This paper examines demographic, self-esteem and personality correlates of Public Speaking Anxiety. In all 1049 working adults indicated how anxious they were in giving speeches in public and they also filled out the High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI). We used correlations and regressions to explore the relationship between the independent variables and Public Speaking Anxiety. Our multiple regression indicated five significant factors that accounted for 15% of the variance: younger more than older; female more than male, and those who scored lower on self-esteem, courage and competitiveness rated their Public Speaking Anxiety higher. Results are discussed in terms of the previous literature and implications for helping people struggling with Public Speaking Anxiety.

Self-presentation theory suggests people strategically adjust trait displays to meet evaluative goals, meaning faking can sometimes enhance the link between scores and real-world performance. We tested this in a large-scale military selection field experiment (N = 1,133) by manipulating the salience of self-presentation motives during personality assessment. We examined how varying the salience of self-presentation affects personality trait levels, convergent validity with low-stakes scores, and the ability to predict performance and career outcomes. Participants completed the same personality inventory under low, moderate, or high self-presentation. Despite trait score inflation, convergent validity with low-stakes benchmarks remained largely equivalent, and predictive validity was preserved or even enhanced under high-salience conditions. Notably, traits such as conscientiousness and extraversion showed stronger predictive utility when self-presentation motives were made explicit. These findings challenge the common view that response distortion inherently undermines test validity and instead suggest that motivated self-presentation may reflect context-relevant trait expression.

This exploratory study examined intelligence differences between people in four professional groups and three industries. We used a well-validated Intelligence (IQ) test, the General Intelligence Assessment (GIA), with five subscales (Reasoning, Perceptual Speed, Number Speed & Accuracy, Word Meaning, and Spatial Visualisation). In each analysis, we co-varied age, education, gender and management level, each of which was significant, confirming many previous findings. We compared large job function groups (each N > 5000) in Accountancy, Actuarial and Finance Professionals, Customer Service Occupations, Engineering, Science or Technology Professionals, and Sales. In all, 18 of these comparisons had effect sizes above d > 0.10, while six of these comparisons had effect sizes above d > 0.20. The largest difference was in Number Speed & Accuracy Scores between Accountancy, Actuarial and Finance Professionals, and Customer Service workers. We also compared three industry groups (each N > 7000): Business Management/Finance, Manufacturing, and Retail. The greatest differences in Spatial Visualisation were observed for manufacturing workers, who scored higher than workers in business and management (d = 0.15) and retail (d = 0.16). Implications for job selection are considered as well as the limitations of this research.

Time spent in nature benefits human mental and physical well-being. However, much of the variance in outcomes of nature contact remains unexplained, suggesting that new mechanistic pathways need to be considered. Here, we tested a novel conceptual model linking nature contact with life satisfaction via pathways involving positive experiences of living in and experiencing the world through the physical self. Using data from the Body Image in Nature Survey (BINS; N = 50,363), representing respondents from 58 nations and speaking 36 different languages, we find that nature contact is associated with greater self-compassion and greater perceived restoration in nature, which in turn are associated with more positive body image. In addition, more positive body image is associated with greater life satisfaction. These associations were robust to sensitivity tests, generalised to all gender identities and age groups, and held individually in almost all national groups and languages. Although replications are needed, we propose that the materialities of natural environments help to link bodily experiences to the production and experience of well-being, a process that is largely stable across national groups.

As large language models (LLMs) become more accessible, concerns are emerging for academics and practitioners about their use in high-stakes assessment scenarios, particularly in personality assessments where there is no inherent ‘right’ answer to the questions. This study investigated when an LLM demonstrates role-congruent impression management when completing a personality inventory under different instructional prompts. Significant differences were found across all big five personality domains, with the largest effects being seen in Openness, but large effects also seen for Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. Role-based prompts produced distinct, socially desirable responses that differed significantly from the model's baseline responses, where it was asked to respond as itself, where the baseline model produced significantly lower Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and higher Neuroticism scores than role-congruent prompts. The findings indicate that LLMs can generate personality-consistent outputs that reflect contextual social expectations. This raises important questions for both theory and practice: whether AI-mediated impression management should be treated as an extension of existing socially desirable behaviours, and how assessments may need to evolve to remain valid and secure in the face of AI use. Implications for synthetic data generation, test design, and human-AI interaction are discussed.

There is much debate on how scarce medical resources such as transplant organs should be allocated: in the UK, the NHS uses the principles of sickest first, prognosis and waiting list time – but not age [1]. Furthermore, it has recently been reported that in the UK younger patients tend to wait much longer than older patients for a liver transplant. The current study investigates younger and older lay people’s preferences for the allocation of liver transplants using four criteria,the patient’s age, time spent on the waiting list, pre-transplant life expectancy and post-transplant life expectancy. In an online study, lay participants (N = 400) rated 16 hypothetical patients in terms of priority to receive an available donor liver, using only information on patients’ age, time spent on the waiting list, pre-transplant life expectancy and post-transplant life expectancy. The relative ‘importance’ of the criteria in making decisions was indexed using a standardised effect size measure (generalised eta-squared). Pre-transplant life expectancy (‘sickest first’) was associated with the largest effect size, followed by post-transplant life expectancy (‘prognosis’), then age (‘youngest first’) and finally waiting list (‘first-come, first served’). In addition, participants assigned higher priority ratings to young patients, patients who had been on the waiting list for a long time, patients with a low pre-transplant life expectancy, and patients with a high post-transplant life expectancy. Both age groups prioritised younger over older patients, but younger participants prioritised younger over older patients to a greater extent than did older participants. There was no evidence for in-group bias. Additionally, younger participants showed a stronger prioritisation of patients with a long waiting time and patients with a low pre-transplant life expectancy compared to older participants. Lay individuals were able to effectively use the four allocation principles in a practical scenario to assign priority ratings to potential liver transplant recipients. The findings are consistent with previous findings that lay individuals see ‘sickest first’ (pre-transplant life expectancy in this case) as being the most important criterion for the allocation of a scarce medical resource. However, the findings also reveal that both younger and older individuals support the notion that ‘youngest first’ is also an important criterion, something not currently reflected in the NHS allocation policy.

