Primal world beliefs.

Abstract

Beck's insight-that beliefs about one's self, future, and environment shape behavior-transformed depression treatment. Yet environment beliefs remain relatively understudied. We introduce a set of environment beliefs-<i>primal world beliefs</i> or <i>primals</i>-that concern the world's overall character (e.g., <i>the world is interesting, the world is dangerous</i>). To create a measure, we systematically identified candidate primals (e.g., analyzing tweets, historical texts, etc.); conducted exploratory factor analysis (<i>N</i> = 930) and two confirmatory factor analyses (<i>N</i> = 524; <i>N</i> = 529); examined sequence effects (<i>N</i> = 219) and concurrent validity (<i>N</i> = 122); and conducted test-retests over 2 weeks (<i>n</i> = 122), 9 months (<i>n</i> = 134), and 19 months (n = 398). The resulting 99-item Primals Inventory (PI-99) measures 26 primals with three overarching beliefs-<i>Safe, Enticing</i>, and <i>Alive</i> (mean α = .93)-that typically explain ∼55% of the common variance. These beliefs were normally distributed; stable (2 weeks, 9 months, and 19 month test-retest results averaged .88, .75, and .77, respectively); strongly correlated with many personality and wellbeing variables (e.g., <i>Safe</i> and optimism, <i>r</i> = .61; <i>Enticing</i> and depression, <i>r</i> = -.52; <i>Alive</i> and meaning, <i>r</i> = .54); and explained more variance in life satisfaction, transcendent experience, trust, and gratitude than the BIG 5 (3%, 3%, 6%, and 12% more variance, respectively). In sum, the PI-99 showed strong psychometric characteristics, primals plausibly shape many personality and wellbeing variables, and a broad research effort examining these relationships is warranted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).