The researchers examined the relationship between Big Five personality traits and a multidimensional assessment of lifestyle in a large student sample. Participants completed a web-based survey measuring openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism with the 44-item Big Five Inventory. Their lifestyles were assessed using the University Self-report Multidimensional Inventory of Lifestyle Evaluation, or U-SMILE.

Lifestyle scores were linearly transformed to a 0–100 scale, while the personality traits were converted to z-scores. Multiple linear regression models estimated the associations between each personality trait and lifestyle score while adjusting for age, gender, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, field of study, household income and employment status. This approach estimates whether personality differences were associated with lifestyle differences beyond the demographic and social variables included in the analysis.

Extraversion had the strongest positive association among the five traits. For each one-standard-deviation increase in extraversion, the model estimated a 1.95-point increase in the lifestyle score, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.35 to 2.55. Openness was associated with a 1.04-point increase per standard deviation, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.47 to 1.61, while agreeableness was associated with a 0.59-point increase, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.07 to 1.12. Each of these confidence intervals excluded zero, indicating statistically significant adjusted associations in the sample.

Neuroticism showed the opposite direction. A one-standard-deviation increase in neuroticism was associated with a 1.89-point reduction in the lifestyle score, with a 95% confidence interval from −2.37 to −1.40. The estimate for conscientiousness indicated a 0.36-point reduction, but its 95% confidence interval, from −0.88 to 0.17, included zero and was therefore not statistically significant. The results identify extraversion and neuroticism as the most prominent personality correlates in the models, with openness and agreeableness showing smaller positive relationships.

The participants had a mean age of 25.1 years, a standard deviation of 8.5 years and a median age of 22. Most were female, accounting for 72.5% of the sample, and the researchers described the participants as similarly distributed between the two institutions. Age, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, household income and employment status were associated with lifestyle scores in the analysis; gender was not associated with lifestyle.

Because the study was cross-sectional and based on self-report, its findings describe relationships measured at one point in time rather than changes over time or causal effects. The design cannot determine whether personality influences lifestyle, whether lifestyle is related to personality, or whether other factors contribute to both. It also does not establish that altering a personality trait would produce a corresponding change in behavior, and the study did not test whether personality-based lifestyle interventions could improve mental health promotion in universities.

The sample size and the number of demographic and social variables included in the adjusted models provide a detailed snapshot of personality–lifestyle associations in the participating student population. Generalization is limited by the self-reported measures and the inclusion of students from only two institutions. Within those boundaries, the analysis shows that the Big Five traits did not contribute equally: extraversion and neuroticism had the clearest independent associations with the broad lifestyle score, openness and agreeableness had smaller positive associations, and conscientiousness showed no clear association after adjustment.

Subject of Research: Big Five personality traits and multidimensional lifestyle patterns in Brazilian undergraduate students

Article Title: Big five personality traits and lifestyle: a cross-sectional study in brazilian undergraduate students

Article References: Fukuti, P., di Santi, T., Nascimento, A. G., Oliveira, L. C. D., Zuppi Garcia, L. A., Mancini, E. M. M., Cabrelon, V. C., Carrijo, L. D. F., Oliveira, M. C. D., Brañas, M. J. A. A., Croci, M. S., Aguiar-Borges, S., Santos, J. M., Sousa, N., Humes, E. D. C., Menezes, P. R., Miguel, E. C., & Caye, A. (2026). Big five personality traits and lifestyle: a cross-sectional study in brazilian undergraduate students. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05391-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05391-8

Keywords: Big Five personality, lifestyle patterns, extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, Brazilian students, cross-sectional study, regression analysis, mental health, five

Researchers examined the Big Five personality traits using multivariable linear regression models. The primary models adjusted for sociodemographic, family-related, behavioral and health-related covariates. Interaction terms between sleep quality and each personality trait tested whether the estimated personality–depressive symptom associations varied across levels of sleep quality. Sensitivity analyses additionally adjusted for social support, teacher–student relationships and peer relationships, while stratified analyses examined gender and grade-level subgroups. The supplied abstract does not report the direction or magnitude of differences by gender or grade, and it does not provide regression coefficients, confidence intervals, instrument names or other details needed to assess the precision and size of the findings.

After the additional adjustment for social support and interpersonal relationship factors, the associations involving agreeableness and openness were attenuated and no longer statistically significant. The pattern of sleep-quality interaction results remained unchanged in the sensitivity analysis. Based on the abstract, the negative associations involving conscientiousness and extraversion were therefore relatively robust to the additional covariates, whereas the agreeableness and openness associations were sensitive to that adjustment. The results do not establish whether social support or relationship factors mediate, confound or otherwise explain the observed associations.

