The quantity of social relationships and social interactions is positively related to well-being, but the underlying role of personality dispositions in these associations is unclear. The present study investigated whether social motives for affiliation and intimacy moderate associations of personal networks with well-being.

This study aimed to explore the autobiographical foundations of specific narrative identities, which made it possible to choose medical volunteering in the time of the pandemic, resist highly hazardous conditions of working in COVID-19 "red zones,” and emerge from this work with a sense of meaning and optimism.

In this psychobiographical study, we examined the life and times of social change agent Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay public officials in the United States. Milk is remembered as a gay hero who fought for the rights of marginalized people, often by invoking the importance of hope. Milk was assassinated less than one year after his election. In this psychobiography, we adopted a structural

This psychobiography focuses on the advocacy work of Natasha Keating, a trans woman incarcerated in two male prisons in Australia between 2000 and 2007. Incarcerated trans women are a vulnerable group who experience high levels of victimization and discrimination. However, Natasha advocated for her rights while incarcerated and this advocacy contributed to substantial changes in the carceral system

This article presents a psychobiography of James Baldwin (1924-1987), a prolific African American author and activist whose writing centered primarily on race, sexuality, and religion. Baldwin’s lived experiences and breadth of knowledge provided him with a unique perspective of the Black experience in America, a theme he frequently revisited in his work and the impetus for his involvement in the Civil

Peer groups represent a critical developmental context in adolescence, and there are many well-documented associations between personality and peer behavior at this age. However, the precise nature and direction of these associations are difficult to determine as youth both select into, and are influenced by, their peers. We thus examined the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental links between antisocial

We examined changes in value inter-relations during middle-childhood. In line with the Personal Values Theory (Schwartz, 1992), we expected a value system, with individuals similarly valuing related motivations, and setting priorities between conflicting motivations (Döring et al., 2016; Schwartz, 1992). We hypothesized this system to develop dynamically during middle-childhood, as children deepen

Research in personality trait change has largely relied on mean-level and rank-order change across the lifespan. The current research expanded the literature in several ways: analyzing four types of change and correlated change patterns, obtaining multi-informant reports, including lower-order personality traits, and collecting multiple assessments during a short yet important time for college-attending

In the first 100 days of his U.S. presidency, Joe Biden sought to comfort Americans who had lost loved ones to the pandemic and to initiate a surprisingly progressive policy agenda. I interpret these two cardinal features of his early presidency in terms of two traumatic losses in Biden’s personal life, contextualizing the argument within a 3-tiered model of personality.

We propose that analysis of the life of Jane Lockwood Barney provides insight into the notion of a “generative identity”—an integrated sense of self constructed around caring for others and the world. During her 104 years, the socially prescribed roles for women grew in range; Barney's own roles included minister's wife, mother of four, theological philosopher, social work student and professional

This study investigated whether the Big Five personality dimensions were associated with mental health trajectories and/or intervention effects of a digital divorce intervention from juridical divorce to 12 months following juridical divorce. The study utilized a randomized controlled trial study design (N = 676) and measured mental health outcomes (anxiety, depression, somatization, and stress) at

In this rapidly digitizing world, it is becoming ever more important to understand people's online behaviors in both scientific and consumer research settings. The current work tests the feasibility of inferring personality traits from mouse movement patterns as a cost-effective means of measuring individual characteristics.

Evolved mate preferences have taken center stage in evolutionary psychology research, yet this literature has been fairly muted on mate preferences for extrapair partners. Here, we examined the mate preferences for mistress relationships (the traits that men prioritize in a mistress and mistresses prioritize in their male partners) and compared these preferences to those of short- and long-term relationships

There is reason to believe that introversion may relate to different patterns of negative and positive experiences in everyday life (“hassles” and “uplifts”), but there is little evidence for this based on reports made in daily life as events occur. We thus extend the literature by using data from ecological momentary assessments to examine whether introversion is associated with either the frequency

No construct is more central to personality than the person’s self-concept. Higher-order domains of self-assessment, including self-perceived skills, traits, and values, are expressed in action and provide frames of reference for deciding whether to accept or reject personally relevant social feedback. To perform these functions in a consistent manner, the domains of self-concept need to achieve coherence

We took a rare opportunity to examine whether extreme debtors have inflated assessment of their self-control capacity, potentially rendering self-reported measures ineffective as prediction tools for debt risks.

Gloria Steinem is one of the best-known feminists active in the United States today. This article addresses aspects of Steinem's childhood and adolescence to help us understand how her experiences helped set the stage for Steinem's development into a feminist in midlife.

This 33-year study examined associations between self-control development in adolescence and forgivingness, i.e., the dispositional tendency to forgive others, in middle adulthood.

Self-control is a meaningful predictor of crucial life outcomes. Knowingly, genes contribute substantially to differences in self-control, but behavioral genetic findings are often misinterpreted regarding environmental influences. Therefore, we reinvestigate the heritability of self-control as well as potential environmental influences, namely parenting and a chaotic home environment.

