, like Extraversion, also predicted support seeking. Personality more strongly predicted coping in young samples, stressed samples, and samples reporting dispositional rather than situation-specific coping. Daily versus retrospective coping reports and self-selected versus researcher-selected stressors also moderated relations between personality and coping. Cross-cultural differences were present, and ethnically diverse samples showed more protective effects of personality. Richer understanding of the role of personality in the coping process requires assessment of personality facets and specific coping strategies, use of laboratory and daily report studies, and multivariate analyses.

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Relations between personality and coping: a meta-analysis.

We quantitatively integrated 169 samples (N= 35,265 employees) that have been used to investigate the relationships of the following 7 work-related stressors with job performance: role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, job insecurity, work–family conflict, environmental uncertainty, and situational constraints. Overall, we obtained a negative mean correlation between each job performance measure and each stressor included in our analyses. As hypothesized, role ambiguity and situational constraints were most strongly negatively related to performance, relative to the other work-related stressors. Analysis of moderators revealed that (a) the negative correlation of role overload and performance was higher among managers relative to nonmanagers; (b) publication year moderated the relation of role ambiguity and role overload with performance, although in opposite directions; (c) the correlations obtained for published versus unpublished studies were not significantly different; and (d) using the Rizzo et al. scale of role ambiguity and role conflict decreased the magnitude of the correlations of these stressors with performance, relative to other scales. Theoretical contributions, future research directions, and practical implications are discussed.

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A meta-analysis of work demand stressors and job performance: examining main and moderating effects

This article presents the results of three studies using the Aston Driving Simulator (ADS). The first studies sex and age differences in driving performance when travelling along an open road "task free" from traffic. The second investigates the age and sex differences in driving performance when following a lead vehicle. The third study tests the differences in a) risk homeostasis and b) the utility attached to the driving task between men and women drivers. Sixty drivers participated in the first two experiments. In experiment one, they were presented with a view of the road with oncoming traffic only. The track along which the participants "drove" was drawn to include straight runs, curves and sharp bends. The driving performance measures were: speed; position on track; steering wheel position; braking and acceleration. In the second experiment, participants were instructed to follow the vehicle ahead and to maintain a distance of about 15 metres. The ADS logged the same variables as before every 500 ms. In the third study, 94 different subjects were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: a) told that they were driving a car fitted with an advanced braking system; b) told that they were driving a car fitted with an advanced braking system, although this was not in fact so; and c) a control group, given no information about the braking system. The same driving variables as before were used. The results indicate that men are greater risk takers than women, but there is no difference in their homeostatic behaviour. Older drivers and women find they have to concentrate more on the driving task. For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 853013.

Group differences in driving performance

This study presents a description of the concept of behavioural culpability, a step-by-step manual for using it, and an empirical test of a suspected mis-classification of culpability. Behavioural culpability is defined as whether the driver’s actions contributed to a crash and that non-culpable crashes are not caused by any specific behaviour and can only be predicted from exposure. Drivers with non-culpable crashes are therefore a random sample of the population. However, if the criteria for culpability and/or the individual judgements are not reflective of the principle of behavioural culpability, no fault drivers will not be a random sample of the driving population. To test the predictions from the definition of randomness in a sample assumed to have sub-optimal coding, the categorization of crash involvement undertaken by a British bus company was tested for associations between at fault and no fault crashes, age and experience. As predicted from the low percentage of at fault accidents in the sample, correlations between the variables indicated that a fair percentage of at fault crashes had been coded as no fault of the bus driver, suggesting a too lenient criterion. These results show that within fleet-based companies, culpability for a crash is probably allocated for legal reasons, which means that the predictability of accident involvement taking into account individual differences is not fully utilized. The aim of behavioural culpability coding is to increase effect sizes in individual differences in safety research and to improve our capability of predicting accident involvement.

