Vol. 23 No. 2 (2020)
Articles

Rigidity and its Relations to the Basic Dimensions of Personality

Download PDF View Abstract
  • Katya STOYCHEVA,
  • Ergyul TAIR,
  • Kalina POPOVA

Published 09/10/2020

Keywords

  • perseveration,
  • rigidity,
  • dogmatism,
  • big five’s dimensions,
  • Eysenck’s personality model

How to Cite

STOYCHEVA, K., TAIR, E., & POPOVA, K. (2020). Rigidity and its Relations to the Basic Dimensions of Personality. Psychological Research (in the Balkans), 23(2). Retrieved from https://journalofpsychology.org/index.php/1/article/view/49

Copyright (c) 2020 Psychological Research (in the Balkans)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The paper examines rigidity and its relations to the basic dimensions of personality as they are identified by the Big Five’s factors and Eysenck’s personality model. Empirical data come from two studies with Bulgarian adults who have been tested with a Bulgarian questionnaire for measuring dimensions of personality rigidity as perseveration, rigidity, and dogmatism. Study 1 involved 150 students from 3 different universities who filled in the questionnaire on personality rigidity and the Bulgarian form of the IPIP-50 measure. In Study 2, 30 men and 30 women filled in online the same questionnaire on personality rigidity and the Bulgarian adaptation of the Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire. In the paper we first discuss the concept of rigidity, its scope and content, and outline the relations between the dimensions of personality rigidity and other personality traits. Then we compare the results of the two empirical studies. Finally, we draw conclusions about where and how the measures of rigidity fit into the big five model of personality. Correlational and factor analyses revealed association between perseveration and neuroticism, replicated across the two samples, while rigidity tended to be related to conscientiousness and psychoticism. Our findings support the need of a closer examination of the particular manifestations of rigidity when measures of rigidity are considered or when its relations to personality and behaviour are studied.

