The stakes are higher than many researchers realize. Previous work cited in the study shows that a careless responding rate of roughly 14 percent inflated correlations in published psychological studies by about .07, while simulations have demonstrated that even 5 percent careless responding can produce sign reversals in estimated correlations. Other research has found that removing as little as 4 to 10 percent of careless responders improved model fit in empirical datasets, and that just 10 percent contamination can substantially bias estimates of item discrimination parameters. Because researchers never know in advance how contaminated their data are, the authors argue, evaluating results with and without adjustments for presumed carelessness is essential for trustworthy science.

Traditionally, researchers have hunted for careless responders using screening indices: the long-string index that counts how many identical answers appear in a row, the intraindividual response variability index, the even–odd consistency index that correlates halves of a scale, Mahalanobis distance for multivariate outliers, and attention check items planted in the questionnaire. The trouble is that each index catches only one flavor of carelessness, so researchers typically stack several of them into a multihurdle approach. Worse, every hurdle requires a threshold—a cutoff above which a respondent is declared careless—and there are no firmly grounded rules for setting those thresholds. Small changes in cutoff choices have repeatedly been shown to produce substantially different classification rates, handing researchers enormous and often invisible degrees of freedom.

Mixture models offer an alternative that sidesteps the threshold problem entirely. The idea is elegant: assume that the sample contains two latent groups, one of attentive respondents whose answers reflect the traits being measured, and one of careless respondents whose answers do not. A standard measurement model—in this study, a multidimensional graded response model appropriate for categorical Likert items—links responses to latent traits in the attentive class. In the careless class, the model assumes responses do not depend on item content at all: threshold parameters are constrained to be equal across items, and a single latent variable representing each respondent’s preference for certain response categories replaces the substantive traits. The model then estimates, for every person, a posterior probability of belonging to the attentive class, conveying not just a verdict but a degree of certainty. A posterior probability of .60 signals that the response pattern says little either way; a .90 signals strong evidence of attentiveness.

The exemplar model used in the study was deliberately designed to capture the core features shared by most existing mixture approaches for C/IER while avoiding their more restrictive assumptions. Unlike many predecessors that treat item responses as continuous, it acknowledges their categorical nature, allowing the shape of response distributions to differ between classes—for instance, roughly normal for attentive respondents versus uniform for random responders. It also accommodates dependencies among careless responses arising from individual differences in category preferences. Because the specification retains the two-class structure common to the wider family of mixture models, the authors expect their findings to generalize to closely related approaches.

The heart of the study is a simulation comprising 240 crossed conditions, each replicated 200 times, with samples of 500 respondents and 10 percent careless responding—a realistic baseline given reported rates of roughly 5 to 12 percent in offline studies and 6 to 10 percent in large-scale assessments, but also an extreme class imbalance that makes detection genuinely hard. The researchers varied the number of five-point Likert items (5, 10, or 20), the proportion of negatively worded items (0 or 40 percent), the heterogeneity of item thresholds, the strength of item discriminations, and the type of careless behavior: straightlining, respondent-specific category preference, random responding, or a blend of the last two. Three criteria were evaluated: whether model comparisons correctly detected the presence of C/IER using the Bayesian information criterion, whether the estimated proportion of careless respondents was accurate, and whether individuals were correctly classified.

The results reveal a clear recipe for success. When the data contained no careless responders at all, the simpler model was always correctly preferred—no false alarms. When 10 percent careless responding was present, straightlining was detected consistently under every condition tested. For the subtler patterns, however, questionnaire design mattered enormously. With only five items, reliable detection generally required scales mixing positively and negatively worded items together with high item heterogeneity, meaning items differ substantially in how easy they are to endorse. With ten items, either mixed wording or high heterogeneity sufficed. With twenty items, the mixture model was preferred in nearly every condition regardless of wording or heterogeneity. The logic is intuitive: on a short, uniformly worded scale of easy-to-endorse items, an attentive respondent who consistently picks the category that best describes them produces a pattern nearly indistinguishable from a straightliner. Paradoxically, stronger item discriminations can make this problem worse, sharpening the tendency of attentive respondents to answer uniformly, while under random responding the effect reverses and weak discriminations become the hazard.

Individual-level classification told a similar story. Specificity—the probability of correctly assigning simulated attentive respondents to the attentive class—exceeded .90 in every single condition, partly because with only 10 percent contamination, a classifier defaulting to attentive already achieves 90 percent specificity. Sensitivity, the ability to catch true careless responders, depended heavily on scale length, item heterogeneity, and wording, rising with all three for most careless response types. For estimating the overall proportion of careless respondents, mixed-worded scales with high heterogeneity kept bias within acceptable bounds even at five items, while unidirectional, low-heterogeneity, short scales inflated estimates toward 14 percent. Straightlining proved uniquely stubborn: the proportion of careless respondents was systematically underestimated, dropping as low as 6 percent, and longer scales actually made the underestimation worse rather than better.

To show that the latent classes really mean what researchers hope they mean, the team reanalyzed a publicly available Big Five dataset collected across four online crowdsourcing platforms—MTurk, CloudResearch, Prolific, and Qualtrics—with roughly 500 respondents each, using the 50-item NEO-PI-R inventory in which each trait is measured by ten items, half negatively worded. By the simulation’s own criteria, these scales offered favorable conditions for detection. The model classified between 76.5 and 83.3 percent of respondents as attentive depending on the scale, and classifications were strikingly consistent: 62.4 percent of respondents were classified as attentive on all five scales, while only 8.4 percent failed to reach the attentive class on any scale, with posterior probabilities across scales correlating between .509 and .666. This cross-scale stability suggests the model captures a stable disposition toward careless responding rather than scale-specific quirks.