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Behavioural culpability for traffic accidents

the aston research programme on driver behaviour involves several methods of data collection, most of them indirect. these include judgments, scale-ratings and questionnaires. to supplement these with more direct data on behaviour, a low-cost driving simulator was required. the simulator selected was based on an acorn archimedes personal computer with 2 megabytes of memory. the aims of this pilot study were first to assess the hardware and software for design problems; second to determine whether the simulator discriminated between groups of drivers, and finally to replicate and extend hagen's (1975) experiment on sex and age differences in driving performance. this preliminary study support hagen's (1975) findings with respect to significant sex differences in mean speed and maximum speed, mean accelerator input and maximum accelerator input. males drove significantly faster and used the accelerator significantly more. however, while hagen found that males were less consistent in their operation of the accelerator, no significant difference emerged in the current study with respect to mean accelerator pedal use, although females exhibited greater variability in the maximum accelerator pedal measure. however, given that this study found significant differences between young and old males on this measure, it is likely that age was a confounding factor in the hagen study. while the means for hagen's groups of subjects were similar to those of the young groups in this study, the age range was greater. with respect to position on road, compared with young females, males in this study drove closer to the centre as in hagen (1975). males also used the brake pedal significantly more. for the covering abstract of this seminar see irrd 845356.

Age and sex differences in driving performance: some preliminary findings from the aston driving simulator

In order to combat the problem of novice bus driver risk, a bus simulator was developed to improve decision-making at hazards that are most often associated with bus crashes. If the simulator is capable of discriminating between novice and experienced bus drivers then it can be argued that it is a valid tool for bus driver training to improve road safety. The purpose of this study then is to investigate whether there are significant differences between experienced and novice bus driver performance. Twelve novice bus drivers with 2-3weeks of driver training, and twelve experienced drivers who had held their PCV (Public Commercial Vehicle) license for at least three years were asked to drive a simulated bus route. Participants drove for approximately 15 minutes encountering three major hazardous locations for bus driving, namely, layby bus stops, parallel bus stops and right hand junctions. At these locations, parameters measured were speed, acceleration, position, steering and braking. The results showed that experienced drivers demonstrated greater caution but more confident behavioural strategies at layby and parallel bus stops. At right hand junctions, experienced drivers drove slower and further away from the kerb and used the brake significantly more often than novice bus drivers did. Results are discussed with reference to the use of a driving simulator for novice bus driver training.

Simulator Performance Differences Between Experienced and Novice Bus Drivers

This paper reports research aiming to test the relationship between Driver Behaviour Inventory (DBI) scales and measures of driver simulation performance related to attention and risk- taking Four samples were run, some of which performed more than one task, so that the data were analysed in six studies Each driver viewed a three- dimensional display of the road ahead, and controlled the 'car' with a steering wheel, brake, and accelerator pedals The state of the controls and 'car' were recorded every 500ms The simulator was programmed to investigate three types of driving situation: (1) open- road tasks; (2) following tasks; and (3) overtaking tasks A run typically lasted for 10min, and was over a 'road' that was an unpredictable mixture of straight sections and bends of varying curvature The data show that all three DBI scales predict some aspects of performance, but only under specific circumstances Aggression was considerably correlated with risk-taking only in the overtaking studies Aggressive drivers seemed to face special risks in overtaking situations Dislike of driving had less clear safety implications More alert drivers paid better attention to hazards The results imply that a variety of mechanisms influence driver behaviour, with their dangerous effects apparently greater than their beneficial effects However, the simulator results may not generalise to real driving, and their relatively mild experimental stresses may have been unrealistic For the covering abstract of the seminar see IRRD 859703

Lisa Dorn

Papers

Group differences in driving performance

Behavioural culpability for traffic accidents

Age and sex differences in driving performance: some preliminary findings from the aston driving simulator

Simulator Performance Differences Between Experienced and Novice Bus Drivers

Driver stress and simulated driving: studies of risk taking and attention