This research identifies a broad and inclusive set of personality-related problems and examines their empirical associations with both the high and low poles of the five-factor model of personality (FFM). McCrae, Widiger, and colleagues (e.g., McCrae, 1994; McCrae, Löckenhoff, & Costa, 2005; Widiger, Costa, & McCrae, 2002, 2012) have proposed that individuals with particular personality traits may be predisposed to particular kinds of problems in life, and suggested that the FFM serve as a basis for identifying personality-related problems. The existing empirical literature has documented a range of problems, symptoms, and impairments associated with the FFM, but these associations are largely confined to the socially undesirable poles. Widiger and colleagues (e.g., Haigler & Widiger, 2001; Widiger, 2011) argue that problem behaviors are also associated with both poles of the FFM, but that normal-range FFM measures may be limited in covering maladaptive variants of socially desirable traits.

A list of 310 behaviorally-specific personality problems was developed and administered to a large college student sample. The International Personality Item Pool Representation of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (IPIP NEO-PI-R; Goldberg, 1999) and an experimental manipulation of the NEO-PI-R items (EXP NEO-PI-R; Haigler & Widiger, 2001) were also administered. The most prevalent problems of college students included difficulties with sustaining motivation, negativistic attitudes about oneself, and impaired functioning in social and intimate relationships. Numerous problem behaviors were associated with both poles of each trait domain and facet of the FFM, as measured by the IPIP NEO-PI-R and EXP NEO-PI-R. Patterns of problem reporting are consistent with dynamic theories of psychosocial development as well as recently emerging research on maladaptive behaviors and trait continua. Future research should evaluate the generality of the current list of personality problems against other representations of problem behavior, examine base rates of problem occurrence in non-student samples, and consider the perceptions of self and others.

Does goal attainment relate to the development of meaning in life and psychological well-being? If so, do these relationships depend on the nature of the goal and why one pursues it? This study sought to generalize the relationship between goal attainment and subjective well-being to meaning in life and psychological well-being, and test whether goal contents and motives moderate this relationship. At two times about seven weeks apart, 360 undergraduates rated their meaning in life and subjective and psychological well-being. All well-being variables loaded on a single general factor of well-being. Further results replicated evidence of the relationship between subjective well-being change and goal attainment, and generalized it to meaning in life and psychological well-being, but not to autonomy or purpose. This evidence offers new support for theories describing goals as sources of meaning, though the causal direction of this connection remains unestablished. In addition, the results of moderation analyses concord with prior research that demonstrates not all goals relate equally to well-being change or meaning in life. However, these results also pose challenges to the finer points of these theories that describe the inequalities among goals in terms of their supposed service to well-being. Many direct relationships and goal attainment moderators from the literature on self-determination theory failed to replicate, extrinsic motivation being the primary exception to this surprising trend of null results. Mixed results also emerged for theories regarding other goal characteristics. Retrospective ratings of environmental support and inter-goal facilitation (versus conflict) moderated the relationship of goal attainment with overall well-being change, and environmental support related to well-being change directly. Time frame, willingness to invest, extrinsic motivation, and overall self-determination predicted changes in well-being directly, but no other motives or characteristics did so prospectively. Only extrinsic motivation and expectations of success prospectively moderated the relationship between goal attainment and well-being change. This relationship with attainment held across most varieties of goal content, most notably vanishing with goals participants identified as financial in nature, though independent judges' categorizations of goal content did not support this distinction. Furthermore, important limitations to the evidentiary value of the research paradigm have gone unacknowledged in prior literature, as discussed last.

Graduating high school and entering college, the workforce, or the military may all be understood as examples of major life transitions. Such transitions may be experienced in different ways, may be easy or difficult, and may or may not be successful. One life transition infrequently studied is the military-to-civilian transition that service members experience. The current study focused on the transition period service members experience upon reentry to civilian life after they have separated from the service. A successful transition was assessed in two ways: the ease to which the service member adjusted to civilian life and their satisfaction with life immediately after discharge from the military. This study incorporates both positive and negative effects of serving on the service members’ perception of the ease and success of their transition to civilian life and their satisfaction with life. Personality traits were assessed to determine if individual differences also predicted success during the transition period and satisfaction with life. Participants were 595 United States military service members who had separated from the service less than 10 years prior to the time of data collection. The results of the current study indicate that positively experienced deployments, positive discharge training experience, more frequent contact with other veterans, the kind (positive or negative) of situation returned to, and post-traumatic stress symptoms significantly predicted service members perceived ease of adjustment to and satisfaction with civilian life. Extraversion and negative emotionality similarly predicted these same outcomes. No significant gender differences were observed. These findings suggest a potential avenue future researchers and policy makers might take to better help service members adjust to civilian life. One avenue may be to create an intervention of a standardized discharge training experience all service members receive when separating from the service. This training should treat adjustment back into civilian life as multifaceted and involve the service member and those individuals who make up their social support system.