Crucially, the model-based classifications converged with evidence that does not rely on response patterns at all. Respondents who passed more of the five embedded attention check items received higher posterior probabilities of being attentive, with virtually all respondents passing four or five checks classified as attentive with near-certainty across all scales. Even more striking, the latent class variable tracked the data-collection platform more strongly than the attention check index did: averaged across scales, Nagelkerke’s pseudo-R-squared was 0.224 for the model-based classification versus 0.071 for the index. Both methods identified MTurk as by far the worst platform, but the model painted a starker picture—only 47 to 59 percent of MTurk respondents were classified as attentive on some scales, compared with 85.6 percent flagged by attention checks, while Prolific fared best at 88 to 95 percent attentive. The authors conclude that with scales of at least ten items, mixed wording, and sufficient item heterogeneity, mixture modeling is a viable, comparatively easy-to-implement tool for addressing careless responding—available in standard software such as the R package mirt—while cautioning that short, uniformly worded, low-heterogeneity scales remain its blind spot, and that questions about trait-score accuracy and misclassification consequences await future research.

Subject of Research: Detection of careless and insufficient effort responding in self-report questionnaires using latent variable mixture models

Article Title: Understanding when mixture models effectively identify careless responding: Simulation and validity evidence

Article References: Uglanova, I., Nagy, G., & Ulitzsch, E. (2026). Understanding when mixture models effectively identify careless responding: Simulation and validity evidence. Behavior Research Methods, 58(11), Article 313. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-03165-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13428-026-03165-z

Keywords: careless responding, mixture models, item response theory, survey methodology, psychometrics, latent class analysis, attention checks, straightlining, Big Five, data quality, online platforms, simulation study

The instrument in question is the Big Five Aspect Scales short version, known as the BFAS-40. The original Big Five Aspect Scales, developed by Colin DeYoung and colleagues, grew out of the observation that each Big Five domain splits into two aspects: for example, extraversion divides into enthusiasm and assertiveness, while neuroticism splits into withdrawal and volatility. These aspects sit between the broad domains and the even narrower facets measured by instruments such as the NEO Personality Inventory, and they have proven useful for linking personality to psychopathology, political ideology, and well-being. The BFAS-40, developed by Gallagher, Stevenor, Samo, and McAbee, condensed the original longer scales into just four items per aspect, aiming to preserve psychometric strength while cutting completion time dramatically.

Translating a questionnaire is not simply a matter of swapping words. Personality items often rely on idioms, subtle emotional vocabulary, and response conventions that do not map neatly across languages. Italian researchers have a long history of adapting personality measures, going back to factor-analytic work on the NEO inventories in the 1990s and 2000s, but each new instrument must be validated on its own terms. A team led by Chloe Lau of the University of Toronto and Francesco Bruno of Universitas Mercatorum in Rome, together with Francesca Chiesi of the University of Florence and Lena Quilty of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, took on that task for the BFAS-40, testing the translated scale in a community sample of 662 Italian-speaking adults.

The methodological heart of the study is its use of multidimensional item response theory, or MIRT, a modern statistical framework that models how each individual item functions across levels of the underlying trait. Unlike classical test theory, which focuses on total scores, item response theory estimates parameters for every question: how well it discriminates between people with different trait levels, and where its response thresholds fall along the trait continuum. Because the ten personality aspects are correlated and each item is written to tap one aspect within a broader domain, the researchers fit confirmatory multidimensional models rather than treating each aspect in isolation. This approach allowed them to test whether the hypothesized two-aspect structure actually held within each of the five Big Five domains in the Italian data.

The results were encouraging. Across all ten aspects, the confirmatory MIRT models showed acceptable to strong factor loadings and discrimination parameters, with response thresholds that were well ordered, meaning the answer options functioned as intended along the trait scale. Bayesian fit statistics told a consistent story: standardized root mean square residual values ranged from 0.045 to 0.063, root mean square error of approximation values from 0.032 to 0.045, and comparative and Tucker-Lewis fit indices ranged from 0.950 to 0.975. In conventional terms, these numbers indicate acceptable to strong model fit, supporting the structural validity of the two-factor solutions within each domain. In plain language, the Italian items grouped themselves into the same ten aspects that theory predicted, without needing to be reshuffled or discarded.

Reliability, the consistency with which the items measure each aspect, was assessed using Bayesian methods rather than traditional point estimates alone. The resulting estimates ranged from low to excellent across the ten aspects, a spread that is not unusual for very short scales. With only four items per aspect, some aspects inevitably show weaker internal consistency than others, and the authors are transparent about this variability. The Bayesian framework is particularly well suited to this kind of evaluation because it produces full distributions of the reliability estimates rather than single numbers, giving researchers a more honest picture of the precision of the measurement in a sample of this size.

Validity was then tested against external criteria. The Italian BFAS-40 was administered alongside the Big Five Inventory short form, allowing the researchers to check whether the new scale’s domain scores converged with an established measure of the same constructs. They also examined associations with indices of well-being and with measures of depression, anxiety, and stress drawn from the DASS-21. The pattern of correlations supported both convergent and discriminant validity: aspects related to negative emotionality, such as withdrawal and volatility, correlated with distress measures in the expected directions, while aspects tied to positive engagement aligned with well-being scores. This network of expected relationships suggests the translated items are measuring the same psychological substance as their English originals, not merely producing superficially similar responses.