These findings are summarized from the abstract of an observational, cross-sectional study. Such a design can identify statistical associations but cannot establish temporal order, causation or the direction of relationships among personality, sleep quality and depressive symptoms. The evidence is limited to the surveyed student population in northwestern China, and the abstract does not provide detailed information about recruitment, response rates, missing data, depression measurement or the sample’s demographic composition. Accordingly, the results do not demonstrate that changing sleep quality or personality traits would change depressive symptoms or provide clinical benefits.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional associations among Big Five personality traits, sleep quality and depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents

Article Title: Associations between personality traits and depressive symptoms vary by sleep quality among Chinese adolescents: a large cross-sectional study

Article References: Hu, B., Chen, C., Zhang, M., & Guo, J. (2026). Associations between personality traits and depressive symptoms vary by sleep quality among Chinese adolescents: a large cross-sectional study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05708-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05708-7

Keywords: adolescents, Big Five personality, sleep quality, depressive symptoms, cross-sectional study, Chinese students, neuroticism, conscientiousness, extraversion, social support, Associations, between

The research focused on frontline employees because their engagement in this activity is important for service organizations in delivering high-quality customer service and maintaining competitiveness. Although earlier work has commonly examined what promotes CO-OCB, the investigators instead focused on factors that might prevent frontline employees from participating in it. The researchers used conservation of resources theory to develop their hypotheses.

In their proposed model, perceived organizational politics was associated with work alienation, and work alienation was related to a reduced tendency to perform CO-OCB. Their statistical analysis also supported a moderation role for conscientiousness: the negative relationship between perceived organizational politics and CO-OCB was weaker among employees with higher levels of conscientiousness. In the study’s terminology, this meant that conscientiousness buffered the effect of perceived organizational politics on customer-oriented citizenship behavior.

The findings remained evident after the researchers controlled for two other factors that might help explain CO-OCB: prosocial motivation and perceived organizational support. The survey therefore supported the proposed relationships beyond those two commonly considered mechanisms. However, the evidence came from a nonexperimental survey of hospitality-sector employees rather than an intervention or experiment that manipulated workplace conditions.

The results establish reported associations consistent with the proposed model, but they do not by themselves demonstrate that perceived organizational politics caused work alienation or that alienation caused a reduction in CO-OCB. The scope is also limited to the frontline hospitality employees included in the study, so the findings should not automatically be extended to other industries or workplaces without further evidence.

Subject of Research: Survey evidence on perceived organizational politics, work alienation, conscientiousness and customer-oriented citizenship behavior among hospitality employees.

Article Title: What discourages frontline employees from engaging in customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior? the role of perceived organizational politics, work alienation, and conscientiousness

Article References: Wu, X., Xu, A. J., & Sun, H. (2026). What discourages frontline employees from engaging in customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior? the role of perceived organizational politics, work alienation, and conscientiousness. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1636. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10160-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10160-2

Keywords: frontline employees, hospitality workers, customer service, organizational citizenship behavior, workplace politics, work alienation, conscientiousness, employee surveys, conservation of resources theory, discourages, frontline, employees

The research team, led by Seyed Rouhollah Hosseini-Marvast of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, surveyed 162 emergency department nurses working in teaching hospitals affiliated with the university between June and August 2022. Using convenience sampling, the researchers administered three well-validated psychometric instruments: the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-25) to quantify resilience, the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) to profile personality traits, and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ-18) to capture the mental strategies nurses use to manage emotional distress. The design was correlational, meaning the team measured associations at a single point in time rather than tracking nurses over months or years, but the statistical approach was unusually rigorous for a study of this size.

Methodologically, the researchers employed hierarchical multiple linear regression, a technique that allows the contribution of different variable groups to be assessed in sequence. Demographic characteristics were entered in the first block, the five major personality traits in the second, and the cognitive emotion regulation subscales in the third. Because the data showed heteroscedasticity, meaning the variability of the outcome differed across levels of the predictors, the team applied HC3 robust standard errors, a correction that guards against inflated significance when error variance is uneven. They also ran sensitivity analyses after excluding statistically influential cases, a step that tests whether any single outlier was driving the results.

The headline finding concerns acceptance, one of the adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies measured by the CERQ. In the final regression model, acceptance was positively associated with resilience, with an unstandardized coefficient of 2.06 and a p-value of 0.048, just inside the conventional threshold for statistical significance. Acceptance in this context refers to the deliberate mental act of acknowledging a stressful reality rather than fighting it, denying it, or ruminating over it. For an emergency nurse, this might mean recognizing that a traumatic resuscitation has occurred and cannot be undone, rather than mentally replaying every decision in search of an alternative ending.

More surprising was the second significant result. Conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits and typically celebrated in occupational psychology as a marker of diligence, organization, and reliability, was negatively associated with resilience, with a coefficient of -0.59 and a p-value of 0.017. The authors propose that this paradoxical pattern may reflect rigid self-regulatory tendencies. In other words, nurses who score extremely high on conscientiousness may hold themselves to inflexible standards, struggle to delegate, or find it difficult to let go of perceived failures, and this rigidity could erode their capacity to bounce back under sustained stress. The researchers suggest that psychological flexibility may matter more for resilience in emergency care than effortful control.

Notably, the block of cognitive emotion regulation strategies as a whole did not significantly increase the explained variance in resilience beyond what personality traits already accounted for, with a change in R-squared of 0.06 and a p-value of 0.296. This suggests that while individual strategies like acceptance stand out, the broader family of emotion regulation tactics, which includes rumination, catastrophizing, positive refocusing, and refocusing on planning, does not add much predictive power once stable personality dispositions are taken into account. Personality, in this dataset, appears to be the deeper scaffold on which coping behaviors rest.

The study also revealed a demographic pattern with practical implications. Resilience scores differed significantly by employment type, with permanently employed nurses reporting higher resilience than their contractual counterparts, a difference that reached statistical significance at p = 0.005. Job insecurity is a well-documented chronic stressor, and in the Iranian healthcare context, where contractual positions may offer fewer protections and less predictable career trajectories, this finding resonates with a broader international literature linking precarious employment to poorer mental health outcomes among nurses.

