PERSONALITY TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH ABILITIES. I. WITH INTELLIGENCE AND DRAWING ABILITY

IT is customary to think of abilities as powers having an existence independent of other personality traits, i.e., of dy-namic and temperament traits. In mathematical terms this is founded in the conception of unitary traits as factors (6). Since even different ability factors are mathematically inde-pendent of one another, it is not surprising that factors of differ-ent modality, e.g., temperament and ability traits, are still more confidently expected to be independent. Correspond-ingly, in clinical and general psychological terms the usual approach conceives of functionally independent traits or powers. Abilities, for example, are the cools of dynamic traits and may be used interchangeably by the same or different drives. Pre-diction of, say, the outcome of a son’s antipathy to his father or a girl’s overcompensatory concentration on school subjects rests first on an estimate of the strength of the drive but also on knowledge of the endowment in the various abilities which it may use. The purpose of this paper is to show that the above analysis is only a first approximation to the truth. It proposes a more refined conceptualization and presents some new data, which, together with the data of an ensuing article (S), constitute a slight initial foundation for a factual edifice in this realm. 11. T h e General Nature of Ability-Personality Trait Connections Clinically the connection of abilities with dynamic traits is Inferiority overcompensations sometimes often quite striking