Two topics of methodological research in the social sciences that have garnered recent attention are the topics of dyadic data analysis and the use of discrete latent variables. Dyadic data refers to data that were collected from two interdependent sources, such as data from identical twins or romantic partners. Data collected in this fashion violate the traditional independence assumption underlying many common statistical techniques. Discrete latent variables come in many commonly used models, such as the latent class, latent profile, and latent transition models. All these models share the goal of explaining observed relationships between variables using discrete categories (i.e. classification) in which observations are statistically similar to those in the same category, and dissimilar from those in separate categories. While both dyadic data analysis and categorical latent variables have seen countless articles (and even entire textbooks) written about their usage, these two techniques have formerly remained independent procedures. This dissertation will briefly review the conceptual and statistical details of both modeling techniques and then provide two substantive examples of how dyadic data and discrete latent variables can profitably be used together. The first example combines growth mixture modeling with the use of the common fate growth model to identify distinct trajectories of marital satisfaction among couples. The oft-observed decline in satisfaction in the years following marriage can largely be attributed to a sub-population that reports a large decrease in marital satisfaction. The second substantive example combines the latent profile, latent transition, and actor-partner interdependence model into a model examining the cross-lagged association of couple members political beliefs. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate how dyadic data analysis and discrete latent variables techniques can be used together with the hopes that these two modeling techniques will begin to be research, applied, and reference together.

Academic and social engagement can be used to better motivate students to get involved with their curricula and other campus activities. Engagement can help students stay in university and graduate, help make the university experience a pleasant one, and help get good grades and learn. Though there is much information in the literature about the many benefits of being engaged and the characteristics of students’ academic engagement, there is little about students’ social engagement in a non- learning context. Even more, many changes may occur during university years but there is little research on how academic and social engagement may change for university students. This dissertation presents a new measure that assesses social engagement in university students, it evaluates students’ academic and social engagement, and models how the two engagement types may change across two academic quarters as a function of students’ personality and daily activities. The findings show academic and social engagement are strongly related to each other. Academic engagement was predicted by conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, time students spent studying and going to class. Additionally, those students who started off high on extraversion and openness showed an increase in academic engagement over time, and those students who started off low on each of the two traits showed a decrease in academic engagement. Social engagement was best predicted by extraversion and openness to experience, as well as time spent on activities with friends, exercising, and housework (negative relation). This preliminary exploratory information can help with a better understanding of what engages and motivates students for future studies.

Getting good grades, making new friends, and losing weight have the potential to increase individuals' well-being, but what factors predict attainment of these outcomes and how does attaining them impact well-being? This study aimed to identify person and contextual factors that predict goal attainment and determine how goal attainment changes well-being. Personality traits, the accumulation of setbacks experienced in an academic year, and goal appraisals (e.g., importance, expected success) were used to predict goal attainment and goal attainment in domains relevant to students (e.g., academics, social relationships) were used to predict changes in well-being. Eighty-nine of 297 students completed questionnaires at the beginning and end of their freshman year of college. At the first assessment, students were asked to describe their personality traits (i.e., the Big Five) and their satisfaction with life. They were also asked to list ten personal goals and evaluate them on dimensions thought to impact goal attainment (e.g., goal importance). At the second assessment, students were asked to reevaluate their goals on various dimensions, one of which assessed goal attainment. They were also asked about the setbacks they experienced over the academic year, using a new setback inventory, and their satisfaction with life. Multi-level models were used to predict goal attainment and correlational analyses were used for examining other associations. Results showed that goal attainment is predicted best by individuals' appraisals of their goals. Higher levels of commitment, motivation, positive emotion, self-efficacy, and perceived opportunity for success were associated with higher levels of goal attainment. Conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness moderated some of these associations. Goal attainment levels were also related to experiencing setbacks. Experiencing academic or occupational setbacks predicted lower levels of goal attainment. This attainment of goals was important to students' well-being. Attaining goals in the academic or occupational, social relationship, and financial domains predicted increases in well-being. Discussion focuses on the importance of positive goal evaluations, the implications of experiencing setbacks in domains relative to one's role (e.g., academics for students), and how well-being is influenced by goal attainment.