Sensitivity analyses added an important layer of nuance. When the researchers re-ran their models after excluding influential cases, acceptance remained a significant positive correlate of resilience, reinforcing its status as the most robust finding in the study. The negative association with conscientiousness, however, was attenuated, meaning it became weaker and less statistically dependable once extreme observations were removed. The authors themselves frame conscientiousness as an unexpected and tentative result, one that warrants replication before firm conclusions are drawn about whether high conscientiousness genuinely undermines resilience or whether the initial signal was partly an artifact of a few influential data points.

The study’s limitations are worth taking seriously. With 162 participants recruited by convenience sampling from a single university hospital network, the sample may not represent the full diversity of Iranian emergency nursing, let alone emergency nursing globally. The cross-sectional design means causality cannot be established; it is equally plausible that resilient nurses become more accepting over time, or that some unmeasured third variable, such as social support, workload intensity, or prior trauma exposure, drives both acceptance and resilience. Self-report questionnaires are also vulnerable to social desirability bias, particularly on sensitive topics like coping and mental health in a professional culture where stoicism may be valued.

Nevertheless, the findings carry practical weight for healthcare administrators and mental health professionals designing support programs for emergency staff. If acceptance is the most consistent psychological correlate of resilience in this high-acuity setting, then interventions rooted in acceptance-based frameworks, such as acceptance and commitment therapy or mindfulness-based stress reduction, deserve consideration as resilience-building tools for emergency nurses. At the same time, the conscientiousness result serves as a caution against assuming that any desirable personality trait is uniformly protective. In environments defined by relentless unpredictability, the capacity to bend, to tolerate uncertainty, and to accept what cannot be changed may be a more valuable psychological asset than the capacity to control every detail. The authors call for longitudinal research to clarify the causal pathways and identify the contextual moderators that shape resilience in emergency care, a necessary next step before these correlational signals can be translated into targeted, evidence-based support for the clinicians who hold the front line.

Subject of Research: Psychological resilience, emotion regulation strategies, and personality traits among Iranian emergency department nurses

Article Title: Emotion regulation and personality traits associated with resilience among Iranian emergency nurses: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Hosseini-Marvast, S. R., Mosavat, S. H., Jelodarian, A., Jangjou, A., Dehbozorgi, S., Rostami Pur Fard, S., & Farid, S. M. (2026). Emotion regulation and personality traits associated with resilience among Iranian emergency nurses: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05277-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05277-5

Keywords: resilience, emergency nursing, emotion regulation, personality traits, acceptance, conscientiousness, cognitive emotion regulation, occupational stress, cross-sectional study, Iran, BMC Nursing, psychological flexibility

Food addiction is a contested but increasingly studied construct. It describes a cluster of experiences that mirror substance addiction in an eating context: powerful cravings for certain foods, consumption in larger amounts than intended, repeated failed attempts to cut down, continued overeating despite negative consequences, and withdrawal-like states or distress when consumption is curtailed. Researchers typically measure it with symptom counts rather than a simple yes-or-no diagnosis, which allows the severity of the pattern to be graded across a population. The condition has been linked to pathological eating behaviour, obesity and a range of adverse mental health outcomes, yet the emotional underpinnings of the syndrome remain incompletely mapped. Depression and anxiety have received considerable attention; anger, by contrast, has been largely unexplored in this context.

The research team, led by Felix S. Hussenoeder of Leipzig University’s Institute of Social Medicine, Occupational Health and Public Health, set out to close that gap with an unusually rigorous design. Rather than simply asking whether angry people eat more compulsively, they asked whether trait anger, the stable disposition to experience angry feelings across situations, predicts food addiction symptoms independently of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. This distinction matters because trait anger is conceptually entangled with neuroticism and low agreeableness, and a naive analysis could mistake a general personality vulnerability for a specific emotional signal.

The data came from 1,138 adults aged 20 to 79 who participated in the LIFE-Adult Study, a cohort drawn from the general population of Leipzig between 2011 and 2014. Participants completed established questionnaires assessing trait anger along with three dimensions of how anger is handled: anger expression-in, which reflects suppressing angry feelings and directing them inward; anger expression-out, which reflects directing anger toward other people or objects in the environment; and anger control, which reflects attempts to restrain angry feelings before they are expressed. Food addiction symptoms were quantified as symptom counts, and the team used sequential Poisson regression, a statistical approach suited to count outcomes, to build models of increasing complexity.

The analytical strategy was deliberately layered. The researchers first examined the association between trait anger and food addiction symptoms on its own, then progressively adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics such as age and sex, for social support, for alcohol use, for the anger expression and regulation dimensions, and finally for the Big Five personality traits. This stepwise approach allowed them to see which associations survived as the statistical company grew more crowded, a technique that helps separate genuine independent signals from correlations that merely ride on other variables.

The results were striking in their selectivity. Higher trait anger was associated with higher food addiction symptom counts, and the association remained statistically significant even after adjustment for the anger expression and regulation dimensions and for sociodemographic characteristics. In the fully adjusted model, four factors emerged as independently associated with higher symptom counts: trait anger, lower social support, higher neuroticism and lower conscientiousness. Notably, the specific dimensions of anger expression and regulation, the inward suppression, the outward venting and the deliberate control of anger, were no longer significant once trait anger and personality were taken into account.

