No abstract is available for this article.

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science—description, prediction and explanation—and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of predictive models without being constrained by parsimony

No abstract is available for this article.

People interact with their physical environments every day by visiting different places and moving between them. Such mobility behaviours likely influence and are influenced by people's subjective well‐being. However, past research examining the links between mobility behaviours and well‐being has been inconclusive. Here, we provide a comprehensive investigation of these relationships by examining

Smartphones promise great potential for personality science to study people's everyday life behaviours. Even though personality psychologists have become increasingly interested in the study of personality states, associations between smartphone data and personality states have not yet been investigated. This study provides a first step towards understanding how smartphones may be used for behavioural

This study explored the validity of person judgements by targets and their acquaintances (‘informants’) in longitudinally predicting a broad range of psychologically meaningful life experiences. Judgements were gathered from four sources (targets, N = 189; and three types of informants, N = 1352), and their relative predictive validity was compared for three types of judgement: direct predictions of

This conceptual paper examines the promises and critical challenges posed by contemporary personality measurement using big data. More specifically, the paper provides (i) an introduction to the type of technologies that give rise to big data, (ii) an overview of how big data is used in personality research and how it might be used in the future, (iii) a framework for approaching big data in personality

People around the world own digital media devices that mediate and are in close proximity to their daily behaviours and situational contexts. These devices can be harnessed as sensing technologies to collect information from sensor and metadata logs that provide fine‐grained records of everyday personality expression. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework and empirical illustration for personality

Behaviour and the individual person are important but widely neglected topics of personality psychology. We argue that new technologies to collect and new methods to analyse Big (Behavioural) Data have the potential to bring back both more behaviour and the individual person into personality science. The call for studying the individual person in the history of personality science, the related idiographic/nomothetic

To what extent are intergroup attitudes associated with regional differences in online aggression and hostility? We test whether regional attitude biases towards minorities and their local variability (i.e. intraregional polarization) independently predict verbal hostility on social media. We measure online hostility using large US American samples from Twitter and measure regional attitudes using

No abstract is available for this article.

Over the last few decades, most personality psychology research has been focused on assessing personality via scores on a few broad traits and investigating how these scores predict various behaviours and outcomes. This approach does not seek to explain the causal mechanisms underlying human personality and thus falls short of explaining the proximal sources of traits as well as the variation of individuals'

Divergent thinking (DT) is an important constituent of creativity that captures aspects of fluency and originality. The literature lacks multivariate studies that report relationships between DT and its aspects with relevant covariates, such as cognitive abilities, personality traits (e.g. openness), and insight. In two multivariate studies (N = 152 and N = 298), we evaluate competing measurement models

The field of personality psychology aspires to construct an overarching theory of human nature and individual differences: one that specifies the psychological mechanisms that underpin both universal and variable aspects of thought, emotion, and behaviour. Here, we argue that the adaptationist toolkit of evolutionary psychology provides a powerful meta‐theory for characterizing the psychological mechanisms

Vocational interests are traditionally conceived as stable preferences for different activities. However, recent theorizing suggests their intraindividual variability. This preregistered experience sampling study examined intraindividual variation in selected vocational interests states and related situation and person factors (N = 237). Results indicate that the three interest dimensions Investigative

Ambulatory assessment methods provide a rich approach for studying daily behaviour. Too often, however, these data are analysed in terms of averages, neglecting patterning of this behaviour over time. This paper describes recurrence quantification analysis (RQA), a non‐linear time series technique for analysing dynamic systems, as a method for analysing patterns of categorical, intensive longitudinal

Empathy theoretically serves an affiliative interpersonal function by satisfying motives for intimacy and union with others. Accordingly, empathy is expected to vary depending on the situation. Inconsistent empirical support for empathy's affiliative role may be because of methodology focused on individual differences in empathy or differences between controlled experimental conditions, which fail

Estimating psychological constructs from natural language has the potential to expand the reach and applicability of personality science. Research on the Big Five has produced methods to reliably assess personality traits from text, but the development of comparable tools for personal values is still in the early stages. Based on the Schwartz theory of basic human values, we developed a dictionary

Performance on achievement tests is characterized by an interplay of different individual attributes such as personality traits, motivation or cognitive styles. However, the prediction of individuals' performance from classical self‐report personality measures obtained during large and comprehensive aptitude assessments is biased by, for example, subjective response tendencies. This study goes beyond

According to the integrative framework for studying people, personality manifests and develops along three separate, but related, levels: the actor (e.g. traits), agent (e.g. goals), and author (i.e. narratives). Although these levels are thought to be conceptually interrelated, few studies have empirically examined such interrelations. To address this gap, the present study tested how traits, goals

Few studies have examined birth order effects on personality in countries that are not Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD). However, theories have generally suggested that interculturally universal family dynamics are the mechanism behind birth order effects, and prominent theories such as resource dilution would predict even stronger linear effects in poorer countries.