Perhaps the most internationally significant part of the study is its cross-cultural comparison. The researchers compared item functioning between the Italian sample and a Canadian sample of 347 participants, using differential item functioning analysis, a technique that detects whether an item behaves differently for people from different groups after accounting for their trait levels. Of the 40 items, 39 showed no evidence of differential functioning between Italian and Canadian respondents. Only a single Agreeableness item was flagged. This near-perfect record is remarkable for a translated personality measure and suggests that the Italian adaptation achieved what psychometricians call measurement equivalence, the property that allows scores to be compared meaningfully across cultures rather than within each country alone.

The one flagged item is worth noting rather than dismissing. Agreeableness, which splits into compassion and politeness, is the aspect most closely tied to social values and interpersonal norms, domains where cultural expectations differ most between countries. An item that functions differently across cultures does not necessarily indicate a translation error; it may reflect genuine cultural variation in how agreeable behavior is expressed or interpreted. For researchers planning cross-cultural studies, the practical implication is that 39 of the 40 Italian items can be used in direct comparison with Canadian data, while the flagged Agreeableness item should be interpreted with caution in such analyses.

The study arrives at a moment when demand for brief, validated personality measures is accelerating. Short scales are increasingly used in electronic health records, large online panels, and studies that follow thousands of people over time, where every additional minute of questionnaire length translates into dropout. Recent work has extended the BFAS-40 to German, French, and Italian samples, and the present study adds a level of statistical scrutiny, multidimensional item response modeling with Bayesian estimation and formal cross-cultural DIF testing, that goes beyond typical translation checks. For Italian-speaking researchers and clinicians, the BFAS-40 now offers a theoretically grounded, efficient tool that captures the ten aspects of the Big Five in a fraction of the time of the original instruments. For the broader field, it demonstrates that careful psychometric engineering can make even a nuanced hierarchical model of personality travel across languages without losing its shape, a small but meaningful step toward personality science that speaks with one measurement language worldwide.

Subject of Research: Cross-cultural psychometric validation of the Italian BFAS-40 personality questionnaire using multidimensional item response theory

Article Title: The Italian adaptation of the big five aspects scale short version (BFAS-40): a multidimensional item response theory model and cross-cultural validation study

Article References: Lau, C., Bruno, F., Chiesi, F., & Quilty, L. C. (2026). The Italian adaptation of the big five aspects scale short version (BFAS-40): a multidimensional item response theory model and cross-cultural validation study. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1508. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09982-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09982-x

Keywords: personality psychology, Big Five, BFAS-40, psychometrics, item response theory, cross-cultural validation, Italian adaptation, reliability, validity, differential item functioning, Bayesian analysis, psychological assessment

The phenomenon the researchers investigated is known as sibling differentiation, a term that has largely replaced the older label of deidentification. The idea traces back to Alfred Adler, who argued that when parental resources such as time, attention, and affection seem limited, siblings compete for them, and in response they consciously or unconsciously set themselves apart from one another. By developing different interests, strengths, and roles, siblings reduce direct rivalry and secure their own niche within the family. Decades later, this remains one of the most compelling explanations for why children raised together can be so dissimilar, a question that has occupied behavioral geneticists since the recognition that nonshared environmental influences, not the shared family environment, drive much of the divergence between siblings.

What makes the new study distinctive is its focus on emerging adulthood, the period between roughly 18 and 29 years of age when people are actively constructing their identities. Most previous work on parental differential treatment, the practice of showing affection, granting privileges, or providing support unevenly across children, concentrated on childhood and adolescence. But the authors reasoned that even as young adults gain independence, parents remain a background resource contributing to adjustment and well-being, and that patterns of unequal treatment may continue to influence how siblings position themselves relative to one another. Differentiation during this stage, they note, may help reduce unwanted comparisons from outsiders and ease lingering competition between siblings.

The study also broke new ground by treating mothers and fathers separately. Drawing on developmental theory suggesting that mother-child and father-child relationships play somewhat different emotional and socialization roles, the researchers measured perceived maternal and paternal differential support using an adapted version of the Intergenerational Support Index. Participants rated ten forms of parental assistance, including emotional, practical, communication, advice-related, and financial support, indicating for each whether it flowed more toward themselves or toward a designated sibling closest in age. Scores above the scale midpoint signaled support favoring the participant; scores below signaled support favoring the sibling. Both scales showed strong internal consistency, with reliability coefficients of 0.82 for maternal and 0.83 for paternal support.

Sibling differentiation was measured with the differentiation subscale of the Sibling Influence Scale, which captures the extent to which people deliberately distance themselves from a sibling by emphasizing differences in behaviors, choices, or strengths. A sample item reads, I try to be good at things that my sister or brother isn’t good at. Personality was assessed with Goldberg’s 25-item Adjective Scale, covering the five major traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The analytic strategy was ambitious: a single moderated regression model containing covariates such as gender, birth order, age gap, and family size, plus linear and quadratic terms for maternal and paternal support, all five personality traits, and twenty interaction terms testing whether each trait moderated each component of parental support.

The headline finding concerns maternal support. Neither the linear nor the quadratic term of paternal support predicted differentiation on its own, but maternal support showed a significant curvilinear, U-shaped association. Differentiation tendencies were lowest when young adults perceived maternal support as roughly equal between themselves and their sibling, and rose as perceived inequality increased, regardless of whether the imbalance favored the participant or the sibling. This pattern fits equity theory, which holds that perceived inequity in relationships creates psychological tension that motivates behavioral adjustment, and social comparison theory, which predicts that both strongly favorable and strongly unfavorable treatment heighten the salience of interpersonal differences. It also echoes the self-evaluation maintenance model, under which differentiating from a sibling can serve as a strategy for protecting self-esteem when comparisons become threatening.