People differ in how they regulate their emotions, and how they do so is guided by their beliefs about emotion. We propose that social power—one's perceived influence over others—relates to one's beliefs about emotion and to emotion regulation. More powerful people are characterized as authentic and uninhibited, which should translate to the belief that one should not have to control one's emotions

Education has a strong impact on adolescent development. This study investigated the complex longitudinal associations between educational identity processes, academic achievement, and perfectionism.

We propose a model of basic self-regulatory mechanisms that integrates descriptive-structural and dynamic-explanatory approaches to personality. Using a structural way of thinking and based on a structural model of personality (the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits), we deduced two orthogonal (distinct) but interactive mechanisms: (a) Impulse Control responsible for controlling automatically activated

Leaders differ in their personalities from non-leaders. However, when do these differences emerge? Are leaders “born to be leaders” or does their personality change in preparation for a leadership role and due to increasing leadership experience?

American Indian communities have long been subject to environmental degradation, but successful “grassroots” struggles to end such exploitation are exceedingly rare. How is it that Joseph William Azure—my father and an unsung hero of social change—came to “notice” in 1985 that “our entire [reservation] mountain range was at risk” from destructive gold mining and, in response, to form “a small grassroots

Extant theoretical models of personality coherence/incoherence do not sufficiently address the challenge of explaining personality coherence dynamics and the role of psychological mechanisms, including temperament and attention. To overcome these limitations, the Complex-System Approach to Personality (C-SAP) postulates that personality coherence is a within-person structure that arises from the functional

Several personality traits increase the risk for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Because many of these traits are correlated, their associations with disease risk could reflect shared variance, rather than unique contributions of each trait. We examined a higher-order personality trait of Stability as related to preclinical atherosclerosis and tested whether any such relationship might be explained

Research on the associations between cognitive and noncognitive personality traits has widely neglected character strengths, that means positively and morally valued personality traits that constitute good character.

Previous research suggests that people want to change their big five traits—and moreover, they may be able to do so. This paper extends these findings in three ways. First, I examined the extent to which people want to change their levels of the dark triad—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Second, I tested whether desires to change the dark triad predicted actual changes in the corresponding

Previous studies examined the trajectory of self-esteem during critical developmental periods and over the life-span. However, little is known about how self-esteem changes during the school-to-work transition.

Studying abroad is often considered a life-changing experience. However, research on studying abroad has not always disentangled selection from socialization effects, leading to uncertainty about the actual impact of this experience. In this 4-wave longitudinal study, we examined both selection and socialization effects of a 4-week intensive study abroad program on 17 psychosocial variables related

Research on associations between parents’ personality and parenting has a long history, but mechanisms that explain them remain unsettled. We examined parents’ explicit and implicit negative internal working models (IWMs) of the child, assessed at toddler age, as linking parental personality and parenting.

The savanna theory of happiness posits that it is not only the current consequences of a given situation that affect happiness but also its ancestral consequences, and that the effect of ancestral consequences on happiness is stronger among less intelligent individuals. But what about situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment and thus have no ancestral consequences? Global pandemic

There are components of self that recognize effective courses of action and there are components of self that enact behaviors. The objective of the research was to examine alignment between these different components of self.

In clinical psychopathology research, up to seven traits have been suggested as instances of antagonistic psychopathology. Those antagonistic traits, in turn, are commonly viewed as reflections of low Agreeableness as per the Big Five (BF-AG). However, specific theoretical differences between antagonistic traits suggest that other broad, basic dimensions beyond BF-AG ought to provide further points

The goal of this paper is to promote the integration of two approaches to personality and assessment: Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory (CIIT) and the Narrative Identity Approach (NI).

Global challenges such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic have drawn public attention to conspiracy theories and citizens' non-compliance to science-based behavioral guidelines. We focus on individuals' worldviews about how one can and should construct reality (epistemic beliefs) to explain the endorsement of conspiracy theories and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and propose the Dark

Do people (i.e., metaperceivers) know their romantic partners’ (i.e., perceivers’) impressions, displaying meta-accuracy? Is it related to relationship well-being? We explored two components of meta-accuracy: (1) positive meta-accuracy (i.e., knowing the perceiver’s positive impressions of the metaperceiver), and (2) distinctive meta-accuracy (i.e., knowing the perceiver’s unique impressions of the

Personality involves both trait and state components, personal goals serving a crucial regulatory function for the expression of personality states. The present study investigates the dynamic interplay between conscientiousness-related goals, conscientious personality states, and trait conscientiousness.

Narcissism can manifest in grandiose and vulnerable patterns of experience and behavior. While largely unrelated in the general population, individuals with clinically relevant narcissism are thought to display both. Our previous studies showed that trait measures of grandiosity and vulnerability were unrelated at low-to-moderate levels of grandiose narcissism, but related at high levels.