Theorists have suggested that beliefs about whether personality can change might operate in a self‐fulfilling fashion, leading to growth in personality traits across time. In the present two studies, we collected intensive longitudinal data from a total of 1339 emerging adults (ns = 254 and 1085) and examined the extent to which both global beliefs that personality can change (e.g. ‘You can change

Researchers are increasingly interested in the affect dynamics of individuals for describing and explaining personality and psychopathology. Recently, the incremental validity of more complex indicators of affect dynamics (IADs; e.g. autoregression) has been called into question (Dejonckheere et al., 2019), with evidence accumulating that these might convey little unique information beyond mean level

This study examined sojourners' long‐term personality trait changes over five years, extending previous research on immediate sojourn effects. A sample of German students (N = 1095) was surveyed thrice (T1–T3) over the course of an academic year. Sojourners (n = 498) lived abroad shortly after T1 for one or two semesters; stayers (n = 597) remained in their home country. Five years after T1, we surveyed

This paper introduces key concepts for studying intraindividual variability in narratives (narrative IIV). Narrative IIV is conceptualized in terms of sources of within‐person variation (events and audiences) and dimensions of variation (structural and motivational/affective dimensions of narratives). Possible implications of narrative IIV for well‐being and self and social development are outlined

Past research using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an observational ambulatory assessment method for the real‐world measurement of daily behaviour, has identified several behavioural manifestations of the Big Five domains in a small college sample (N = 96). With the use of a larger and more diverse sample of pooled data from N = 462 participants from a total of four community samples

In the age of big data, substantial research is now moving toward using digital footprints like social media text data to assess personality. Nevertheless, there are concerns and questions regarding the psychometric and validity evidence of such approaches. We seek to address this issue by focusing on social media text data and (i) conducting a review of psychometric validation efforts in social media

The purpose of the study was to examine longitudinally how intrinsic and extrinsic values develop during preadolescence within a mother–child context by comparing three different developmental pathways—direct value transmission, indirect value transmission, and value origination. Two hundred and thirty‐three Korean mother–child dyads of late elementary students (Mage = 11.4 years; 55% girls) participated

People vary widely in their expressive accuracy, the tendency to be viewed in line with one's unique traits. It is unclear, however, whether expressive accuracy is a stable individual difference that transcends social contexts or a more piecemeal, context‐specific characteristic. The current research therefore examined the consistency of expressive accuracy across three social contexts: face‐to‐face

This study examined the associations between personality traits and psychological and behavioural responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic. Personality was assessed in January/February 2020 when the public was not aware of the spread of coronavirus in the USA. Participants were reassessed in late March 2020 with four sets of questions about the pandemic: concerns, precautions,

Most work on self‐control and impulsivity typically assumes, more or less tacitly, that people value self‐control as more important than succumbing to temptations. According to this narrative, people regard impulsive behaviours as ‘failures’ of self‐control and experience negative self‐evaluations such as feelings of guilt or shame in response. Here, we direct attention to a neglected but crucial meta‐behavioural

Recent developments in personality research highlight the value of modelling dynamic state‐like manifestations of personality. The present work integrates these developments with prominent clinical models addressing within‐person multiplicity and promotes the exploration of models centred on state‐like manifestations of personality that function as cohesive organizational units. Such units possess

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, confers self‐oriented, existential, and social benefits. We examined whether nostalgic engagement is less beneficial for individuals who are high in neuroticism (i.e. emotionally unstable and prone to negative affect). Specifically, we tested whether the benefits of experimentally induced nostalgia are moderated by trait‐level neuroticism

In line with the social investment principle, becoming a parent should lead to more mature behaviour and an increase in conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability. However, previous research provided mixed results that do not support this idea. Here, we used data from a nationally representative household panel study from Germany (N = 19 875) to examine whether becoming a parent relates

No abstract is available for this article.

Why are open people open? A recent theory suggests that openness/intellect reflects sensitivity to the reward value of information, but so far, this has undergone few direct tests. To assess preferences for information, we constructed a novel task, adapted from information‐seeking paradigms within decision science, in which participants could choose to see information related to a guessing game they

We present a new method for personality assessment at a distance to uncover personality structure in historical texts. We focus on how two 19th century authors understood and described human personality; we apply a new bottom‐up computational approach to extract personality dimensions used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to describe fictional characters in 21 novels. We matched personality descriptions

Personality can be described at different levels of abstraction. Whereas the Big Five domains are the dominant level of analysis, several researchers have called for more fine‐grained approaches, such as facet‐level analysis. Personality facets allow more comprehensive descriptions, more accurate predictions of outcomes, and a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying trait–outcome relationships

For decades, day–night patterns in behaviour have been investigated by asking people about their sleep–wake timing, their diurnal activity patterns, and their sleep duration. We demonstrate that the increasing digitalization of lifestyle offers new possibilities for research to investigate day–night patterns and related traits with the help of behavioural data. Using smartphone sensing, we collected

The increasing availability of high‐dimensional, fine‐grained data about human behaviour, gathered from mobile sensing studies and in the form of digital footprints, is poised to drastically alter the way personality psychologists perform research and undertake personality assessment. These new kinds and quantities of data raise important questions about how to analyse the data and interpret the results

