Psychology and non-psychology students' estimation of their desirable and undesirable personality traits

The present study examines the relationship between psychology and non-psychology students' actual and self-estimated test scores derived from Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R, 1985). One hundred and five final year psychology (58 female, 47 male) and 90 final year non-psychology students, mainly from Engineering and Physics disciplines, (40 female, 50 male) rated the degree to which they exhibited extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism on a 13-point scale (0=low, 12=high), and completed the EPQ-R. There was a significant positive correlation between participants' actual extraversion test scores and their estimates of what those scores would be for both psychology and non-psychology students. However, only the non-psychology students showed a strong and significant positive correlation between actual and self-estimated neuroticism test scores. There was no significant correlation between actual and self-estimated psychoticism scores. These results indicate that students are generally better in estimating their desirable (extraversion) than undesirable personality test scores (neuroticism, psychoticism) irrespective of their level of scientific knowledge of those traits. The implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.