Personality proved to be a powerful lens through which these dynamics play out, and conscientiousness emerged as the most consequential trait. For maternal support, conscientiousness moderated the curvilinear pattern: participants higher in conscientiousness showed a pronounced U-shape, with the lowest differentiation at equal maternal support and higher differentiation at unequal levels, while those lower in conscientiousness displayed a much flatter profile with only modest variation. The authors suggest that conscientious individuals, who tend to be attentive to expectations, structure, and fairness, may find balanced maternal support particularly reassuring, reducing any perceived need to establish a distinct sibling niche, whereas inequality in either direction reactivates that motivation.

Conscientiousness operated differently for fathers, moderating the linear rather than the curvilinear association. When paternal support favored the sibling, participants lower in conscientiousness showed higher predicted differentiation than their more conscientious peers, but when support favored the participant, the two groups converged. Highly conscientious individuals, who are typically achievement-oriented and well regulated, may manage unfavorable comparisons without resorting to differentiation, whereas less conscientious individuals may experience sibling-favored paternal support as threatening and respond with a reactive, self-protective distancing strategy. Extraversion and agreeableness each moderated the curvilinear link between paternal support and differentiation in opposite ways. More extraverted participants differentiated least when paternal support strongly favored the sibling and most around equal or participant-favored levels, possibly leveraging perceived advantage to assert status. More agreeable participants showed a classic U-shape, differentiating least at equal support and most under inequality, which the authors interpret as a constructive effort to preserve relational harmony by reducing direct comparisons. Less agreeable participants showed the reverse, an inverted U-shape peaking at equal support, perhaps because balanced treatment intensifies competitive comparison for those less concerned with harmony.

The broader message is that maternal and paternal support carry distinct psychological meanings within sibling dynamics. Paternal support may function as a signal of status or validation, encouraging proactive differentiation in some people and defensive differentiation in others depending on dispositional tendencies, while maternal support may shape identity positioning through emotional security and relational comparison, with balanced maternal care creating a stable context that lowers the urgency to differentiate. The findings also carry practical implications: rather than striving to eliminate all differential treatment, which is often unavoidable given children’s differing needs, parents might communicate the rationale behind unequal support, and professionals working with families may benefit from attending to both child personality and parent gender when considering how favoritism is experienced.

The authors are careful to note the study’s limits. It relied exclusively on self-report from one member of each sibling pair, used a correlational design that cannot establish causation, and examined only supportive forms of differential treatment rather than criticism or conflict. The parent-gender findings may not generalize to single-parent or same-gender parent families, and caregiver involvement was not directly assessed. Still, the core conclusion stands out clearly: the processes that push siblings apart do not fade after adolescence. Even in the twenties, as young adults assemble their adult identities, the subtle arithmetic of who gets more parental support—and the personality of the person doing the counting—continues to shape whether they choose to walk a path deliberately different from their sibling’s.

Subject of Research: How parental differential support and personality traits shape sibling differentiation tendencies in emerging adulthood

Article Title: Finding one’s own path: parental differential support, personality, and sibling differentiation tendencies

Article References: Finding one’s own path: parental differential support, personality, and sibling differentiation tendencies. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10153-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10153-1

Keywords: sibling differentiation, parental differential treatment, personality, emerging adulthood, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, Big Five, social comparison, equity theory, family dynamics, identity development

Neuroticism, one of the five broad dimensions measured by virtually every modern personality inventory, describes the tendency to experience negative emotions such as worry, fear, irritability, and sadness more frequently and more intensely. People high in neuroticism are not simply pessimistic; decades of research show that their nervous systems react more strongly to perceived threats and take longer to return to baseline after a stressor. In the context of a global health emergency, that disposition proved to be a meaningful vulnerability. According to the study, individuals with higher neuroticism scores perceived the risk of COVID-19 as greater, engaged in less physical exercise, and reported drinking more alcohol than their more emotionally stable peers.

Each of those three findings matters on its own, but together they sketch a coherent psychological pathway through which a crisis becomes a compounding health problem. The first element, heightened risk perception, is not inherently maladaptive. Accurately judging danger is essential to protective behavior, and during a pandemic, some degree of vigilance saves lives. Yet the study indicates that for highly neurotic individuals, risk perception operated less as a calibrated alarm and more as a persistent state of dread. When threat appraisal remains chronically elevated, the physiological stress response does not switch off, and the psychological toll accumulates in the form of anxiety, rumination, and disturbed sleep.

The second element, reduced physical exercise, illustrates how a personality trait can cascade into behavioral change that then feeds back into mental health. Exercise is one of the most reliable non-pharmacological buffers against anxiety and depressive symptoms, and lockdowns had already stripped away many routine opportunities for movement, from gym visits to casual walking commutes. For people high in neuroticism, who tend to experience stress as more overwhelming and may have fewer psychological resources to initiate effortful coping behaviors, the pandemic environment appears to have pushed activity levels down further. The result is a familiar and unfortunate loop: stress reduces the motivation to exercise, and the absence of exercise removes one of the most effective tools for managing stress.

The third element, increased alcohol consumption, raises the stakes considerably. Alcohol is a widely used self-medication strategy, offering short-term relief from anxiety at the cost of long-term vulnerability. Elevated drinking during the pandemic was documented across many populations, but the new findings suggest the increase was not evenly distributed. Those highest in neuroticism, precisely the people most prone to pandemic-related distress, were also those most likely to reach for alcohol as a coping mechanism. Public health researchers have long warned that crises can leave a residue of problematic substance use that outlasts the crisis itself, and this study helps identify which segments of the population carried the greatest risk of that residue.

