Scott Acton
- SPN Mentor
IN MEMORIAM
Professor Scott Acton died February 6, 2006, in a motor vehicle accident at the age of 35. Professor Acton earned his bachelor’s degree from Duke University, and his master's and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco on the role of depression on smoking treatment outcome, he became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003.
In addition to his research and teaching, Scott maintained the "Great Ideas in Personality" website at www.personalityresearch.org, which at the time of his death had been visited more than one million times.
I am interested in relating theoretical and methodological issues in individual differences to health-related outcomes. My interest in individual differences includes the topics of personality, psychopathology, and intelligence, all of which can be shown to have significant health-related consequences. For example, the trait of impulsivity appears to be a temperamental vulnerability factor for substance abuse.
In relating individual differences to health-risk behaviors, it is useful to have an overarching model of individual differences. One model that I find useful for the classification of psychopathology includes two higher-order dimensions: internalization (anxious-misery and fear) and externalization (psychopathy and substance abuse). I am interested in exploring the theoretical and methodological basis for these dimensions and relating them to substance abuse and sexual risk-taking. For example, I am the principal investigator on work funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program showing that internalization predicts smoking treatment failure. I am currently exploring the hypothesis that both internalization and externalization are causally related to smoking initiation, maintenance, and relapse.
My recent work has made use of a theoretically informed measurement approach called item response theory, which has advantages over classical test theory in terms of testing the correspondence between a concept and its empirical referent. One application of item response theory is to distinguish latent category-likeness from latent dimension-likeness. For example, I am currently exploring whether the diagnosis of major depression can be reduced in a non-trivial sense to a dimension similar in content to internalization. In doing so, I am making use of a conceptual and psychometric approach called the dimension/category framework, which I helped to develop while in Belgium over the summer of 2002.
I am currently drawing together the various strands of my research program in the Generalized Interpersonal Theory of Personality and Psychopathology. This theory includes a structural model that includes both the Big Five dimensions of personality and the internalization/externalization dimensions of psychopathology and a dynamic model that predicts affect and behavior in interpersonal interactions. The dynamic model explains phenomena such as depression precipitating rejection and expressed emotion precipitating depression; it also specifies how to bring about change in psychotherapy. My next step will be to show that common mental disorders are reducible to the dimensions in the structural model in terms of the dimension/category framework. This work should both generalize the interpersonal theory of personality and give a theoretical basis to the growing literature on the internalization and externalization dimensions of adult psychopathology.
Primary Interests:
- Culture and Ethnicity
- Emotion, Mood, Affect
- Evolution and Genetics
- Health Psychology
- Interpersonal Processes
- Personality, Individual Differences
- Research Methods, Assessment
- Sociology, Social Networks
Online Studies:
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Journal Articles:
- Acton, G. S. (2003). Measurement of impulsivity in a hierarchical model of personality traits: Implications for substance use. Substance Use & Misuse, 38, 67-83.
- Acton, G. S. (1998). Classification of psychopathology: The nature of language. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 19, 243-256.
- Acton, G. S., Kunz, J. D., Wilson, M., & Hall, S. M. (2005). The construct of internalization: Conceptualization, measurement, and prediction of smoking treatment outcome. Psychological Medicine, 35, 395-408.
- Acton, G. S., Prochaska, J. J., Kaplan, A. S., Small, T., & Hall, S. M. (2001). Depression and stages of change for smoking in psychiatric outpatients. Addictive Behaviors, 26, 621-631.
- Acton, G. S., & Revelle, W. (2004). Evaluation of ten psychometric criteria for circumplex structure. Methods of Psychological Research, 9, 1-27.
- Acton, G. S., & Revelle, W. (2002). Interpersonal personality measures show circumplex structure based on new psychometric criteria. Journal of Personality Assessment, 79, 446-471.
- Acton, G. S., & Schroeder, D. H. (2001). Sensory discrimination as related to general intelligence. Intelligence, 29, 263-271.
- Acton, G. S., & Zodda, J. J. (2005). Classification of psychopathology: Goals and methods in an empirical approach. Theory & Psychology, 15, 373-399.
- De Boeck, P., Wilson, M., & Acton, G. S. (2005). A conceptual and psychometric framework for distinguishing categories and dimensions. Psychological Review, 112, 129-158.
Other Publications:
Courses Taught:
- Abnormal Psychology
- Introductory Psychology
- Psychology of Personality
- Scientific Writing