Download PDF View Abstract

References

  1. Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper and Row. 990 p.
  2. Barelds, D. P. H., Luteijn, F. (2002). Measuring personality: a comparison of three personality questionnaires in the Netherlands. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 499-510.
  3. M. E. Boyes, T. M. Carmody, P. J. F. Clarke, P. A. Hasking (2017). Emotional reactivity and perseveration: Independent dimensions of trait positive and negative affectivity and differential associations with psychological distress. Personality and Individual Differences, 105, 70-77.
  4. Cattell, R. B. (1946a) The riddle of perseveration: I Creative effort and disposition rigidity, Journal of Personality, 14, 229-238.
  5. Cattell, R. B. (1946b) The riddle of perseveration: II Solution in terms of personality. Journal of Personality, 14, 239-267.
  6. Cattell, R. B., Tiner, L. G. (1949) The varieties of structural rigidity. Journal of Personality, 17, 321-341.
  7. Constantinescu, P. M., Constantinescu, I. (2016). The adaptation of the Big Five IPIP-50 questionnaire in Romania revisited. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov, Special Issue Series VII: Social Sciences, vol. 9(58), 129-138.
  8. Costa, P. T., McCrae, R. R. (1992). NEO-PI-I professional manual: Revised NEO personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
  9. Costa, P. T., Jr. & McCrae, R. R. (1999). Reply to Goldberg. In I. Mervielde, I. J. Deary, F. de Fruyt & F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality psychology in Europe (vol. 7, pp. 29-31). Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.
  10. Di Fabio, A., Bernaud, J. L., Loarer, E. (2014) Emotional intelligence or personality in resistance to change? empirical results in an Italian health care context. Journal of Employment Counseling, 51, 146-157.
  11. Donnellan, M. B., Oswald, F. L., Baird, B. M., Lucas, R. E. (2006). The Mini-IPIP Scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five Factors of Personality. Psychological Assessment, 18(2), 192-203.
  12. Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers of the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, vol. 4, 26-42.
  13. Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt, &
  14. F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe, Vol. 7 (pp. 7-28). Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.
  15. Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R. & Gough, H. C. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84-96.
  16. Gow, A. J., Whiteman, M. C., Pattie, A. & Deary, I. J. (2005). Goldberg’s “IPIP” Big-Five factor markers: Internal consistency and concurrent validation in Scotland. Personality and Individual Differences, 39, 317-329.
  17. Guilford, J. P. & Hoepfner, R. (1971). The Analysis of intelligence. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Co.
  18. Eysenck, S. B. G., Eysenck, H. J. (1962). Rigidity as a function of introversion and neuroticism: a study of unmarried mothers. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 8, 180-184.
  19. Eysenck, H. and Wilson, G. D. (1975). Know Your Own Personality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  20. Jackson, C. J., Furnham, A., Forde, L. & Cotter, T. (2000). The structure of the Eysenck Personality Profiler. British Journal of Psychology, 91(2), 223-239.
  21. John, O. P., Naumann, L. P., & Soto, C. J. (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and conceptual issues. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research. p. 114–158. The Guilford Press.
  22. Ilieva, J. (2018) Interrelations between rigidity and Hans Eysenck’s personality dimensions. Unpublished Bachelor Thesis (Academic advisor: Prof. Dr. Katya Stoycheva). Sofia: New Bulgarian University.
  23. Lapsley, D. K., Enright, R. D. (1983) A cognitive developmental model of rigidity in senescence, International Journal of Aging and Human development, 16(2), 81 – 93.
  24. Luchins, A. S. (1949). Rigidity and Ethnocentrism: A Critique. Journal of Personality, 17 (4), 449-466.
  25. McCrae, R. R. & John, O. P. (1992). An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of Personality, 60, 175-215.
  26. Nijstad, B. A, De Dreu, B. A., Rietzschel, E. F., Baas, M. (2010): The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence, European Review of Social Psychology, 21:1, 34-77.
  27. O’Connor, B., Dyce, J. (2001). Rigid and extreme: A geometric representation of personality disorders in five-factor model space. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1119-1130.
  28. Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88 (4), 680-693.
  29. Paspalanov, I., Stetinski, D., Eysenck, S. B. (1984). Bulgarian adaptation of Hans Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire. Bulgarian Journal of Psychology, 5, 279-292.
  30. Paulhus, D. L. and Martin, C. L. (1988). Functional flexibility: A new conception of interpersonal flexibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 88-101.
  31. Rokeach, M. (1960). The Open and Closed Mind. New York: Basic Books.
  32. Rubenowitz, S. (1963). Emotional flexibility-rigidity as a comprehensive dimension of mind. Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell.
  33. Saucier, G. (1992). Openness versus Intellect: Much ado about nothing. European Journal of Personality, 6, 386-391.
  34. Schultz, P. W., Searleman, A. (2002). Rigidity of thought and behavior: 100 years of research. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monograph, 128(2), 165-207.
  35. Steinmetz, J. P., Loarer, E., Houssemand, C. (2011). Rigidity of Attitudes and Behaviors: A Study on the Validity of the Concept. Individual Differences Research, 9 (2), 84-106.
  36. Stoycheva, K. (2003). Tolerntnostta kum neapredelenost (Tolerance for ambiguity). Pleven: Lege Artis.
  37. Stoycheva, K., Shtetinski, D., Popova, K. (2011). The study of rigidity in personality: Featuring Ivan Paspalanov’s questionnaire for measuring rigidity. Bulgarian Journal of Psychology, 3-4, 136-142 (in Bulgarian)
  38. Stoycheva, K., Shtetinski, D., Popova, K. (2013). Age and education differences in personality rigidity and its components. Psychological Research, No1, 59-70 (in Bulgarian)
  39. Stoycheva, K., Shtetinski, D., Popova, K. (2014). Studies on the validity of Ivan Paspalanov’s questionnaire for measuring rigidity. Bulgarian Journal of Psychology, No 4, 27-46 (in Bulgarian)
  40. Schaie, K. W. (1955). A test of behavioral rigidity. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 604–610.
  41. Schaie, K. W., Dutta, R., Willis, S. L. (1991). Relationship between rigidity-flexibility and cognitive abilities in adulthood. Psychology and Aging, Vol 6(3), 371-383.
  42. Strelau, J., Zawadzki, B. (2011) Structure of personality: Search for a general factor viewed from a temperament perspective. Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010) 77–82.
  43. Te Nijenhuis, J., Van der Flier, H., Van Leeuwen, L. (2003). The Use of a Test for Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Rigidity for Dutch Immigrant Job-applicants. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 52 (4), 630-647.
  44. Tracey, T. J. G. (2005). Interpersonal rigidity and complementarity. Journal of Research in Personality, 39, 592-614.
  45. Van Hiel, A., Onraet, E., Crowson H. M., Roets, A. (2016). The Relationship Between Right-wing Attitudes and Cognitive Style: A Comparison of Self-report and Behavioural Measures of Rigidity and Intolerance of Ambiguity. European Journal of Personality, European Journal of Personality, 30: 523-531.
  46. Zheng, L., Goldberg, L. R., Zheng, Y., Zhao, Y., Tang, Y., & Liu, L. (2008). Reliability and Concurrent Validation of the IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers in China: Consistencies in Factor Structure between Internet-Obtained Heterosexual and Homosexual Samples. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(7), 649-654.