Inferring personality traits of clients with Parkinson's disease from their descriptions of favourite activities.

OBJECTIVE

To explore the extent to which practitioners effectively use cues from clients' verbal descriptions of their favourite activities to form accurate impressions of the personality of clients with Parkinson's disease.

PARTICIPANTS

Ninety-nine practitioners from disciplines of occupational, physical and speech therapy, nursing or medicine.

PROCEDURE: Six men and six women with Parkinson's disease completed a self-report measure of personality and were individually interviewed regarding their favourite activities. The practitioners viewed 2-min segments of those videotaped interviews and provided judgements of the clients' personality.

MEASURE: The NEO-Five Factor Inventory and a coding scheme to describe characteristics of clients' favourite activities.

ANALYSIS: Clients' self-reported personality was correlated with the activity characteristics to identify the degree to which each characteristic was a cue of personality. Practitioners' judgements of personality were correlated with the activity characteristics to identify how heavily the practitioners weighted each cue. These two sets of weightings were compared using Pearson's correlations to determine whether practitioners used an appropriate cue strategy related to the activity descriptions.

RESULTS

Practitioners appropriately used the personality cues found in the clients' favourite activity descriptions to assess the traits of Openness to Experience, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness (r = 0.66, r = 0.60, and r = 0.55, respectively, all p < or = 0.02). Practitioners appeared to use less effective cue strategies for the traits of Neuroticism and Extraversion.

CONCLUSION

Clients with Parkinson's disease appear to express their personality in their descriptions of favourite activities, and practitioners appear to make use of these expressive verbal cues effectively for some aspects of personality.