Raymond B. Cattell's Personality Theories (continued)
The Development of Personality
Boundary studies compare personality factors at different age levels. In general, similar factors are found from 4 years of age to adulthood.
MAVA (multiple abstract variance analysis) is a statistical technique designed to examine the relative contributions of heredity and environment to particular personality variables. MAVA studies twins and nontwin and adoptive siblings and tells not only whether the influence of heredity is present but to what extent it is expressed within and between families.
Negative correlations between heredity and environment suggest a law of coercion to the biosocial mean in the personality domain.
People learn by associative and means-end learning, confluence learning (satisfying several sentiments and ergs through one action), and integration learning; in the last, one learns to maximize long-term satisfaction by selecting certain ergs for expression at any given time and suppressing or sublimating others.
Syntality is essentially the personality of the group. It is inferred from group behavior, as personality is inferred from individual behavior.
