Miles Bore and Don Munro from the
School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, attended the conference of the
International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID – linked
to the journal Personality and Individual Differences) at University of Western
Ontario, Canada, in late July. Miles presented a paper on his work with Amanda
Boer on a new scale of trait subjective sexual arousal, and Don presented aspects
of his 7-year study with Miles and David Powis on the predictive value of
non-cognitive medical school selection measures with Hull York Medical School
in England. Both papers were well received.
Two topics/issues dominated the
conference: (1) Work on the “Dark Triad” of Narcissism, Psychopathy and
Machiavellianism, together with a new construct of Everyday Sadism (making a
‘Dark Tetrad’), and (2) Strong criticisms of the prevailing “Big Five” trait
model of personality, in favour of more complex measures and possibly a return
to the theories and measures of several decades ago that have been relatively
neglected while the Big 5 has held sway.
