Publications by authors named "Mitja D Back"

Individual differences in social traits such as the affiliation motive are closely linked to the formation and maintenance of social relationships. Most previous research focused on long-term characteristics or momentary assessments of social relationships (e.g.

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Concerns about the generalizability of machine learning models in mental health arise, partly due to sampling effects and data disparities between research cohorts and real-world populations. We aimed to investigate whether a machine learning model trained solely on easily accessible and low-cost clinical data can predict depressive symptom severity in unseen, independent datasets from various research and real-world clinical contexts. This observational multi-cohort study included 3021 participants (62.

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Interpersonal judgments play a central role in human social interactions, influencing decisions ranging from friendships to presidential elections. Despite extensive research on the accuracy of these judgments, an overreliance on broad personality traits and subjective judgments as criteria for accuracy has hindered progress in this area. Further, most individuals involved in past studies (either as judges or targets) came from ad-hoc student samples which hampers generalizability.

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Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) refers to an adherence to conventional values and authorities with the power to penalize groups that are perceived to challenge the cohesion of ingroup norms. Correspondingly, RWA has repeatedly been linked to negative perceptions of minoritized groups, such as refugees or religious minorities. To investigate whether and how sociocultural factors add to and moderate how RWA influences perceptions that minoritized groups pose a threat (i.

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The Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS) is a an economical, widely used self-report measure of vulnerable narcissism. Developed and mostly used as a unidimensional scale, previous structural examinations suggest two correlated dimensions, one emphasizing hypersensitive/neurotic aspects and the other highlighting egocentric/antagonistic aspects of vulnerable narcissism. The few extant factor analyses of the HSNS, however, differ profoundly in their methodological approach, the resulting item-to-factor assignment, and lack a thorough validation of the two putative subscales.

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Social skills (e.g., assertiveness, empathy, ability to accept criticism) are essential for the medical profession and therefore also for the selection and development of medical students.

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Response surface analysis (RSA) allows researchers to study whether the degree of congruence between two predictor variables is related to a potential psychological outcome. Here, we adapt RSA to the case in which the two predictor variables whose congruence is of interest refer to individual differences in within-person associations (WPAs) between variables that fluctuate over time. For example, a WPA-congruence hypothesis in research on romantic relationships could posit that partners are happier when they have similar social reactivities-that is, when they have similarly strong WPAs between the quantity of their social interactions and their momentary well-being.

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This meta-analytic review investigated the development of narcissism across the life span, by synthesizing the available longitudinal data on mean-level change and rank-order stability. Three factors of narcissism were examined: agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic narcissism. Analyses were based on data from 51 samples, including 37,247 participants.

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This study integrates leadership process models with process models of personality and behavioral personality science to examine the behavioral-perceptual pathways that explain interpersonal personality traits' divergent relation to group leadership evaluations. We applied data from an online group interaction study ( = 364) alternately assigning participants as leaders conducting brief tasks. We used four variable types to build the pathways in multiple mediator models: (a) Self-reported personality traits, (b) video recordings of expressed interpersonal behaviors coded by 6 trained raters, (c) interpersonal impressions, and (d) mutual evaluations of leadership emergence/effectiveness.

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Social media impacts people's wellbeing in different ways, but relatively little is known about why this is the case. Here we introduce the construct of "social media sensitivity" to understand how social media and wellbeing associations differ across people and the contexts in which these platforms are used. In a month-long large-scale intensive longitudinal study (total n = 1632; total number of observations = 120,599), we examined for whom and under which circumstances social media was associated with positive and negative changes in social and affective wellbeing.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has had devastating effects on the Ukrainian population and the global economy, environment, and political order. However, little is known about the psychological states surrounding the outbreak of war, particularly the mental well-being of individuals outside Ukraine. Here, we present a longitudinal experience-sampling study of a convenience sample from 17 European countries (total participants = 1,341, total assessments = 44,894, countries with >100 participants = 5) that allows us to track well-being levels across countries during the weeks surrounding the outbreak of war.

