VALIDATING A COMPUTER-BASED TECHNIQUE FOR ASSESSING STABILITY TO FAILURE STRESS

Abstract

An upsurge of interest in the implicit personality assessment, currently observed both in personality psycho-diagnostics and in experimental studies of social attitudes and prejudices, signals the shifting of researchers’ attention from de?ning between-person personality taxonomy to specifying comprehensive within-person processes, the dynamics of which can be captured at the level of an individual case. This research examines the possibility of the implicit assessment of the individual’s stability vs. susceptibility to failure stress by comparing the degrees of ef?cacy in the voluntary self-regulation of a computer-simulated information-processing activity under different conditions (patent of Ukraine № 91842, issued in 2010). By exposing two groups of participants (university undergraduates) to processing the information, the scope of which exceeds the human short-term memory capacity at one of the stages of the modeled activity an unexpected and unavoidable failure is elicited. The participants who retain stability of their self-regulation behavior after having been exposed to failure, i.e. who keep processing information as effectively as they did prior to failure, are claimed to retain homeostasis and thus possess emotional stability. Those, who loose homeostasis after failure and display lower standards of self-regulation behavior, are considered to be susceptible to stress. The validity of the suggested type of the implicit diagnostics was empirically tested by clustering (K-means algorithm) two samples of the participants on the properties of their self-regulation behavior and testing between-cluster differences by a set of the explicitly assessed variables: Action control ef?cacy (Kuhl, 2001), preferred strategies of Coping with Stressful Situations (Endler, Parker, 1990), Purpose-in-Life orientation (a Russian version of the test by Crumbaugh and Maholick, modi?ed by D.Leontiev, 1992), Psychological Well-being (Ryff, 1989). Statistically signi?cant differences in the properties of the successful vs. unsuccessful modes of self-regulative behavior, assessed implicitly with the patented method and in the explicitly assessed personality characteristics con?rmed the prognostic validity of the suggested method.

Keywords

• personality stability vs. susceptibility to stress
• information-processing technique
• self-regulation ef?cacy
• implicit assessment.