Portraits in Misery: A Bottom-Up-to-Prototype Approach to Personality Assessment

The present investigation endorses the premise that each person can be understood in terms of particular ways of responding to particular situations. In two studies (total N = 353), participants indicated how they would respond to a wide variety of mundane and consequential life situations. These person-in-situation units were used to understand variations in miserable functioning, defined in terms of degree of match to a miserable person prototype. Participants receiving higher behavioral tendencies of misery (BT-M) scores scored lower in flourishing and higher in psychopathological symptoms. In addition, misery, as quantified, was evident to peers (Study 1) and linked to deficiencies in goal pursuit and achievement in daily life (Study 2). The results provide insights into miserable functioning while also providing support for a new approach to personality assessment that can link person-specific bottom-up units to any number of constructs through the use of prototype scoring.