Methodologically, the study belongs to a growing body of work that treats personality not as a static curiosity but as a measurable risk factor for health outcomes. The Big Five framework, encompassing openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, provides a standardized vocabulary for describing stable individual differences, and its predictive power has been demonstrated across domains ranging from occupational success to longevity. What the pandemic offered researchers was an unprecedented, shared stressor: nearly everyone on the planet faced the same threat at the same time, filtered only through their own dispositions and circumstances. That natural experiment made it possible to isolate the contribution of personality with unusual clarity.

The findings on neuroticism align with a broader theoretical picture in which the trait functions as a general amplifier of vulnerability. Previous research had already linked neuroticism to poorer outcomes across the pandemic, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, as well as lower adherence to some protective behaviors. The new study extends that picture by tracing specific behavioral mediators: the perception of greater risk, the reduction in exercise, and the increase in alcohol use. In statistical terms, these behaviors help explain how a personality trait translates into mental distress, offering researchers concrete intervention targets rather than an abstract disposition to worry about.

It is worth emphasizing what the study does not claim. Neuroticism is not a diagnosis, and high scores do not doom anyone to poor mental health. The trait exists on a continuum, and its expression depends heavily on context, resources, and coping strategies. Moreover, conscientiousness and other traits likely played protective roles during the pandemic, with more conscientious individuals tending to maintain routines and adhere to health guidelines. The authors, funded in part by the National Institute on Aging, note that the funders had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, or publication, and the researchers declared no competing interests. The work appears in PLOS One under the title How personality traits shape susceptibility to mental distress in times of crisis: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The practical implications reach well beyond the pandemic. Health systems increasingly recognize that psychological risk is not distributed evenly, and personality screening, already used in some clinical and occupational settings, could help identify people who need additional support when disasters strike. Simple, scalable interventions, such as promoting structured home exercise, providing accessible mental health resources, and offering evidence-based alternatives to alcohol for stress relief, could be targeted toward individuals known to be high in neuroticism before or during a crisis. The study suggests that such targeting would address not just the distress itself but the behavioral pathways, inactivity and drinking, through which distress becomes physical harm.

As the world moves past the acute phase of COVID-19, researchers are still tallying the psychological costs, and studies like this one sharpen the accounting. The pandemic did not create neuroticism, but it revealed how deeply a stable feature of temperament can shape the way a person weathers an unstable world. For the millions of people whose threat-detection systems run hot, the crisis was experienced not as an episode to be managed but as a prolonged siege on their well-being, compounded by less exercise and more alcohol. Understanding that pattern is the first step toward designing public health responses that protect the most vulnerable minds, not just the most vulnerable bodies, the next time a global crisis arrives.

Subject of Research: The influence of Big Five personality traits, particularly neuroticism, on mental distress and health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: How neurotic people struggled more in the COVID-19 pandemic: they perceived the risk as higher, exercised less, and drank more alcohol

Article References: How neurotic people struggled more in the COVID-19 pandemic: they perceived the risk as higher, exercised less, and drank more alcohol. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: neuroticism, personality, COVID-19, mental distress, risk perception, physical exercise, alcohol consumption, Big Five, PLOS One, pandemic psychology, coping behavior, public health

The study was led by Marco Angrisani, senior economist at the USC Center for Economic and Social Research and associate professor (research) of economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Angrisani and his colleagues set out to answer a question that has troubled mental health researchers for decades: why do responses to large-scale societal stressors vary so dramatically from one person to the next? Their answer, drawn from one of the most extensive longitudinal datasets available, points to personality as a meaningful and measurable factor in shaping that heterogeneity. “There is a wide variety of mental health responses to large-scale societal stressors,” Angrisani said. “Our study shows that personality traits, and neuroticism in particular, play a role in shaping heterogeneous responses in a major crisis across individuals and could therefore inform better targeted interventions.”

The evidence base for these conclusions is unusually robust. The researchers followed 4,030 U.S. adults using data from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative internet panel managed by the USC Center for Economic and Social Research. The analysis drew on more than 100,000 survey responses collected from 2019 through early 2024, a window that allowed the team to compare mental health before, during, and after the pandemic. That temporal span matters enormously. Cross-sectional studies conducted at a single point in time can show that distress was high during the pandemic, but they cannot reveal whether it rose, fell, or lingered afterward. By anchoring their measurements in pre-pandemic baselines and extending them well into the recovery period, the researchers could distinguish acute, transient distress from the kind of prolonged suffering that signals genuine vulnerability.

At the heart of the analysis were the so-called Big Five personality traits, the dominant framework in contemporary personality psychology. Neuroticism describes a tendency to experience worry, emotional sensitivity, and stronger reactions to stress or uncertainty. Extraversion captures the tendency to be outgoing, energetic, and motivated by social interaction. Openness reflects curiosity about new ideas and experiences and a willingness to consider change. Agreeableness denotes a tendency to be cooperative, trusting, and concerned about social harmony, while conscientiousness describes people who are organized, dependable, self-disciplined, and goal-oriented. Crucially, these characteristics exist on a continuum. Everyone possesses some degree of each trait, and a high or low score on any dimension does not constitute a disorder. The Big Five model is valued by researchers precisely because it reduces the enormous complexity of human temperament to five stable, measurable dimensions that can be tracked over time and correlated with real-world outcomes.

