{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,27]],"date-time":"2026-08-27T06:18:16Z","timestamp":1787811496464,"version":"build-2784847793"},"reference-count":56,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,27]],"date-time":"2026-08-27T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1787788800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Psychol."],"abstract":"<jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Introduction<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Ego Development Theory (EDT) describes systematic changes in how adults make meaning, but its principal measure, the Sentence Completion Test (SCT), requires resource-intensive expert scoring.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Methods<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>\n                      We developed an automated scoring approach in which an evolutionary algorithm derives a small set of interpretable maturity indicators, each scored from sentence-completion responses by a domain-fine-tuned language model; a classifier trained on the resulting scores then predicts developmental stage. Performance was evaluated on an expert-scored dataset never used for feature discovery (\n                      <jats:italic>N<\/jats:italic>\n                      = 851), in a fully blinded comparison with an independently trained scorer (\n                      <jats:italic>N<\/jats:italic>\n                      = 47), and against external criteria (\n                      <jats:italic>N<\/jats:italic>\n                      = 446).\n                    <\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Results<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>\n                      The classifier agreed exactly with expert ratings in 86.1% of cases (quadratic-weighted \u03ba = 0.93). By contrast, zero-shot prompting of two frontier language models with the full scoring manual yielded only 40.1\u201344.9% agreement, indicating that expert-comparable scoring is not achieved by prompting alone. The classifier's agreement replicated at 85.1% in the blinded comparison. In external validation, the indicators correlated with personality, coherence, and autonomy measures in theoretically expected patterns, and explained substantial additional variance in expert-rated developmental stage beyond Big Five traits (\u0394\n                      <jats:italic>R<\/jats:italic>\n                      <jats:sup>2<\/jats:sup>\n                      = 0.59). In further analyses, they were also consistent with EDT's predicted alternation of differentiation and integration across stages. The Language Complexity indicator agreed with human-rated Integrative Complexity (ICC = 0.73 and 0.77 in two corpora). Exploratory analyses in five non-SCT corpora suggested the indicators predict domain-relevant behavior in other text genres.\n                    <\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Discussion<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>These results support automated ego-development scoring at agreement levels comparable to trained raters, and the indicators offer interpretable candidate dimensions of adult development for confirmatory and population-scale research.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.3389\/fpsyg.2026.1853871","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,27]],"date-time":"2026-08-27T05:34:23Z","timestamp":1787808863000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Automated scoring of adult ego development from sentence completions: interpretable maturity indicators derived by evolutionary prompt optimization"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Tamas","family":"Madl","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and University of Vienna","place":["Vienna, Austria"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Susanne R.","family":"Cook-Greuter","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Cook-Greuter and Associates","place":["Wayland, MA, United States"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,27]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1111\/j.1744-6570.1991.tb00688.x","article-title":"The big five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis","volume":"44","author":"Barrick","year":"1991","journal-title":"Pers. 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