That pattern carries a theoretical implication. It suggests that what matters for food addiction is not so much how a person manages or expresses their anger, but rather the underlying propensity to feel angry in the first place. In other words, the emotional disposition itself, rather than its behavioural outlets, appears to be the relevant correlate of difficult-to-control eating. This framing aligns with broader models of addiction in which negative affect serves as a trigger for compulsive consumption: anger, like other aversive emotional states, may prompt eating as a form of self-regulation or escape, and a person who experiences anger frequently and intensely may accumulate more such triggers over time.

The independent contributions of social support and personality fit coherently into this picture. Lower social support has long been associated with poorer self-regulation and with using food as a coping resource in the absence of interpersonal ones. Higher neuroticism, the tendency toward negative emotionality and emotional instability, is a well-replicated correlate of addictive and compulsive behaviours, and lower conscientiousness, which reflects reduced impulse control and planning, plausibly weakens the behavioural brakes on overconsumption. That trait anger retains its association alongside these established markers suggests it captures something they do not, a specific hot emotional propensity rather than a general tendency toward distress or poor self-discipline.

The authors are careful about what the study cannot show. Because anger and food addiction symptoms were measured at a single point in time, the cross-sectional design cannot establish whether trait anger causes food addiction, whether compulsive eating amplifies angry feelings, or whether both arise from a shared underlying vulnerability. Temporal ordering and causality remain open questions, and longitudinal follow-up would be needed to disentangle them. The study also relies on self-report questionnaires, which are subject to recall and reporting biases, and the sample, while population-based, comes from a single German city.

Even with those caveats, the findings carry practical weight. If trait anger is confirmed as a relevant emotional correlate of food addiction, it could inform screening and intervention: clinicians working with disordered eating might consider assessing anger proneness alongside depression and anxiety, and emotion-focused treatments that address anger specifically might complement existing approaches. For the public, the study adds nuance to a familiar narrative. Food addiction is not simply a matter of willpower or the seductive engineering of ultra-processed foods; it is entangled with temperament, emotional life and social circumstances. A stable tendency to feel angry, the research suggests, may be one thread in that web, quietly shaping why some people find eating far harder to control than others.

Subject of Research: The association between trait anger, anger expression and regulation, and food addiction symptoms in adults

Article Title: Associations of trait anger and the anger expression and regulation dimensions with food addiction in the LIFE-adult study

Article References: Hussenoeder, F. S., Conrad, I., Luppa, M., Löbner, M., Pabst, A., Engel, C., Reyes, N., Yahiaoui-Doktor, M., Glaesmer, H., Hinz, A., Witte, V., Schroeter, M. L., Medawar, E., Kirsten, T., Loeffler, M., Villringer, A., & Riedel-Heller, S. G. (2026). Associations of trait anger and the anger expression and regulation dimensions with food addiction in the LIFE-adult study. Journal of Eating Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01802-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01802-8

Keywords: food addiction, trait anger, anger expression, anger control, emotion regulation, personality, neuroticism, conscientiousness, social support, eating disorders, LIFE-Adult Study, mental health

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: Gozu, H., & Rieder, J. K. (2026). Finding one’s own path: parental differential support, personality, and sibling differentiation tendencies. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1595. 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

The study, published in SSM – Population Health by Yeongmi Jeong, Meghan M. Skira, and Robbee Wedow, focuses on two polygenic scores, which are numerical summaries of the many small genetic differences scattered across a person’s genome. The first, called the smoking initiation score, aggregates variants associated with whether a person ever becomes a regular smoker. The second, the cigarettes-per-day or CPD score, aggregates variants associated with how heavily someone smokes once they start. Both scores were built from genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, that scanned the genomes of more than a million people of European ancestry to find single-letter DNA differences, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, that statistically track with smoking behavior. Each person’s score is calculated by adding up the number of copies of the risk-increasing variants they carry, with each variant weighted by the strength of its estimated association.

Neither score is a crystal ball. Out-of-sample predictions indicate that the initiation score explains only about 4 percent of the variation in whether people start smoking, and the CPD score explains about 4 percent of the variation in how much they smoke. Within the study sample itself, a one standard deviation increase in the initiation score raised the probability of ever smoking by roughly 9 percentage points, while a one standard deviation increase in the CPD score was associated with about two additional cigarettes smoked per day among smokers. These are modest effects, but they are large enough, in a sample of this size, to reveal patterns that would otherwise remain invisible.

To measure health, the researchers constructed a standardized index combining thirteen distinct outcomes: self-reported general health, hospitalization, body mass index, seven doctor-diagnosed chronic conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, heart problems, stroke, and arthritis, and limitations in basic and instrumental activities of daily living. The analysis covered 48,444 person-wave observations from 9,515 unique participants aged 50 to 65, drawn from survey waves between 1994 and 2018. The age range was chosen deliberately, to minimize survival bias, since people with the worst health may not survive to be surveyed at older ages, and to avoid conflating genetic associations with the health effects of retirement.