Mental distress in the study was measured with the PHQ-4, a brief validated questionnaire that assesses symptoms of anxiety and depression. A score of six or higher on the PHQ-4 indicates moderate-to-severe symptoms, although the instrument is a screening tool rather than a clinical diagnosis. Using this threshold, the researchers quantified how the probability of moderate or severe distress shifted across the pandemic for people at different points on the personality spectrum. The results were striking. Increases in the probability of moderate or severe distress were approximately 11 to 20 percentage points greater among participants who scored in the highest 25 percent for neuroticism compared with those in the lowest quarter. In practical terms, this means that highly neurotic individuals were dramatically more likely to cross the threshold into clinically significant distress as the crisis unfolded.

Just as important as the size of the effect was its persistence. The association between neuroticism and elevated distress held across young, middle-aged, and older adults, and it remained evident into the post-pandemic observation period. This durability is what distinguishes the finding from earlier work documenting short-lived spikes in anxiety during lockdowns. The pandemic has largely receded as an acute threat, yet the psychological shadow it cast appears to have lingered far longer for people high in neuroticism than for their more emotionally stable counterparts. For health systems still grappling with elevated demand for mental health services, that pattern suggests the pandemic’s toll was not merely an episode but, for a vulnerable segment of the population, a lasting shift.

The study also uncovered behavioral differences that may help explain the mechanism. Participants higher in neuroticism perceived greater health and financial risks during the crisis, adopted more protective behaviors, and reported exercising and relaxing less frequently while consuming more alcohol. These patterns sketch a coherent picture: people who react strongly to uncertainty tend to perceive danger more acutely, respond with heightened caution, and simultaneously withdraw from the very activities, such as exercise, relaxation, and moderate drinking habits, that buffer against psychological distress. Measurements of extraversion, openness, and agreeableness showed weaker or inconsistent associations with distress trajectories, while conscientiousness appeared modestly protective, particularly among adults aged 60 and older. That last finding hints that the self-discipline and structure characteristic of conscientious individuals may function as a psychological resource in older adults facing prolonged disruption.

The practical implications extend well beyond pandemic planning. The findings could help clinicians and emergency planners recognize who may need closer follow-up after disasters, public-health emergencies, or other prolonged disruptions. Public information campaigns could also be tested to ensure they inform people without unnecessarily increasing distress among those who are more vulnerable to it. Angrisani was careful to emphasize, however, that personality should be just one part of a broader risk assessment, considered alongside current symptoms, previous mental health conditions, and social circumstances, rather than serving as a label or an automatic trigger for treatment. Neuroticism is a risk factor, not a diagnosis, and it does not determine any individual’s mental health destiny. In the paper, the authors advocate for monitoring and stepped care: following people over time and offering treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy or emotion-regulation training when significant, persistent symptoms emerge, rather than treating people solely because of a personality score.

Like all observational research, the study has limits that the authors acknowledge. It identifies associations and cannot prove that personality, especially neuroticism, caused the distress patterns observed. All personality and mental distress measures were self-reported, which introduces the possibility of reporting bias, and the findings may not generalize beyond the United States. Even so, the scale and duration of the dataset give the results considerable weight, and they point toward a concrete strategy for the future: crisis communication that emphasizes practical, controllable actions, combined with accessible mental health support, could help protect psychologically vulnerable groups when the next major disruption arrives. As climate events, geopolitical instability, and future pandemics test societies around the world, the USC-led study offers a deceptively simple insight with far-reaching consequences. The question of who will suffer most in a crisis may be partly answerable in advance, and answering it could mean the difference between reactive care and genuinely preventive support for the millions of people whose minds bear the longest scars of collective trauma.

Subject of Research: The influence of personality traits, particularly neuroticism, on the persistence of mental distress during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: Personality traits influence level of lasting distress during a crisis, USC-led study finds

Article References: Personality traits influence level of lasting distress during a crisis, USC-led study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: neuroticism, personality traits, Big Five, mental distress, COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety, depression, PHQ-4, Understanding America Study, stepped care, observational study, USC

The research team recruited 662 Brazilian adults aged 18 to 71, with a mean age of about 35 years. Roughly 80 percent of participants were women, and most resided in the state of São Paulo. Data were collected online in April 2022 through Google Forms, with participants providing informed consent and confirming they were at least 18 years old. The sample also carried rich mental health context: nearly 43 percent reported having undergone psychological treatment at some point, about 40 percent were currently in treatment, and roughly 62 percent reported no psychiatric diagnosis. This community-based composition gives the study a window into how dark traits manifest in everyday life rather than exclusively in clinical or forensic settings.

Methodologically, the study stands out for its sophistication. Rather than relying on simple correlations, the researchers employed exploratory structural equation modeling, or ESEM, a flexible statistical framework that allows latent factors to load on multiple indicators without the rigid constraints of confirmatory approaches. Analyses were conducted in R using the lavaan package, with a robust weighted least squares estimator and gender included as a covariate through a MIMIC modeling design, ensuring that reported associations held independent of gender effects. Model fit was evaluated against established benchmarks, and the final models achieved satisfactory indices, with comparative fit values around 0.95 and root mean square error values well below conventional thresholds.

The instruments themselves spanned the personality landscape. Dark traits were measured with the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen, a 12-item self-report scale with four items per trait, alongside the Single Item Narcissism Scale. To capture narcissism in greater depth, the team used the Pathological Narcissism Inventory, a 52-item measure distinguishing grandiose facets such as exploitativeness and entitlement rage from vulnerable facets such as hiding the self and contingent self-esteem. Socioemotional skills were assessed with the SENNA inventory, a 54-item instrument organized around five domains that parallel the Big Five: engaging with others (extraversion), amity (agreeableness), self-management (conscientiousness), emotional resilience (neuroticism), and openness to the new (openness). All scales showed acceptable to good internal consistency in the sample.

