title: Personality traits below facets: The consensual validity, longitudinal stability, heritability, and utility of personality nuances.
abstract: It has been argued that facets do not represent the bottom of the personality hierarchy-even more specific personality characteristics, nuances, could be useful for describing and understanding individuals and their differences. Combining 2 samples of German twins, we assessed the consensual validity (correlations across different observers), rank-order stability, and heritability of nuances. Personality nuances were operationalized as the 240 items of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). Their attributes were examined by analyzing item residuals, controlling for the variance of the facet the item had been assigned to and all other facets. Most nuances demonstrated significant (p < .0002) cross-method agreement and rank-order stability. A substantial proportion of them (48% in self-reports, 20% in informant ratings, and 50% in combined ratings) demonstrated a significant (p < .0002) component of additive genetic variance, whereas evidence for environmental influences shared by twins was modest. Applying a procedure to estimate stability and heritability of true scores of item residuals yielded estimates comparable with those of higher-order personality traits, with median estimates of rank-order stability and heritability being .77 and .52, respectively. Few nuances demonstrated robust associations with age and gender, but many showed incremental, conceptually meaningful, and replicable (across methods and/or samples) predictive validity for a range of interest domains and body mass index. We argue that these narrow personality characteristics constitute a valid level of the personality hierarchy. They may be especially useful for providing a deep and contextualized description of the individual, but also for the prediction of specific outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology.
authors.forename: René
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mõttus
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bielefeld.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kandler
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California.
authors.forename: Wiebke
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Bleidorn
authors.affiliation: of Psychology, University of Bielefeld.
authors.forename: Rainer
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Riemann
authors.forename: Robert R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: McCrae
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005260:Female; D006803:Human Development / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010551:Personality / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*; D010556:Personality Tests / Q000592:standards*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D055815:Young Adult