Ebook: Differential Psychophysiology: Persons in Situations

Those interested in the relationships between psychological and physiological functions will again and again be impressed by the fact that great individual differences and large situational variability are manifested in psychophysiological data. Psychophysiology from a differential perspective has been an enduring theme throughout the history of personality and temperament research. However, the present book is the first to bear the word differential in its title. Actually, this monography is not only concerned with psychophysiological personality research, but with a much broader program of systematic investigation. Multivariate research methodology permits one to operationalize physiological response profiles, both with regard to lasting differences between persons and the discrimination of situations. In order to determine functional relationships between person characteristics and situational demands, that is, to determine the processes of stimulus-response mediation, one first needs to systemize these various sources of variance in assessment models and subsequently partition the observed covariance. A series of the author's own investigations in the Hamburg and Freiburg laboratories shows just how fruitful this research approach can be.

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This book gives a comprehensive account on the methodological foundations of psychophysiology and, in particular, differential psychophysiology. In the first part of the book, the nature of psychological explanations, the place of psychophysiology in psychology, notions of situation, personality, and activation, assessment models, and methodological principles are systematically developed. On the basis of a stimulus-response mediation model both key methodologica terms in psychophysiology, such as specificity analysis and covariance partitioning, and measurement models are derived. One specialized measurement model, The Model of Autonomic Cardiovascular Activation Components, is extensively studied. The second part of the book presentsempirical demonstrations of research programs that make considerable useof the ideas and methods of a differential psychophysiology: The analysis ofactivation processes, the characterization of laboratory tasks in terms of cardiovascular activation components, the concept of situational arousability within Eysenck's biological personality therory, and the psychophysiology of anger. Readers are provided with an illustrated and comprehensive treatment of the methodological foundation of psychophysiology. The focus on differential psychophysiology is new and will make the book valuable to both the researcher and student of psychophysiology and the differential psychologist.