The headline finding is strikingly consistent: every Dark Triad trait was negatively associated with amity, the socioemotional skill domain corresponding to agreeableness. Machiavellianism showed a strong negative association with amity (−0.58) alongside a positive link to engaging with others (0.30). Psychopathy displayed the strongest antagonism link of all (−0.73), paired with a moderate positive association with openness to the new (0.30). Narcissism, measured in multiple ways, combined positive associations with social engagement (0.41 for the Dirty Dozen version) with negative ties to amity (−0.50) and emotional resilience (−0.31). In other words, the common core of darkness is antagonism—a pattern of manipulativeness, callousness, deceitfulness, and hostility that researchers increasingly regard as the shared backbone of all three traits.

Beneath that shared core, the study revealed trait-specific signatures. The positive association between psychopathy and openness caught the authors’ attention: traits such as novelty seeking and imagination may accompany the impulsivity and moral norm violation characteristic of psychopathy, though the authors caution that the Dirty Dozen’s limited coverage of the construct means this link likely reflects impulsivity and emotional dysregulation rather than the cold, calculating features of primary psychopathy. Meanwhile, the positive ties between Machiavellianism, narcissism, and engaging with others suggest that socially dominant, assertive, even charming behavior can coexist with exploitative motives—a kind of pathological extraversion built for manipulation rather than genuine connection.

One of the most culturally intriguing threads involves the Brazilian jeitinho, an emic construct describing the creative, persuasive, sometimes rule-bending knack for achieving personal goals. Because jeitinho shares features with Dark Triad traits—strategic social manipulation and self-promotion—it may help explain why Machiavellianism plays a prominent role in Brazilian personality networks compared with other countries. The authors suggest that in sociocultural contexts like Brazil, individuals high in Machiavellianism may deploy interpersonal strategies that, though instrumentally motivated, are perceived as positive social engagement, potentially inflating the observed correlation between Machiavellianism and the engaging-with-others domain. Cross-cultural studies have indeed flagged Brazil as showing some of the largest differences in Dark Triad item responses relative to countries such as Greece and Japan.

The study’s treatment of narcissism may prove its most clinically valuable contribution. By modeling the facets of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory separately, the researchers showed that grandiose and vulnerable narcissism carry distinct socioemotional profiles. Grandiose facets—exploitativeness, grandiose fantasies, entitlement rage—tended to pair with high social engagement and low amity, with exploitativeness showing a positive association with engaging with others (0.35). Vulnerable facets told a different story: contingent self-esteem was moderately associated with low emotional resilience (−0.37), and hiding the self was negatively associated with social engagement (−0.34) while positively linked to openness (0.28). Both dimensions shared low amity, reinforcing the idea that antagonism is central to pathological narcissism, while emotional resilience and amity help separate the grandiose from the vulnerable expressions.

The authors are candid about limitations. The Dirty Dozen primarily captures callous affect and impulsive psychopathy, omitting dimensions such as antisocial behavior and interpersonal manipulation. The sample’s predominantly female composition, roughly 80 percent, limits generalizability to men despite statistical controls. The single-item narcissism measure, while convenient, may inflate associations with assertiveness and fail to capture vulnerability. And because the design was cross-sectional, the direction of causality between dark traits and socioemotional skills remains an open question, calling for longitudinal and experimental follow-ups in more gender-balanced samples.

Even so, the implications are compelling. If dark personality traits can be understood as chronic deficits or imbalances in trainable socioemotional competencies, then interventions that strengthen amity—or curb the manipulative, exploitative forms of social engagement—might genuinely reduce antagonistic tendencies and their damaging interpersonal fallout. The study reframes the Dark Triad not as an immutable curse of character but as a specific, mappable pattern of socioemotional strengths and deficits, one that future research may learn to reshape.

Subject of Research: Associations between Dark Triad personality traits and the five-factor model of socioemotional skills

Article Title: Between Darkness and Emotion: The Dark Triad and the Big Five Socioemotional Factors

Article References: Caurin, N. B., da Rocha, R. M. A., & Hauck-Filho, N. (2026). Between Darkness and Emotion: The Dark Triad and the Big Five Socioemotional Factors. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00516-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00516-9

Keywords: Dark Triad, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, antagonism, socioemotional skills, Big Five, personality psychology, structural equation modeling, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, Brazilian sample

The study was conducted by Daniela Zibenberg of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Jean Carlos Natividade of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas. They recruited 646 Brazilian adults aged 18 and older, with a mean age of 29.6 years, through invitations distributed on social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Just under 73 percent of participants were women, and roughly 60 percent were in a romantic relationship at the time of the study, most of them dating or married. The research was approved by the ethics committee of the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

To capture the psychological footprint of romantic comedies, the researchers measured several distinct constructs. Participants ranked their preference for 14 film genres, reported how often they watched romantic comedies on a scale from never to always, and estimated how many romantic comedy films they watched in a typical week. Romantic beliefs were assessed with a Brazilian adaptation of the well-established Romantic Beliefs Scale, which measures four idealized notions: that love finds a way despite obstacles, that there is one and only one true love, that true love will be nearly perfect, and that love can strike at first sight. Relationship satisfaction was measured with a validated five-item scale, and personality was assessed with both the Big Five model and the Emotional Investment construct, which captures the disposition to invest in an amorous relationship through its Romanticism and Affection components.

