Openness to experience and ego level in Loevinger's Sentence Completion Test: Dispositional contributions to developmental models of personality

Sentence completion responses of a sample of 240 adult males, ages 35-80 yrs, were scored for the J. Loevinger et al (1970) ego development levels. Correlation of these scores with a series of objective personality trait measures collected over a 9-mo period showed no relation between ego level and measures of neuroticism or extraversion. However, as hypothesized, ego level was significantly related to 7 of 10 measures of openness to experience. Blind judgments of protocols from the upper and lower 20% of the Experience Inventory total distribution demonstrated that openness is expressed in sentence completion responses, and examples of characteristically open and closed responses are given. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1980 American Psychological Association.