The central finding is stark. A one standard deviation increase in the CPD score was associated with a 0.043 standard deviation increase in the health index, where higher values indicate worse health. Adding detailed controls for smoking behavior, including current and lifetime smoking status, the exact number of cigarettes smoked per day, the maximum ever smoked, the age of starting and quitting, and teenage smoking, attenuated the association only modestly, to 0.035 standard deviations. For context, that residual association is roughly 38 percent of the average health gap between ever smokers and never smokers in the sample. In other words, even after accounting for everything the surveys record about smoking, the genetic score still carries substantial information about health.

The most provocative result emerged when the researchers restricted the analysis to never smokers, a group of more than 20,000 observations with no reported smoking behavior to explain away. Among these individuals, a one standard deviation increase in either the CPD score or the initiation score was associated with roughly a 0.03 standard deviation increase in the health index. The CPD score also tracked with higher body mass index and obesity among never smokers, with a one standard deviation increase associated with 0.645 units of additional BMI. Because these individuals never smoked, the association cannot be attributed to their own tobacco use, although it could still reflect secondhand smoke exposure, unmeasured smoking-related environments, or something else entirely.

One obvious candidate is the family environment. Because children inherit genes from their parents, a person’s smoking-related genetic score may be correlated with parental smoking, parental substance use, parental education, and childhood socioeconomic conditions, all of which shape later health. The researchers tested this by adding controls for whether parents smoked during the respondent’s childhood, whether parents drank or used drugs heavily enough to cause family problems, parental mortality timing, parental years of schooling, and self-reported childhood financial status. These factors accounted for a modest share of the association, but more than 75 percent of the CPD score’s relationship with health remained, and about 60 percent of the initiation score’s relationship among never smokers survived the most comprehensive specifications.

The researchers then turned to psychology. Prior work has shown that smokers tend to be more impatient, risk-tolerant, and impulsive than non-smokers, and the team asked whether people with higher smoking-related genetic scores differ along similar dimensions. They found little evidence of a link with measured risk preferences, but higher scores were significantly associated with shorter financial planning horizons, greater pessimism, and lower conscientiousness, traits that economists and psychologists have long connected to lower investment in health. When these behavioral and psychological characteristics were added to the models simultaneously, they explained at most 21 percent of the remaining association between the CPD score and health, and 18 percent of the initiation score’s association among never smokers. Even with the fullest set of controls, at least 69 percent of the CPD score’s association with health persisted.

The authors are careful to emphasize what the study does not show. Polygenic scores are not clean measures of direct genetic effects. The GWAS estimates underlying them can absorb indirect genetic effects, such as parental genotypes shaping the environments children experience, as well as confounding from assortative mating, population stratification, collider bias, and case-control ascertainment. There is also the problem of pleiotropy: the same genetic variants that predict smoking may influence other biological processes and traits that affect health directly. Genetic correlation analyses have indeed documented significant overlap between smoking behaviors and a wide range of health, behavioral, and socioeconomic traits. The associations reported here are descriptive, not causal, and the study’s restriction to individuals of European ancestry, a consequence of the limited predictive power of European-derived scores in other populations, means the findings may not generalize more broadly.

Even with those caveats, the implications are significant. Economists studying smoking have long suspected that people who smoke differ from those who do not in ways that extend beyond the behavior itself, and some modeling work has speculated that genetics or correlated risk-taking might explain why smokers face elevated chronic disease and mortality risks beyond what smoking alone explains. This study provides some of the most direct evidence yet that such unobserved heterogeneity is real and partially visible in the genome. Smoking-related polygenic scores, the results suggest, contain information about health that detailed behavioral histories do not capture, pointing toward shared genetic architecture linking tobacco use, personality, and long-run wellbeing. Untangling those threads, the authors argue, will be essential for interpreting genetic risk scores in health research, and for understanding why two people with identical smoking histories can end up with very different health outcomes decades later.

Subject of Research: Associations between smoking-related polygenic scores and health outcomes in midlife

Article Title: Exploring Links Between Health and the Genetic Risk for Smoking

Article References: Jeong, Y., Skira, M. M., & Wedow, R. (2026). Exploring Links Between Health and the Genetic Risk for Smoking. SSM – Population Health, Article 101982. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101982

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101982

Keywords: polygenic scores, smoking initiation, smoking intensity, Health and Retirement Study, GWAS, pleiotropy, chronic disease, health behavior, genetic risk, conscientiousness, never smokers, population health

The research, published in Discover Education by Akoto-Baako Hansen of the University of South Africa, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: which of the Big Five personality traits predict grit, the combination of perseverance and sustained interest in long term goals that psychologists have linked to academic attainment, retention and wellbeing. Grit has become one of the most studied noncognitive skills in education, but the evidence for which personality dispositions give rise to it has been inconsistent, particularly outside well resourced Western institutions.

What makes the study methodologically notable is its analytical machinery. Rather than relying on conventional regression, Hansen applied a family of techniques drawn from econometrics known as double machine learning and post double selection lasso. In these procedures, the lasso algorithm, which shrinks weak predictors to zero, is used purely as a variable selection and orthogonalisation device. After the algorithm identifies which covariates matter, the final coefficients and standard errors are estimated through ordinary least squares, preserving the interpretability of classical statistics while guarding against omitted variable bias and overfitting. Three complementary estimators were used, and a genuinely predictive, cross validated lasso model served as a convergent check.