Although the mate preference priority model (MPPM) has advanced our understanding of mate preferences, tests of the MPPM have relied on methods using text labels and thus lack ecological validity. We address this gap by testing the MPPM using J. M. Townsend's profile-based experimental paradigm, which utilizes profiles comprising photos of pre-rated models to manipulate physical attractiveness as well

Relations between the Big Five personality dispositions and individual differences in political trust and involvement in politics have been investigated in many studies. We aimed to systematically integrate these findings and further explore the correlations at different hierarchical levels of the Big Five and political trust and involvement.

Individual differences in adolescent personality are related to a variety of long-term health outcomes. While previous studies have demonstrated sex differences and non-linear changes in personality development, these results remain equivocal. The current study utilized longitudinal data (n = 831) from the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence to examine sex differences

Trait aggression is a prominent construct in the psychological literature, yet little work has sought to situate trait aggression among broader frameworks of personality. Initial evidence suggests that trait aggression may be best couched within the nomological network of the Five-Factor Model (FFM). The current work sought to locate the most appropriate home for trait aggression among the FFM.

One way in which individuals construct their narrative identity is by making self-event connections, which are often linked to better functioning. Being unable to make connections is related to identity discontinuity and psychopathology. Work in the general population corroborates this association, but also highlights the importance of focusing on specific aspects of these connections and on vulnerable

Effortful control (EC) has been conceptualized as a higher-order construct defined by a class of self-regulatory mechanisms. However, the developmental higher-order structure of EC has seldom been investigated with a thorough psychometric analysis. To begin to fill this gap in the literature, data were obtained from parents and teachers of 185 children (age at T1: M = 9.43 y/o, SD = 1.17) every 2 years

Three studies tested a novel model of the narcissism-paranoia link, whereby narcissism (primarily its socially maladaptive facets) is associated with paranoia via over-use of defensive self-protection and/or under-use of self-affirmation.

Males and females tend to exhibit small but reliable differences in personality traits and indices of psychopathology that are relatively stable over time and across cultures. Previous work suggests that sex differences in brain structure account for differences in domains of cognition.

Correlational research aiming to validate measures and the construct of implicit self-esteem (ISE) has produced heterogeneous results in the past. We argue that this might be caused by two underappreciated obstacles: the situational malleability of and the construct irrelevant variance in conventional ISE measures. In this study, we aim to address these problems.

Parental elaborative reminiscing supports young children's autobiographical memory, narrative, and socioemotional skills.

Here, we examine face memory among individuals who are self-focused and care little about others' needs: grandiose narcissists. Given narcissistic individuals' excessive self-focus and tendency to disregard the needs of others, they may struggle to recognize faces and their surrounding environment. Indeed, narcissistic individuals demonstrated worse recognition memory than non-narcissistic individuals

Optimism is linked to varied advantageous outcomes, ranging from improved health to better relationships, while pessimism is linked to reduced well-being. Relatively little is known about how optimism and pessimism may work together to shape the perception of support within marital relationships, and whether perceived support can affect couple-members' optimism and pessimism.

The present study investigated how much variability in moral identity scores is attributable to individual differences that are stable over time and how much variability reflects daily fluctuations.

Social processing (SP) deficits manifest across numerous mental disorders. However, this research has been plagued by heterogeneity and a piecemeal approach whereby skills are examined in isolation rather than as part of an integrated cognitive system. Here, we combined two dimensional frameworks of psychopathology to address these limitations.

Laughter conveys important information that supports social communication and bonding. Research suggests that unique acoustic properties distinguish laughter that promotes affiliation from laughter that conveys dominance, but little is known about potential individual differences in laughter interpretation or contagion based on these specified social functions of laughter. Psychopathy is associated

Research has consistently illustrated the impact of personality on marital quality. Given the inherent dyadic nature of relationships, recent investigations have integrated spouse-rated personality to account for both spouses' perspectives. Grounded in Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory, we viewed personality through an interpersonal lens and conceptualized maladaptive interpersonal functioning

The connection between personality traits and performance has fascinated scholars in a variety of disciplines for over a century. The present research synthesizes results from 54 meta-analyses (k = 2028, N = 554,778) to examine the association of Big Five traits with overall performance.

Narcissism is a complex, hierarchical construct that can be studied at the one, two, or three factor levels with different components within each level having their own unique nomological networks. The manner in which narcissism—both broadly and narrowly construed—is linked to aggression is important to understand given longstanding clinical and empirical observations of a link between the two and

Prior literature indicates that nontraditional attitudes are linked to higher intelligence. However, such attitudes in adolescence often accompany counter-normative, delinquent-type behaviors, which are themselves negatively linked with intelligence. This points to the possibility of suppression in the relationship between intelligence and nontraditional attitudes.

Recent theories propose that global meaning in life (MIL) is based on feelings of coherence, purpose, and existential mattering. MIL has also been linked to mental representations—for example, beliefs, values, attitudes, and identities—that serve as “meaning frameworks” for interpreting the world and oneself. Combining these proposals, we predicted that beliefs, values, attitudes, and identities would

Changeability of personality over short-term intervals has increasingly become a focus of research. However, the role played by argumentation interventions in short-term variations has scarcely been examined.