Personality psychologists are increasingly documenting dynamic, within‐person processes. Big data methodologies can augment this endeavour by allowing for the collection of naturalistic and personality‐relevant digital traces from online environments. Whereas big data methods have primarily been used to catalogue static personality dimensions, here we present a case study in how they can be used to

This article reviews the causal implications of latent variable and psychometric network models for the validation of personality trait questionnaires. These models imply different data generating mechanisms that have important consequences for the validity and validation of questionnaires. From this review, we formalize a framework for assessing the evidence for the validity of questionnaires from

During adolescence and young adulthood, individuals show personality changes and experience various life transitions. Whereas personality might affect the timing of life transitions, life transitions might also induce personality maturation. We examined Big Five personality maturation from age 12 to 25 using a 9‐year longitudinal study of Dutch youths from two cohorts (n1 = 683, MageT1 = 12.70; n2 = 268

Repeated assessments of personality states in daily diary or experience sampling studies have become a more and more common tool in the psychologist's toolbox. However, and contrary to the widely available literature on personality traits, no best practices for the development of personality state measures exist, and personality state measures have been developed in many different ways. To address

To sample situations that are psychologically arousing in daily life, we implemented an experience sampling strategy in which 82 Dutch young adults (Mage = 20.73) were triggered based on random time intervals and based on physiological skin conductance scores across a period of 5 days. When triggered, participants had to fill in short surveys on affect, situational characteristics and event characteristics

Research indicates that it might be possible to change personality traits through intervention, but this clinical research has primarily focused on changing neuroticism. To date, there are no established, proven techniques for changing other domains of personality, such as conscientiousness and openness. This research examined the effects of a two‐week smartphone‐based intervention to either change

This study assessed change in self‐reported Big Five personality traits. We conducted a coordinated integrative data analysis using data from 16 longitudinal samples, comprising a total sample of over 60 000 participants. We coordinated models across multiple datasets and fit identical multi‐level growth models to assess and compare the extent of trait change over time. Quadratic change was assessed

Network theories have been put forward for psychopathology (in which mental disorders originate from causal relations between symptoms) and for personality (in which personality factors originate from coupled equilibria of cognitions, affect states, behaviours, and environments). Here, we connect these theoretical strands in an overarching personality–resilience–psychopathology model. In this model

Examining the influence of culture on personality and its unbiased assessment is the main subject of cross‐cultural personality research. Recent large‐scale studies exploring personality differences across cultures share substantial methodological and psychometric shortcomings that render it difficult to differentiate between method and trait variance. One prominent example is the implicit assumption

In this study, we examine how daily life fluctuations in positive affect (PA) and negative afect (NA) relate to mixed emotions—that is, simultaneous positive and negative feelings. We utilised three experience sampling studies (total N = 275), in which participants reported their affect 10 times each day for up to 14 days. Because people generally experience fairly stable moderate levels of PA in daily

In the past decade, researchers have demonstrated that personality can be accurately predicted from digital footprint data, including Facebook likes, tweets, blog posts, pictures, and transaction records. Such computer‐based predictions from digital footprints can complement—and in some circumstances even replace—traditional self‐report measures, which suffer from well‐known response biases and are

Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions about what is morally right or wrong rest upon a set of universal foundations. Although this theory has generated a recent surge of research, few studies have investigated the real‐world moral consequences of the postulated moral intuitions. We show that they are predictably associated with an important type of moral behaviour. Stronger individualizing

The associations between couple members' personality and their relationship satisfaction can be conceptualized as reciprocal transactions. To better understand these transactions, we focused on both partners' interpersonal vulnerabilities (i.e. neuroticism, low self‐esteem, and insecure attachment); daily emotional, cognitive, and behavioural relationship components (i.e. perceived responsiveness,

Personality psychology has long been grounded in data typologies, particularly in the delineation of behavioural, life outcome, informant‐report, and self‐report sources of data from one another. Such data typologies are becoming obsolete in the face of new methods, technologies, and data philosophies. In this article, we discuss personality psychology's historical thinking about data, modern data

No abstract is available for this article.

Executive functions are (EF) top‐down control processes involved in regulating thoughts, ignoring distractions, and inhibiting impulses. It is widely believed that these processes are critical to self‐control and, therefore, that performance on behavioural task measures of EF should be associated with individual differences in everyday life outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to test this

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of hypotheses about variations in ideology beyond the

We investigated the distinction between traits (also labelled basic tendencies or dispositions) and (characteristic) adaptations, two related features of the personality system postulated to influence how personality manifests throughout the lifespan. Traits are alleged to be universal, causal, and enduring entities that exist across cultures and through evolutionary time, whereas learned adaptations

There is a well‐established link between substance use and four personality traits of anxiety–sensitivity, hopelessness, impulsivity, and sensation‐seeking. However, construct‐level models of personality may conceal indicator‐level personality–outcome associations. The current study aims to investigate evolution of the network constellation of personality and cannabis/alcohol use from early to late

The importance of personality for predicting life outcomes in the domains of love, work, and health is well established, as is evidence that personality traits, while relatively stable, can change. However, little is known about the sources and processes that drive changes in personality traits and how such changes might impact important life outcomes. In this paper, we make the case that the research