The results were strikingly consistent across every specification. Openness to experience, the trait associated with intellectual curiosity, imagination and willingness to embrace new experiences, emerged as the strongest predictor of grit, with a standardised coefficient of roughly 0.55 across the inferential models. Conscientiousness, the trait of discipline, organisation and goal directed effort, followed closely with coefficients around 0.41. Extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism showed no meaningful association with grit in any specification, with confidence intervals spanning zero throughout.

The ordering matters. Meta analytic evidence drawn largely from Western populations has consistently identified conscientiousness as the dominant correlate of grit, with openness in a supporting role. In this Ghanaian sample, the hierarchy is reversed. The study offers a theoretical explanation grounded in Trait Activation Theory, which holds that personality traits remain latent until situational cues in the environment prompt their expression. In a teacher training college marked by limited teaching resources, large class sizes and unpredictable institutional conditions, the argument goes, those constraints act as powerful cues that activate adaptability and curiosity rather than routine discipline.

In other words, a highly organised but rigid student may struggle when power outages interrupt study sessions, learning materials arrive late, or timetables change abruptly. A student high in openness can improvise alternative strategies, treat obstacles as puzzles rather than barriers, and sustain motivation under uncertainty. Five Factor Theory complements this reading by treating grit as a characteristic adaptation, a habit shaped jointly by underlying dispositions and environmental demands. In this context, the adaptation draws more heavily on flexible curiosity than on structured self-discipline.

The descriptive statistics reinforce how distinctive this population is. Trainees reported high average grit, around 4.26 on a five point scale, and the distribution was strongly negatively skewed, with most students clustered at the upper end. Grit correlated strongly with openness and conscientiousness, with correlation coefficients of 0.62 and 0.56 respectively, magnitudes that exceed many reported in Western meta analyses. The intercorrelations among the five traits were low to moderate, easing concerns that the findings were an artefact of overlapping measures.

The predictive lasso model added a further layer of confirmation. Trained on a subsample and tuned through tenfold cross validation, the model retained nine of fourteen candidate covariates and explained close to 47 percent of the variance in grit scores on withheld data. Under this stricter predictive criterion, agreeableness and neuroticism were not merely statistically weak but dropped entirely from the model, receiving coefficients of exactly zero. Openness and conscientiousness survived with the largest coefficients, reinforcing the conclusion that these two traits carry the dominant association with grit in this setting.

The null results are themselves informative. The absence of a neuroticism effect departs from meta analytic findings that emotional instability typically undermines perseverance, and from a Turkish study reporting a negative association. The author suggests that the relationship may be nonlinear, or that Ghanaian trainees develop coping strategies that buffer the effects of emotional sensitivity. Similarly, the lack of an extraversion effect may reflect the collectivist cultural context, where the advantages of sociability for personal goal pursuit are less pronounced than in individualist settings.

For practitioners, the implications are concrete. Interventions aimed at building grit among prospective teachers in Ghana should prioritise cultivating openness, through problem based learning, exposure to diverse perspectives and independent exploration, alongside conscientiousness, through goal setting and self regulation training, rather than attempting to alter traits that appear irrelevant to persistence in this context. The study also offers a methodological template for educational psychology, demonstrating that machine learning tools can be harnessed for rigorous causal inference rather than mere prediction. The author cautions that the cross sectional design, the single institution sample and the reliance on self report limit generalisability, and calls for longitudinal and nonparametric follow ups. But the core message stands: the personality foundations of grit are not universal, and in resource constrained classrooms, curiosity may matter more than discipline.

Subject of Research: Predicting grit from Big Five personality traits among Ghanaian college students using regularisation-assisted machine learning methods

Article Title: Machine learning in predicting the effects of personality traits on college students’ grit in Ghana

Article References: Hansen, A.-B. (2026). Machine learning in predicting the effects of personality traits on college students’ grit in Ghana. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1107. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02243-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02243-w

Keywords: grit, Big Five personality traits, machine learning, double machine learning, lasso, teacher trainees, Ghana, openness, conscientiousness, educational psychology, Trait Activation Theory, noncognitive skills

A new study published in the Journal of Neurology by Electra Chatzidimitriou of the University of California, San Francisco and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, together with colleagues including Howard Rosen, Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini, William Seeley, Bruce Miller, and Katherine Rankin, set out to answer that question with unusual rigor. The team had previously developed an integrative model of functional decline in a small Greek cohort of 26 patients with bvFTD, combining cognitive, behavioral, personality, and brain imaging variables. Now they have tested whether that model holds up in a much larger and completely independent sample: 146 individuals with mild-stage bvFTD evaluated at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. This kind of external validation is a critical but underused step in dementia research, because it determines whether relationships observed in one cohort are robust enough to generalize across clinical settings, demographics, and cultures.

The participants all met the international consortium criteria for at least possible bvFTD, and only patients scoring above 18 on the Mini-Mental State Examination were included, ensuring the analyses focused on early disease rather than advanced neurodegeneration. Each patient underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging on 3 Tesla scanners, a comprehensive neuropsychological battery, and informant-based assessments of behavior, personality, and daily functioning. Because patients with bvFTD frequently lack self-awareness, the researchers relied on knowledgeable informants, such as close relatives, to rate personality with the Big Five Inventory and behavior with the Neuropsychiatric Inventory. The primary outcome was the Functional Activities Questionnaire, an informant report covering ten domains of instrumental daily living, from balancing a checkbook to preparing meals and keeping track of current events.