The present research examines two distinct features of the lived day of 384 undergraduates. In the first study, we investigated how well individuals remember their daily activities, the ways in which activities were misremembered, if different kinds of activities were remembered differently, and if individual differences are related to the ways in which a person remembers (or misremembers) their daily activities. In the second study we explored the ways in which the experience of affect throughout the day is related to affective evaluation of the day.

Retrospective assessments of behavior are the preferred method of data collection when the goal is to capture all behaviors. Prior research has outlined the discrepancies between experience sampling (ES) and retrospective recall of states, the current project looked at the discrepancies between these methods for reporting activities throughout the day. Participants reported what they were doing in the moment throughout the day, and in the evening retrospectively recalled their activities for each hour of that day. Nearly 75% of daily activities were recalled accurately. The remaining activities were remembered at the wrong time (13%), appear to be confabulated (10%) or were inaccurate for other reasons (2%). Being in class or at work, which are scheduled activities often with strictly enforced start and end times, were the most accurately remembered activities. While participants misremember sleeping, shopping, recreating and housework, confabulating what they were doing when retrospectively recalling these activities. Individual difference variables were not related to how participants remembered their activities.

The second feature of the day that was explored was how the affective experience of the day relates to evaluations of the day. Various research projects have suggested that the average affect, maximum affect, affect in the final moments, or the average between the maximum and final affect are most meaningful (e.g. Hedges, Jandorf, & Stone, 1985; Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier, 1993; Parkinson, Briner, Reynolds, & Totterdell, 1995). The current project found that when reporting on their day, each measure describing lived experience is nearly equally predictive of the affective evaluations of the day. This was the case for both positive and negative affect. These affective measures correlated appropriately with the content of day evaluations, and the various measures of affect throughout the day have similar profiles and external correlates.

Reputation consists of what is said or believed about a person by those who know the person. Our reputation may affect the opportunities available to us and the way others treat us. The current research reports a series of six studies (total N = 2116) used to develop and validate a self-report questionnaire assessing people’s interest in their reputations and their efforts to manage their reputations. The first step in item development relied on open-ended responses to questions relating to reputation interest and management. Using a rational/factor-analytic approach and multiple samples, a two-scale (Concern, Knowledge) Reputation Interest measure and a four-scale (Discretion, Objecting, Masquerading, Support Seeking) Reputation Management measure were produced. Theory-relevant relationships between these multidimensional reputation scales and Big Five personality traits, well-being, and various interpersonal personality characteristics demonstrated validity of the reputation scales. For example, scores on the Masquerading scale (measuring a tendency to present a false appearance of oneself) were positively associated with measures of neuroticism, manipulativeness, approval motivation, and dependency, and negatively associated with a measure of conscientiousness. In the final study, agreement of informant reports and target reports on respective dimensions of reputation interest and management contributed to demonstrating validity of the multidimensional reputation scales. These informant reports also provided information regarding the reputation of target participants. For example, targets who score high on the Knowledge scale (measuring the degree to which one believes to have an awareness of one’s reputation) are reputed by informants to have a higher level of extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and peer acceptance. The value of the reputation scales in providing a broader personological picture is discussed as are other potential benefits of the scales.

Through a series of four studies, this research addresses two specific questions: what is the most accurate facet structure of Conscientiousness and, given that previous research indicates self-control should most likely be considered a facet of the trait, can a measure be created that captures a multidimensional assessment of self-control? Data were collected from a total of 827 undergraduate students at the University of California, Riverside as well as 299 community participants who completed an online survey that measured aspects of their personalities. While this dissertation relied heavily on established Big Five personality inventories, measures of constructs similar to Conscientiousness, including Grit and Determination, were also included. Until now, these were infrequently tested within the Big Five framework. Finally, a new Facets of Control measure is created, refined and tested against established scales. Exploratory factor analytic methods revealed a facet structure of Conscientiousness that included a proactive aspect defined by Grit, Determination, Industriousness and Productiveness. Models also revealed a robust and consistent facet of Order and Organization in all four studies. Finally, an inhibitory aspect of the trait was identified which was captured by Self-Control measures from the Chernyshenko Conscientiousness Scales, Prudence from the HEXACO and Impulse Control from the Facets of Control measure. This specific aspect of the new scale proved useful in establishing the importance of not only adding an inhibitory feature to the understanding of Conscientiousness, but also making a compelling case for including Self-Control within the larger Five Factor Model framework of personality.