Geenen, R. (1991). Psychophysiological Consistency and Personality. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press

From the back cover:

Psychophysiological Consistency and Personality presents an experimental analysis of human individuality as reflected in instantaneous responses to ever-changing situations. Insight into such behavior is considered to be of crucial importance to obtain a complete view of individual functioning in everyday life, and is essential to the growth of knowledge in several areas of psychology such as emotions, information processing, stress and coping, and the etiology and maintenance of psychosomatic and psychoneurotic complaints. The broader context of the study is the area of personality psychology. The perspective is interactional.

In daily life, many acts, thoughts and feelings occur spontaneously. Consequently, more conventional assessment methods such as the questionnaire method, will often not suffice to learn more about instantaneous behavior in complex situations. In this study, films are used as stimulus material, whereas the responses studied are physiological reactions. Methods developed within the context of generalizability theory are used to estimate the amount of behavioural variation arising form multiple sources. In view of the many ambiguities still existing in the area, a large part of the book deals with measurement problems inherent to studies of psychophysiological consistency.

Tilburg University Press

P.O.Box 90153

5000 LE Tilburg

the Netherlands

ISBN 90-361-9653-1

288 pages