This study set out to explore a longitudinal data set of 4915 adults (49.6% females) examining the effects of parental social status/class (measured at birth), childhood intelligence (at age 10), teenager locus of control (at age 16), psychological distress (at age 30), educational qualifications (at age 34), occupational level (at age 38), number of health conditions experienced and self-assessed physical health measures (all at age 42). Correlational analysis showed all these factors were significantly associated with adult physical health measures. Structural equation modelling showed that, apart from health conditions (which was significantly and negatively associated with the outcome variable), teenager locus of control, adult psychological distress, educational qualifications and occupational levels all had significant and direct effects on adult physical health (indicated by good daily physical functioning, relative absence of pain, and perceived health), accounting for 35% of the total variance. Mediation analyses showed that the effects of parental social status and childhood intelligence on adult physical health in part, mediated through educational qualifications and occupational levels. Childhood intelligence predicted adult physical health mediating through teenager locus of control. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Response distortion (faking) on personality tests in high-stakes selection contexts, and the use of warnings to mitigate it, remain critical issues in industrial-organizational psychology. Research on these issues, however, has often been limited by practical and methodological constraints, leaving notable gaps in our understanding of the processes involved. To address these gaps, we conducted a study where 1,123 participants in a military selection setting were randomly assigned to three experimental groups: low-stakes control, high-stakes selection, and high-stakes warning. Performance indicators included admission to officer training, future officer rank, and job performance. The results showed that group-level trait means changed in the expected directions under high-stakes conditions, while the factorial invariance and predictive validity of the personality measure were preserved. The incremental validity of personality traits over general mental ability remained consistent across groups, supporting the robustness of personality assessments. While warnings reduced the mean score inflation, they failed to enhance predictive validity and negatively impacted convergent validity with an unaffected premeasure of personality. Warnings also resulted in other distortions, particularly among high-ability candidates. Overall, these findings indicate that personality assessments retain practical utility in high-stakes settings when excluding warnings, as such interventions may introduce unintended biases without improving selection outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This research explores the relationship between personality traits, self-estimated and test-derived intelligence. Participants completed two personality tests and an intelligence test. They were also asked to estimate their intelligence. Correlations indicate that there was no relationship between test-derived IQ at both subscale and total level but that it was related to many personality traits. The regression suggests few associations of demographic, test-derived IQ, or personality trait scores. This paper discusses what IQ estimates are a function of, and limitations are acknowledged.

We tested the Differentiation of Personality by Intelligence (DPI) Hypothesis and overcame two limitations of prior studies. Prior studies typically examine personality across groups created by splitting the sample using the median/tertile intelligence values. In this study, we examine a range from 2-10 intelligence subgroups. Furthermore, prior studies have assumed that factors are consistently unidimensional across intelligence subgroups. Assuming factorial structures can be problematic, as metrics in question (e.g., Cronbach’s α) work on the premiss of unidimensionality. We therefore heeded factorial structures. We used personality (High Potential Traits Inventory) and verbal intelligence (the Word Meaning subtest of the General Intelligence Assessment) data from 6038 respondents. Results showed no consistent DPI pattern for variances, while internal consistencies increased with higher intelligence. Furthermore, factorial structures varied across intelligence subgroups. Heeding the factorial structure by analyzing only consistently unidimensional subfactors, the before observed effects on internal consistencies disappeared. We conclude that a) there is no support for DPI for scale variances and b) that prior findings testing the DPI for internal consistencies may be an artifact driven by not considering factorial structures. On a practical note, we caution that personality scales may not be consistently unidimensional across subgroups varying in their verbal intelligence.

Dickman’s Impulsivity Inventory is a popular measure of impulsivity which differentiates between when impulsivity is functional and when it is functional. Despite its continued use over the 36 years since its original publication, there are considerable concerns regarding the factor structure of the measure. At the time writing, the scale has been translated into many different languages, all needing to be revised by removing different items for varying factor structures and item inclusions. In each case, all item removals were done in absence of theoretical or semantic rationale. In Study 1, we first assess current item models with a series of confirmatory analyses, and use an exploratory factor analysis to propose an 8-item model. In Study 2, we test this 8-item model alongside the best fitting existing models. Results showed that our 8-item had better fit indices while maintaining adequate internal reliability. We propose this reduced model as a more practical measure for both research and practice.

This exploratory study examined demographic, self-esteem, and work-personality correlates of a measure of Horney's Neurotic Needs: Moving Away (Detachment), Moving Against (Aggression), and Moving Toward (Compliance) Others. In all, 319 adults completed the Horney-Coolidge Tri-dimensional Inventory (HCTI), High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI), and a short measure of self-esteem. The internal reliability of all main factors was satisfactory. Correlational analysis at the factor level showed that none of the Horney scales were significantly correlated with Conscientiousness, but all were negatively correlated with Adjustment. With the six HPTI traits as the criterion variable, demographics, self-esteem, and the three Horney factors were entered as predictor variables. All regressions significantly explained between a tenth and a quarter of the variance. The analyses of traits Adjustment, Risk Approach and Competitiveness accounted for most of the variance. The analysis was repeated using the nine Horney facets. The results suggested that the three Horney traits could be considered “dark-side” variables and a useful measure of personality in applied settings.