What is a reasonable argument for the idea that personality change is maladaptive?

Buss and Plomin (1975) identified the following two characteristics of impulsivity “(1) resisting versus giving in to urges, impulses, or motivational states: and (2) responding immediately and impetuously to a stimulus versus lying back and planning before making a move” (p. 8). Within the domain of personality, impulsivity is considered a trait dimension and is usually measured by self report questionnaires such as the Barratt impulsivity Scale—Version 11 (BIS-11; Patton, Stanford, & Barratt, 1995), the Eysenck I7 (Eysenck, Pearson, Easting, & Allsopp, 1985) and Dickman’s scale of functional/dysfunctional impulsivity (Dickman, 1990).

There is considerable evidence of the validity of the trait of impulsivity and for its utility in the prediction and understanding of both normal and pathological behaviour. Kipnis (1971) reported significant correlations between impulsivity and academic performance in college students, and Vitaro, Arseneault, and Tremblay (1999) found impulsivity to predict both delinquency and problem gambling in adolescents. Colder and Chassin (1997) found a significant correlation between impulsivity and alcohol consumption in young adolescents and the traits of sensation seeking and ego control, which are closely related to impulsivity, were found by Hampson, Severson, Burns, Slovic, and Fisher (2001) to predict alcohol use in high school students. The results of the Kelly longitudinal study (Kelly & Conley, 1987) illustrate the continuing importance of impulsivity beyond the adolescent years; the trait of ‘impulse control’ predicted the incidence of divorce, marital satisfaction and alcohol abuse in males (though not in females) across a period of 15 years.

The BIS-11 (Patton et al., 1995) has been used extensively to explore the role of impulsivity in psychopathology and delinquent behaviour. Such research has found significant differences in impulsivity between bulimic patients and normal controls (Steiger et al., 2001), between alcoholic and non-alcoholic groups, (Ketzenberger & Forrest, 2000), between female borderline personality patients and controls (Dougherty, Bjork, Huckabee, Moeller, & Swann, 1999) and between adults with and without a history of childhood conduct disorder (Dougherty, Bjork, Marsh, & Moeller, 2000). Stanford, Greve, Boudreaux, Mathias, and Brumbelow (1996) found that impulsivity, assessed by the BIS-11, predicted aggression, drug taking and drunk driving in high school and college students and this relationship was especially strong for females.

While the study of single traits such as impulsivity and related traits such as sensation seeking continues, recent decades have seen the rise of hierarchical trait models which aim to encompass the major aspects of personality the most prominent of these being the Five Factor Model (FFM; John & Srivastava, 1999). Such models tend to converge on five broad traits at the highest level of the hierarchy: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. At a lower level of the hierarchy more narrow traits such as deliberation and self discipline are identified as facets of, for example, conscientiousness; while at the lowest level are narrowly defined traits such as tidiness and punctuality.

The FFM subsumes the major traits, both singly and in combination, that are predictive of significant behaviours. For example, there is an extensive body of evidence relating the trait of conscientiousness to various indices of work performance (e.g. Barrick & Mount, 1991: Salgado, 2001) and research on the concept of integrity utilises a construct which is an emergent trait—a blend of the independent traits of conscientiousness, neuroticism and agreeableness (Ones & Viswesvaran, 2001).

A number of studies have investigated the relationship between academic performance and the Big Five traits and the most consistent findings are the positive correlations with openness and conscientiousness (Busato, Prins, Elshout, & Hamaker, 2000). Research has also demonstrated the value of utilising the more narrow traits, or facets, which constitute the broad Big Five traits. Mershon and Gorsuch (1988) compared the amount of variance predicted in a variety of criteria by either five broad traits or sixteen more narrow traits and found the latter to predict almost double the criterion variance. Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham (2003) similarly found that analysis at the level of facets predicted more variance in the educational performance of British undergraduates than analysis at the level of the Big Five traits (28% versus 13% respectively for total exam results). Such studies are, however, susceptible to two types of criticism. Goldberg (1999) pointed out that adding variance to the predictor side of a regression equation will almost always add to the predicted variance, and Ashton (1998) argued that the large number of lower order traits may produce “spuriously high multiple correlations which are unlikely to survive cross validation.” Paunonen and Ashton (2001a) took a more focussed approach and “selected two Big Five factor predictors and compared each of them against only one lower level trait” (p. 81), the latter being selected by a panel of graduate students as most closely related to academic performance. They found that the lower level traits of ‘need for achievement’ and ‘need for understanding’, performed better than their super-ordinate traits conscientiousness and openness to experience in the prediction of undergraduate course grades.

Paunonen and Ashton (2001b) have argued for the importance of measuring narrow traits, those at lower levels of the Big Five hierarchy, providing evidence that the variance specific to the lower level traits—not shared with the higher order trait—carries predictive and explanatory value. This argument is part of an ongoing debate as to the appropriate level of analysis, sparked by Ones and Viswesvaran (1996). It is however concerned largely with predictive validity and says little about theoretical issues such as the nature of models of personality and the relationships between traits at different levels of a hierarchy. Indeed the results may seem to question the value of identifying and assessing higher order traits and—since the logic of the argument could be made to extend further down the hierarchy—may seem to question the validity of the trait approach itself. Here it is argued that lower order traits may have greater theoretical value due to their relationship with significant latent variables which influence behaviour and which may even explain the covariance of the lower order traits which comprise higher order traits. Such a theoretical approach characterises Eysenck’s approach to personality; for example, he proposed that the various facets of extraversion, and their covariance, are a consequence of individual differences in arousal (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985). A similar conceptual model characterises the attempts by Depue and Collins (1999) and by Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, and Shao (2000) to identify reward sensitivity not merely as a useful lower order trait but as the common variable underlying the various facets of extraversion.

Overview of the present study

Many impulsivity scales exist as elements within omnibus personality questionnaires. Within such questionnaires, and the models of personality which they embody, impulsivity is usually situated as a lower level trait, or facet, of a higher order trait—e.g. Constraint within the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ; Tellegen & Waller, in press). The aim of this research was to compare the predictive validity of impulsivity and the Big Five personality traits and to examine whether the

Participants and procedure

The present sample consisted of 236 female undergraduate students, made up of three consecutive years of students taking a freshman psychology class. All subjects participated in return for course credits. Age at onset of course ranged from 17 to 35 years with a mean of 20.3 (SD = 2.7). Respondents completed personality measures at the beginning of their first semester during class time and examination performance data were taken from records at the end of the year. A self report measure of

Results

Table 1 shows the correlations between impulsivity, the four criterion variables and the Big Five traits. Impulsivity correlated negatively and significantly with all four criteria. Of the Big Five traits only conscientiousness correlated significantly with all four criteria; agreeableness and neuroticism correlated significantly with alcohol consumption though not with the academic performance criteria. Impulsivity correlated most strongly with conscientiousness (r = −.70) out of the Big Five

Discussion

The results supported the hypotheses by demonstrating that impulsivity predicted the target criteria even after the effects of conscientiousness or the Big Five traits, were partialled out. The predictive validity of impulsivity was not attributable to its covariance with any, or all, of the Big Five traits. The data were all the more striking given the high correlations between impulsivity and conscientiousness (−.69) and the joint correlation with all the Big Five (.74). The results also

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