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Overview
The Riverside Accuracy Project (RAP) is a
long-term investigation into several important topics relevant to the
assessment and perception of human personality. Funded for almost
two decades by the National Institute of Mental Health grant
R01-MH42427, the project more recently has gained support from National
Science Foundation grants BCS-0642243 and BCS-1052638. At present the lab is working
on three main projects:
1. Situational Assessment. Our principal current
research concerns the assessment of the psychologically
important aspects of situations. Intensive data gathering is
under way, supported by a grant from the National Science
Foundation. We have developed the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ)
and have used this instrument to assess situations
experienced by college students in daily life, and the
correlates between elements of situations, personality, and
behavior. Articles introducing and using this
instrument have been published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Sherman, Nave & Funder, 2010) and the Journal of Research in
Personality (Sherman,
Nave & Funder, 2012,
in press). Further work in progress addresses
"construal," the ways different people may perceive the same situation.
Other related projects are
examining situational assessment
across cultures (along with collaborators in
Japan, China,
Italy and other countries), and the categorization of
situations according to evolutionary theory. For the first
paper from the international project, reporting some
preliminary data from the US and Japan, click
here.
2. Accuracy of Personality Judgment. This
research
program,
which
has
been running for the longest time (and is
the basis of the name of our lab) is based on the Realistic Accuracy
Model (Funder, 1995, 1999,
2012).
Theoretically,
the
model
proposes
that accurate personality judgment
requires a four-stage process in which (1) relevant information is
emitted by the target which (2) becomes available to the judge, who
then (3) detects this information and (4) utilizes it correctly.
Empirically, four moderator variables make accuracy more or less
likely, including properties of (1) the judge (e.g., judgmental
ability), (2) the target (e.g., judgability), (3) the trait being
judged (e.g., visibility), and (4) the information upon which the
judgment is based (e.g., its quantity or quality). For a recent
summary of this research, click here.
Our lab has gathered three large data sets
over the years. Each includes investigations of approximately 200
participants. Our data include self-reports of personality, peer
descriptions of personality, life history interviews and measurements
of behavior and life outcomes. Research using these data is
ongoing, including recent studies of the personality correlates of
language use in a life history interview (Fast & Funder, 2008, 2010).
3. Behavioral Correlates of Personality and
Health over Time. A project initiated in our lab investigated the behavioral
correlates of personality as assessed decades earlier, along with
contemporaneous measures of personality and health. This project
is in collaboration with Lew Goldberg and Sarah Hampson of the Oregon Research
Institute. We used the Riverside Behavioral Q-sort (RBQ)
to assess the behavior of participants in a personality
diagnostic interview. Other information available on
these participants included personality judgments made of
them by their teachers decades earlier, and results of a
recent, comprehensive health assessment. An article
reporting findings from this project was published in Social Psychological
and Personality Science (Nave, Sherman,
Funder, Hampson & Goldberg, 2010). The project is now located in Chris
Nave's laboratory at Rutgers University, Camden. For
information on current activity, click
here.
UCR Undergraduates:
Interested in working in our lab for academic credit?
For the application,
click here.
Resources
We are pleased to provide four
new research resources.
1. Revised Behavioral
Q-sort. The Riverside Behavioral Q-sort has been revised for
more general use, outside of the laboratory contexts in which it has
been employed to date.
2. Riverside Situational
Q-sort. We are in the process of developing and testing a
Q-sort for the psychological description of situations.
3. Q-sorter program.
We have developed a free, downloadable program
for completing Q-sorts on the computer, thus making Q-sort descriptions
easier to complete and their data entry more accurate. We also
include files including the behavioral and situational Q-sorts
described above, along with the revised California Q-sort for the
description of personality.
If you are interested in any
of these, please go to our Qsort
Resources Page.
4. Program to conduct randomization
tests. This program, written by Ryne Sherman in the R
programming language, conducts a randomization test to evaluate (a)
the
number
of
significant
correlations between a single variable and a
large number of other variables, (b) the number of significant
correlations between two large sets of variables, and (c) the average
size of a large number of effects. Link
The relevant article is:
Sherman, R.A., & Funder, D.C. (2009). Evaluating correlations in
studies of personality and behavior: Beyond the number of significant
findings to be expected by chance. Journal
of
Research
in
Personality,
43, 1053-1063.
Link
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