The effect of response style on self-reported Conscientiousness across 20 countries.

Rankings of countries on mean levels of self-reported Conscientiousness continue to puzzle researchers. Based on the hypothesis that cross-cultural differences in the tendency to prefer extreme response categories of ordinal rating scales over moderate categories can influence the comparability of self-reports, this study investigated possible effects of response style on the mean levels of self-reported Conscientiousness in 22 samples from 20 countries. Extreme and neutral responding were estimated based on respondents' ratings of 30 hypothetical people described in short vignettes. In the vignette ratings, clear cross-sample differences in extreme and neutral responding emerged. These responding style differences were correlated with mean self-reported Conscientiousness scores. Correcting self-reports for extreme and neutral responding changed sample rankings of Conscientiousness, as well as the predictive validities of these rankings for external criteria. The findings suggest that the puzzling country rankings of self-reported Conscientiousness may to some extent result from differences in response styles.

Judgments of facial expressions of emotion in profile.

Despite the fact that facial expressions of emotion have signal value, there is surprisingly little research examining how that signal can be detected under various conditions, because most judgment studies utilize full-face, frontal views. We remedy this by obtaining judgments of frontal and profile views of the same expressions displayed by the same expressors. We predicted that recognition accuracy when viewing faces in profile would be lower than when judging the same faces from the front. Contrarily, there were no differences in recognition accuracy as a function of view, suggesting that emotions are judged equally well regardless of from what angle they are viewed.