On the analytical side, the study combined two complementary statistical approaches. First, the team used penalized Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression, a machine learning technique that shrinks the coefficients of uninformative predictors to zero, allowing the strongest correlates of functional status to emerge even when candidate variables are highly correlated. The regularization parameter was tuned through ten-fold cross-validation, and the data were split into training and test sets to evaluate predictive performance. Second, structural equation modeling was used to map the directional pathways among the surviving variables, testing how brain structure, cognition, behavior, and personality interconnect to produce functional disability.

The LASSO analysis delivered a striking result: the two strongest predictors of functional impairment were not cognitive measures at all, but personality and behavior. Reduced conscientiousness, as rated by informants, carried the largest coefficient, followed closely by apathy. Only then came global cognition on the MMSE, executive performance on a modified Trail Making Test, the ability to detect sarcasm on the Awareness of Social Inference Test, and semantic verbal fluency. Together these six variables explained roughly 39 percent of the variance in functional scores. Variables that often preoccupy clinicians, including inhibitory control on the Stroop test, visuoconstructional skills, disinhibition, and even the volume of the right superior frontal gyrus, were shrunk out of the model, indicating that they contributed no independent predictive information once the stronger correlates were accounted for.

The path model then revealed how these predictors relate to one another, and it fit the data exceptionally well, with a nonsignificant chi-square, a Comparative Fit Index of 1.000, a Root Mean Square Error of Approximation of zero, and a standardized residual below 0.05. Three brain-to-cognition pathways emerged from the volume of the right superior frontal gyrus, a prefrontal region involved in executive control, attentional regulation, and the initiation of goal-directed behavior. Smaller gray matter volume in this region was associated with slower executive performance, which in turn predicted worse daily functioning. A parallel pathway linked the same region to global cognition and, through it, to disability. A third, more hierarchical pathway showed that executive dysfunction feeds into broader global cognitive decline, consistent with the characteristic trajectory of bvFTD, in which early frontal network disruption progressively erodes multiple cognitive domains.

Alongside this neural-cognitive cascade, the model identified a partially independent behavioral-personality pathway. Apathy was associated with functional impairment both directly and indirectly, through its relationship with reduced conscientiousness. In other words, the motivational collapse that defines bvFTD appears to undermine daily life in two ways: patients stop initiating activities altogether, and the erosion of goal-directed behavior manifests as disorganization, unreliability, and an inability to plan and complete multistep tasks. Notably, this pathway appeared relatively independent of the neural-cognitive pathways, hinting that motivational and personality changes in bvFTD are mediated by partially distinct neural systems, such as medial frontal and limbic circuits, rather than being mere downstream consequences of executive dysfunction.

One intriguing nuance concerned semantic verbal fluency. In the larger American cohort, fluency was strongly connected to the superior frontal gyrus, executive performance, and global cognition, but it no longer showed a direct path to functional status, unlike in the original smaller Greek study. The authors interpret this through the framework of controlled semantic cognition, which holds that retrieving and deploying conceptual knowledge depends on both a semantic representational system and an executive control system. In a larger sample, the shared variance that fluency once captured across executive and global domains was more precisely disentangled, positioning semantic fluency as an intermediate cognitive marker rather than an independent driver of disability.

The clinical implications are substantial. Because behavioral and personality variables outperformed cognitive tests as predictors of everyday function, the authors argue that assessing bvFTD with cognitive screening alone fundamentally misses the point. Comprehensive evaluation should integrate neurocognitive, behavioral, socioemotional, and personality domains, and care planning should be tailored to each patient’s profile. Patients dominated by apathy and reduced conscientiousness may benefit most from structured environmental support, external cueing, routine-based interventions, and caregiver-mediated behavioral activation, whereas those with prominent executive inefficiency may need targeted training in task sequencing, planning, and goal management. Many patients will require combined approaches.

The study is not without limitations. Variable selection was partly guided by the earlier Greek findings, the neuroimaging analysis focused on a single prefrontal region, and some assessment instruments differed between cohorts, requiring conceptual rather than exact measurement equivalence. The cross-sectional design also precludes causal inference. Still, the convergence of findings across two countries, two healthcare systems, and a fivefold larger sample provides compelling evidence that disability in early bvFTD emerges from the dynamic interplay of two complementary processes: frontal neurodegeneration eroding the cognitive machinery of independence, and motivational and personality changes directly dismantling the will and organization needed to engage with daily life. Recognizing both streams, the authors conclude, is essential for optimizing clinical care and preserving quality of life for patients and families facing this devastating disease.

Subject of Research: Functional impairment and its neural, cognitive, behavioral, and personality determinants in early-stage behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia

Article Title: External validation of an integrative model of functional impairment in early-stage behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD)

Article References: Chatzidimitriou, E., Moraitou, D., Ioannidis, P., Aretouli, E., Chen, Y., Rosen, H. J., Gorno-Tempini, M. L., Seeley, W. W., Miller, B. L., & Rankin, K. P. (2026). External validation of an integrative model of functional impairment in early-stage behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Journal of Neurology, 273(10), Article 642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-026-14182-5

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DOI: 10.1007/s00415-026-14182-5

Keywords: bvFTD, frontotemporal dementia, functional impairment, apathy, conscientiousness, executive function, superior frontal gyrus, LASSO regression, structural equation modeling, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, dementia

The research team, led by Yannick Rudolph and Esther N. Moszeik, surveyed 284 university students drawn from both military and civilian institutions across Germany. The sample was unusual: more than half of the participants were enrolled at universities operated by the German Armed Forces, and every single one of those military students had passed an aptitude test as part of their admission. The participants, whose average age was just over 23, completed validated German-language questionnaires measuring perfectionism, personality, achievement goals, and their self-reported GPA on the German scale, where 1.0 is the best possible grade and 4.0 marks the threshold of failure.

