Big Five Personality Traits and Physical Aggression between Siblings in South Korea: an Actor-Partner Interdependence Analysis

The present study examined actor and partner effects of the Big Five personality traits, assessed by the NEO Five-Factor Inventory, on physical aggression within sibling dyadic interactions. Data were collected from 86 target adolescents receiving counseling services, their mothers, and closest-age siblings in South Korea. Mothers rated their children’s personalities. Target adolescents and siblings reported their own personality, as well as their sibling’s and their own perpetration of physical aggression against one another. Substantial self-other (i.e., mother and sibling) agreement was found for personality traits. Both actor and partner effects were found for the negative associations between extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness and physical aggression among siblings. The current findings increase our understanding of personality traits implicated in physical aggression in general, and specifically aggression among siblings.     

The Brexit Negotiations and the Anglosphere

The Brexit negotiations raise the question of what Britain’s future role in the world should be. Brexiters have drawn on ideas of the Anglosphere to imagine what that future might be. The Anglosphere belongs in a long line of thinking about uniting English speaking communities around the world. Different conceptions of the Anglosphere such as CANZUK are identified. The Anglosphere appeals to many Brexiters because it gives them a positive vision of ‘Global Britain’ as an alternative to EU membership. The advantages to Britain of regaining full sovereignty and associating once more with its ‘true friends’ are stressed. What is ignored is the lack of support among Anglosphere countries for much closer relationships except in the security sphere, and the inability of increased economic ties with the Anglosphere to begin to match what the UK will lose by severing itself from its most important economic partner.     

The Political Consequences of the Crash

The financial crash of 2008 precipitated a major recession. It shattered the financial growth model that had dominated the previous twenty years and plunged the international economy into a period of economic and political restructuring of uncertain duration. The immediate origins of the crash lay in the lending practices associated with the sub-prime mortgages in the United States which produced the credit crunch in 2007, but the wider causes were the unbalanced character of growth in the international economy and the particular role played by finance. The crisis has been explained in a number of different ways, focusing on the behaviour of the financial markets, the institutional and policy conditions that made the boom possible and then undermined it, longer-term economic and policy cycles and the nature of uncertainty and risk in complex social systems. The political impact of the crash and the recession has not been uniform; it has been highly uneven, depending on the position of particular states in the international economy. The rapid interventions by governments to stave off financial collapse at the end of 2008 were successful, but at the cost of creating serious problems of adjustment for the future. The political debate around what were the causes, who should be blamed and what should be done is only just beginning, and the way this crisis comes to be understood will play a major part in determining how it is eventually resolved and how far-reaching will be the changes to the international economy and to domestic politics.