The theoretical backdrop for the study draws on two of the most influential frameworks in media psychology. Social learning theory, originally formulated by Albert Bandura, holds that people learn behaviors and attitudes by observing others, including fictional characters on screen. Cultivation theory, developed by George Gerbner and colleagues, proposes that heavy media consumers gradually come to perceive the world as resembling the world depicted in the media they consume. Applied to romantic comedies, both frameworks predict that repeated exposure to idealized romantic expressions, such as love at first sight and destined soul mates, should lead viewers to endorse those same beliefs more strongly in their own lives.

The correlational results supported that prediction. Weekly romantic comedy consumption was positively correlated with all four romantic belief factors as well as with an overall romantic belief score. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses, which tested five separate models, revealed that demographic and personality characteristics together explained between 13 percent and 23 percent of the variance in romantic beliefs, with the strongest prediction observed for the overall romantic belief factor. Adding the romantic comedy variables of frequency, weekly quantity, and genre preference increased the explained variance by an additional 2 to 4 percent across the models. Notably, the Romanticism component of Emotional Investment emerged as the single most powerful predictor in every model tested, suggesting that a person’s underlying romantic disposition is tightly interwoven with their idealized beliefs about love.

The specific predictors showed instructive patterns. Conscientiousness and Romanticism positively predicted all four belief factors, while Affection behaved counterintuitively, showing negative associations with several beliefs once other variables were accounted for. Age negatively predicted belief in the one and only true love but positively predicted idealization, a pattern the authors speculate may reflect generational differences or the accumulated relationship experience of older participants. Gender also mattered, with men endorsing more romantic beliefs than women on average. Among the romantic comedy measures, the number of romantic comedy films watched per week was the most consistent predictor, positively forecasting idealization, love at first sight, love finds a way, and the overall romantic belief score, while genre preference predicted the love finds a way factor and the overall score.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding emerged from the mediation analysis examining how romantic comedy consumption relates to relationship satisfaction. The researchers found what statisticians call inconsistent mediation, or a suppression effect. At the direct level, weekly romantic comedy consumption was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction, a pattern the authors attribute to the upward social comparisons viewers may make between their own relationships and the polished, idealized romances on screen, which often depict consistently satisfying intimacy, mind-reading partners, and frequent romantic gestures. Yet two indirect pathways ran in the opposite direction and were statistically significant: through the belief in one and only true love, and through the idealization belief, romantic comedy consumption was positively associated with relationship satisfaction. These positive indirect effects partially offset the negative direct effect, producing a total effect that was not significantly different from zero.

This double-edged pattern helps resolve a long-standing debate in the literature. Previous studies have reported that romantic media fosters unrealistic expectations that undermine satisfaction, that it reinforces positive beliefs that enhance relationships, and that it has no measurable association with satisfaction at all. The new findings reconcile these contradictions by showing that all three outcomes can coexist within a single pathway structure, with the balance determined by which beliefs a viewer internalizes. Importantly, the researchers found that idealized romantic beliefs themselves were positively correlated with relationship satisfaction, consistent with earlier work suggesting that romanticism can promote relationship-maintenance behaviors rather than undermining them. The love at first sight factor, by contrast, was not significantly correlated with satisfaction, possibly because initial physical attraction is largely unrelated to the passion, intimacy, and commitment that sustain long-term partnerships.

The authors are careful to acknowledge the limitations of their design. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot determine whether romantic comedies shape beliefs, whether people with romantic beliefs seek out romantic comedies to confirm their existing worldview, or whether both processes operate simultaneously. Only about 3.4 percent of the sample reported watching three or more romantic comedies per week, so stronger cultivation effects might emerge among heavier viewers. All measures relied on self-report, which is vulnerable to recall bias, and the sample was predominantly female, highly educated, and skewed toward participants with incomplete college education. The researchers also note that Brazilian media consumption is shaped by a heavy reliance on foreign streaming content and by the enduring popularity of daily soap operas, both of which may dilute or complicate the identification processes assumed by social learning theory. Future work, they argue, should include longitudinal designs, more gender-balanced and ethnically representative samples, and experimental procedures that track belief changes over weeks with and without romantic comedy exposure.

The practical implications reach from the therapy room to the writers’ room. The authors suggest that relationship education programs could harness romantic comedies that reinforce beneficial beliefs, and they cite prior evidence that simple interventions, such as reading a corrective article before viewing or completing a counterarguing exercise afterward, can reduce romantic belief endorsement when desired. Clinicians working from evidence-based frameworks may find the results useful when discussing media habits with clients, particularly given research linking belief formation to emotional well-being. For filmmakers, the recommendation is subtle: rather than merely portraying idealized relationships, producers might craft narratives that promote the specific idealized beliefs, such as love finding a way or the value of a singular partner, that are associated with greater satisfaction. And for the millions of viewers who return each year to the comforting formula of the meet-cute and the happy ending, the message is reassuring. Romantic comedies do leave a mark on how we think about love, but that mark is modest, filtered through who we already are, and it does not appear to make our relationships any less happy.

Subject of Research: The impact of romantic comedy exposure on idealized romantic beliefs and relationship satisfaction in Brazilian adults

Article Title: Happily Ever After: Impact of Romantic Comedy Exposure on Romantic Beliefs

Article References: Zibenberg, D., & Natividade, J. C. (2026). Happily Ever After: Impact of Romantic Comedy Exposure on Romantic Beliefs. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00526-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00526-7

Keywords: romantic comedies, romantic beliefs, relationship satisfaction, personality traits, cultivation theory, social learning theory, media psychology, Big Five, emotional investment, idealization, Brazilian adults, film consumption