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Harmonization of Neuroticism and Extraversion phenotypes across inventories and cohorts in the Genetics of Personality Consortium: an application of Item Response Theory.

ABSTRACT: Mega- or meta-analytic studies (e.g. genome-wide association studies) are increasingly used in behavior genetics. An issue in such studies is that phenotypes are often measured by different instruments across study cohorts, requiring harmonization of measures so that more powerful fixed effect meta-analyses can be employed. Within the Genetics of Personality Consortium, we demonstrate for two clinically relevant personality traits, Neuroticism and Extraversion, how Item-Response Theory (IRT) can be applied to map item data from different inventories to the same underlying constructs. Personality item data were analyzed in >160,000 individuals from 23 cohorts across Europe, USA and Australia in which Neuroticism and Extraversion were assessed by nine different personality inventories. Results showed that harmonization was very successful for most personality inventories and moderately successful for some. Neuroticism and Extraversion inventories were largely measurement invariant across cohorts, in particular when comparing cohorts from countries where the same language is spoken. The IRT-based scores for Neuroticism and Extraversion were heritable (48 and 49 %, respectively, based on a meta-analysis of six twin cohorts, total N = 29,496 and 29,501 twin pairs, respectively) with a significant part of the heritability due to non-additive genetic factors. For Extraversion, these genetic factors qualitatively differ across sexes. We showed that our IRT method can lead to a large increase in sample size and therefore statistical power. The IRT approach may be applied to any mega- or meta-analytic study in which item-based behavioral measures need to be harmonized.

SUBMITTER: van den Berg SM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4057636 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundIf individual differences are relevant and prominent features of personality, then they are expected to be encoded in natural language, thus manifesting themselves in single words. Recently, the quantification of text data using advanced natural language processing techniques offers innovative opportunities to map people's own words and narratives to their responses to self-reports. Here, we demonstrate the usefulness of self-descriptions in natural language and what we tentatively call Quantitative Semantic Test Theory (QuSTT) to validate two short inventories that measure character traits.MethodIn Study 1, participants (N 1 = 997) responded to the Short Character Inventory, which measures self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence. In Study 2, participants (N 2 = 2373) responded to Short Dark Triad, which measures Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. In both studies, respondents were asked to generate 10 self-descriptive words. We used the Latent Semantic Algorithm to quantify the meaning of each trait using the participants' self-descriptive words. We then used these semantic representations to predict the self-reported scores. In a second set of analyses, we used word-frequency analyses to map the self-descriptive words to each of the participants' trait scores (i.e., one-dimensional analysis) and character profiles (i.e., three-dimensional analysis).ResultsThe semantic representation of each character trait was related to each corresponding self-reported score. However, participants' self-transcendence and Machiavellianism scores demonstrated similar relationships to all three semantic representations of the character traits in their respective personality model. The one-dimensional analyses showed that, for example, "loving" was indicative of both high cooperativeness and self-transcendence, while "compassionate," "kind," and "caring" was unique for individuals high in cooperativeness. The words "kind" and "caring" indicated low levels of Machiavellianism and psychopathy, whereas "shy" or "introvert" indicated low narcissism. We also found specific keywords that unify or that make the individuals in some profiles unique.ConclusionDespite being short, both inventories capture individuals' identity as expected. Nevertheless, our method also points out some shortcomings and overlaps between traits measured with these inventories. We suggest that self-descriptive words can be quantified to validate measures of psychological constructs (e.g., prevalence in self-descriptions or QuSTT) and that this method may complement traditional methods for testing the validity of psychological measures.

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Harmonization of Neuroticism and Extraversion phenotypes across inventories and cohorts in the Genetics of Personality Consortium: an application of Item Response Theory.

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