Central to the study is the modern two-factor model of perfectionism. Psychologists increasingly distinguish between perfectionistic strivings, which capture the drive toward flawlessness and demanding personal standards, and perfectionistic concerns, which reflect fear of failure, excessive self-criticism, and dread of negative evaluation. Decades of research have tied perfectionistic concerns to maladaptive outcomes including burnout, rumination, and even suicidal ideation, while perfectionistic strivings have been linked to achievement motivation and goal-directed behavior. The two facets are correlated but distinct, and the new study measured them separately using subscales of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, one of the field’s most widely used instruments.

The headline result was a statistically significant negative correlation between perfectionistic strivings and GPA—negative, because in the German system lower numbers mean better grades. The correlation coefficient of −0.25 falls in the small-to-medium range, but it aligns closely with earlier meta-analytic estimates. Previous work by other researchers has reported similar relationships between strivings and academic achievement in student populations, and the new data reinforce the picture of strivings as a reliable, if modest, predictor of scholastic success. Perfectionistic concerns, by contrast, showed no such benefit, consistent with the view that the two facets carry very different consequences.

What makes the study more than a simple replication is its attempt to explain the mechanism. The researchers tested two theoretically motivated hypotheses about how strivings translate into better grades. First, they examined whether task-approach goals—the motivation to master the task at hand, such as answering as many exam questions correctly as possible—mediate the link between strivings and performance. Achievement goal theory suggests that perfectionists channel their high standards into approach-oriented goals, which in turn drive better outcomes. Second, they tested whether conscientiousness, the Big Five trait encompassing diligence and self-discipline, moderates the relationship, potentially amplifying or dampening the effect of strivings.

Neither mechanism survived the statistical tests. The mediation analysis produced a significant overall model, and perfectionistic strivings did predict task-approach goals, but the goals themselves did not significantly predict GPA, and the indirect effect was not significant. The moderation analysis similarly found that conscientiousness did not alter the strength of the strivings–GPA relationship. The authors suggest a possible mismatch: GPA is a cumulative, trait-like outcome accumulated over semesters, while task-approach goals are state-based motivations tied to specific exams. They also note that the conscientiousness scale showed low internal consistency in this sample, which may have weakened its ability to detect moderation effects.

The study also probed whether students who had passed an aptitude test differed in perfectionism from those who had not. Descriptively, aptitude-tested students reported higher levels of perfectionistic strivings, but the difference fell short of statistical significance. The comparison was further complicated by the structure of the sample: because all military students had undergone aptitude testing while civilian students largely had not, testing status was entangled with institutional context. Military universities impose highly structured performance demands and selection procedures that may themselves shape perfectionistic tendencies, making it impossible to disentangle selection effects from educational environment effects in this design.

Indeed, the sample’s personality profile diverged notably from the general German population, with participants reporting higher conscientiousness and agreeableness but lower extraversion and openness—differences the authors attribute at least in part to the substantial military contingent. Military training and selection are known to favor and reinforce traits like conscientiousness and self-efficacy, and officer candidates undergo personality-shaping processes throughout their education. These contextual factors may have influenced both reported perfectionism levels and academic outcomes, and the authors are careful to frame their conclusions as tentative on questions of occupational selection.

The findings arrive against a striking cultural backdrop. A meta-analysis spanning 27 years found that perfectionistic strivings have been rising steadily among university students, a trend attributed to growing competitiveness and individualism in society. With more than 90 percent of college students showing at least moderate perfectionistic tendencies, understanding which forms of the trait help and which harm has become urgent. Some researchers argue the causal arrow may even run in reverse: a longitudinal study suggests that academic success itself breeds perfectionism, hinting at a reciprocal relationship between achievement and the trait.

The authors stress that their results should not be read as a blanket endorsement of perfectionism. Academic achievement is only one dimension of functioning, and performance benefits may coexist with self-imposed pressure, impaired recovery, and diminished well-being. The cross-sectional design rules out causal claims, and the mediation model explained only a small share of the variance in grades, leaving ample room for cognitive, motivational, and contextual factors. Future research, the team argues, should track students over time and examine whether perfectionistic strivings support sustainable performance or exact a psychological toll—determining whether the perfectionist’s edge in the classroom comes with a hidden cost.

Subject of Research: The relationship between multidimensional perfectionism and academic achievement in university students

Article Title: Perfectionism as a predictor of academic achievement: a cross-sectional study on German university students

Article References: Rudolph, Y., & Moszeik, E. N. (2026). Perfectionism as a predictor of academic achievement: a cross-sectional study on German university students. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1575. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10109-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10109-5

Keywords: perfectionism, perfectionistic strivings, academic achievement, grade point average, aptitude testing, conscientiousness, achievement goals, educational psychology, personality traits, university students, military education, cross-sectional study