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Whereas grandiose narcissism has generally been found to be related to adaptive affective experiences (i.e., positive affective states), many theoretical conceptualizations have emphasized its associations with characteristics of low affective well-being (i.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how personality traits contribute to social status in face-to-face groups, integrating four pathways: dominance, competence, virtue, and micropolitics.
  • Over 100 years of research was meta-analyzed, involving 1,064 effects from 276 studies focusing on traits like personality, cognitive ability, and physical size related to outcomes like social influence and leadership.
  • Results indicated that status is influenced by perceived competence and virtue, along with assertive behavior, but showed mixed results concerning how these relationships vary by task type, group culture, and familiarity among group members.
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To what extent do individuals differ in understanding how others see them and who is particularly good at it? Answering these questions about the "good metaperceiver" is relevant given the beneficial outcomes of meta-accuracy. However, there likely is more than one type of the good metaperceiver: One who knows the specific impressions they make more than others do () and one who knows their reputation more than others do ). To identify and understand these good metaperceivers, we introduce the social meta-accuracy model (SMAM) as a statistical and conceptual framework and apply the SMAM to four samples of first impression interactions.

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A large body of research suggests that extraversion is positively related to well-being. However, it is unclear whether this association can be explained by social participation (i.e.

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Status pursuit has been emphasized as a key motivational factor underlying narcissism, but research has just begun to unravel the processes by which more narcissistic individuals pursue status in their everyday social interactions. In this article, we combine process models of narcissistic status pursuit with three-factor models of narcissism to test whether different aspects of narcissism (i.e.

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Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across eight widely used narcissism instruments (i.

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To examine psychological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted two large experience sampling (ESM) studies (Study 1: = 327 and = 29,512, Study 2: = 2,272 and = 64,810). Each study subsumed two 14-day ESM waves that took place before and during (Study 1) or during and after (Study 2) the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in Germany. We describe the assessed variables on the trait (e.

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In this article, we introduce multimodal social relations analysis as a powerful tool for studying personality pathology that tackles several important limitations of existing research. By implementing a design in which groups of participants provide repeated ratings as they interact, researchers can gather data on individuals' mutual perceptions, affective experiences, and interpersonal behaviors in naturalistic social contexts. We demonstrate how the social relations model can be used to analyze and make conceptual sense of these complex, dyadic data and showcase how this may be used to address not only the experiences and behaviors of individuals diagnosed with a personality disorder but also the reactions these individuals evoke in others.

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The current study investigates the longitudinal association between grandiose narcissism and multidimensional perfectionism over 2 years in adolescence. We adopted the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept, which differentiates between two aspects of grandiose narcissism. We also considered multiple dimensions of perfectionism, including Socially Prescribed Perfectionism (SPP) and two forms of Self-Oriented Perfectionism (SOP), namely the tendencies to set high standards of performance (SOP-Striving) and to engage in overly critical self-evaluations (SOP-Critical).

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We introduce a novel approach to assess habitual comparison processes, while distinguishing between different types of comparison standards. Several comparison theories (e.g.

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In education, among the most anticipated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are that student performance will stagnate or decline and that existing inequities will increase. Although some studies suggest a decline in student performance and widening learning gaps, the picture is less clear than expected. In this study, we add to the existing literature on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student achievement.

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Contingencies between situational variables and psychological states have been proposed as key individual difference variables by many theoretical approaches to personality. Despite their relevance, the basic properties, nomological correlates, and factor structure of individual differences in contingencies have not been examined so far. We address these fundamental questions in five studies with overall N = 952 participants and N = 32,052 unique assessments.

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Condition-based regression analysis (CRA) is a statistical method for testing self-enhancement effects. That is, CRA indicates whether, in a set of empirical data, people with higher values on the directed discrepancy self-view S minus reality criterion R (i.e.

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Social skills are of key importance in everyday and work life. However, the way in which they are typically assessed via self-report questionnaires has one potential downside; self-reports assess individuals' global self-concepts, which do not necessarily reflect individuals' actual social behaviors. In this research, we aimed to investigate how self-concepts assessed via questionnaires relate to skill expression assessed via behavioral observations after short interpersonal simulations.

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