Personality Psychology Podcast

In this episode, Michael Grosz talks about what causal inference is, how difficult it is to test in personality psychology, and why he doesn't give up on our field.

In this episode moderated by Lisanne de Moor, Colin DeYoung, Isabel Thielmann, Luke Smillie, and Reinout de Vries discuss personality traits and trait models, and debate the evidence for and against two of the most dominant trait models: the Big Five and the HEXACO model.

What does geography have to do with personality? In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann speaks with Fritz Götz, Elisa Militaru, and Markus Jokela about studying personality from a geographical psychology approach—what that research field is, how things are measured (and how tricky it is to measure), past interesting findings and future directions.

Julie Exline is an expert in studying spirituality and religiosity. For this episode, Julie talked with Rebekka Weidmann how she came to study spirituality and religiosity, the nature of spiritual struggles, and supernatural operating rules—how people envision or experience God or other supernatural powers.

Michel Nivard and René Mõttus discuss classical and modern behaviour genetics, and why much of personality genetics is no longer focused on finding personality genes (there are none) but using genes to learn about environment. Perhaps paradoxically, then, genetics is as likely to help with building psychological and sociological theories of personality as biological theories.

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor chats with Adam Fetterman about his work on the role of personality and beliefs in shaping people’s behavior in contemporary phenomena such as doomsday prepping, science denial, and people’s willingness to admit to being wrong.

Personality psychology is an exciting field of research. However, as we learn in Moin Syed’s presentation, this excitement has been dampened by a hyper focus on methodological and definitional issues based on the history of our field. However, personality can be more. Moin Syed talks in his presentation about how our field can earn back its excitement. 

For this episode, we talked to ten researchers at the 20th European Conference on Personality (#ECP20) in Madrid, including Anna Hakobjanyan, Jérome Rossier, Matej Bjurković, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura Buchinger, Markus Jokela, Barbara De Clercq, Verònica Benet-Martínez, Arij Yehya, and Kendall Mather.

This episode's guests were Nick Turiano, Damaris Aschwanden, and Yannick Stephan, three experts in personality and health psychology, who talked with Rebekka Weidmann about the importance of considering personality when predicting important health outcomes across the life span.

Many people believe that traumatic experiences are often followed by psychological growth. What does not kill us, makes us stronger, right?  Laura Blackie and Eranda Jayawickreme are among the leading researchers on this topic, and they just guest-edited a special issue on post-traumatic personality growth in the European Journal of Personality. They talked with René Mõttus what they have learned about how trauma can change us—or if it even changes us, after all.

René Mõttus talks with Emily Willroth and Brett Ford about their recently published paper in the European Journal of Personality entitled: "Emotional responses to a global stressor: Average patterns and individual differences"

Rebekka Weidmann talks with Paul Eastwick about his recently accepted paper in the European Journal of Personality entitled: "Predicting Romantic Interest during Early Relationship Development: A Preregistered Investigation using Machine Learning"

Lisanne de Moor speaks with Ulrich Orth, Ketaki Diwan, and Lorenzo Filosa, three self-esteem researchers, about what self-esteem is, why it has attracted so much scientific attention, some interesting new discoveries, and some outstanding research questions.

In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann speaks with Chris Hopwood about his research on personality and psychopathology, and also his work on authenticity and realness, sustainable behavior, and veganism.

Patrick Hill has studied many topics, including purpose in life, gratitude, health, and personality change. In this episode, Patrick spoke with René Mõttus about the influence of personality on life outcomes, interventions to change personality traits, and several other topics.

At the 2021 EAPP Day, we conducted a live panel discussion with Alexandria West, Hrag Vosgerichian, and Khatuna Martskvishvili and discussed how we can bring more diversity and inclusiveness into the field of personality research. Thank you all for attending! 

Lisanne de Moor spoke with Jenny Wagner, Eva Bleckmann, Larissa Wieczorek, and Naemi Brandt about their research on adolescent personality. They discussed personality development, and school and relationships as influencing factors. In addition, they discussed major recent accomplishments in the fields as well as the next steps forward.

René Mõttus spoke with one of the most influential personality psychologists in recent decades, Robert "Jeff" McCrae. They discussed the history and achievements of personality trait psychology and some of the key questions still awaiting an answer. They also spoke about an early "conspiracy" among the Big Five enthusiasts to promote the trait model and the most controversial aspect of the Five-Factor Theory – lack of direct influences of life experiences on personality traits.

In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann talked with Mitja Back, Carolyn Morf, and Joshua Miller about narcissism—what it is, how it manifests in people’s lives, whether it changes, and common misconceptions about narcissism.

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talked with Jessie Sun about morality and moral development, and how to conceptualize and measure it in research. In addition, they discussed some of Jessie’s past, ongoing, and upcoming research, and the major challenges she sees in moving forward.

In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann talked with Ted Schwaba, Eva Asselmann, and Chris Soto about their research on personality development across the lifespan, the importance of personality for life outcomes, and the emerging study of social, emotional, and behavioral skills.

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talks with Joanne Chung about how she became interested in personality psychology, her past, present, and future work, and creating spaces and recognizing different voices in our work as personality scientists.

In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann talked to Susanne Bücker, Richard Lucas, and Samantha Heintzelman about subjective well-being across the life span, factors that can change the well-being of people including the pandemic, and typical misconceptions that people might hold.

In this episode, Joanna Sosnowska and René Mõttus discuss dynamic models of personality and their usefulness for describing and understanding the psychology of workplace. The discussion is partly based on a recent paper Joanna and her colleagues published in the European Journal of Personality, as well as an upcoming special issue co-edited by Joanna (to be published in July in the European Journal of Personality).

In this episode, we hear a presentation by Emorie Beck on her research on nomothetic and idiographic approaches to personality structure and change, couched in a historical perspective.

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talked to Aidan Wright about how personality can be measured from a more personalized angle, what such an approach can contribute to personality science, and what are some of the challenges that he sees for moving this research forward.

Welcome to our podcast! For this episode, René Mõttus talked to Julia Rohrer and Jaap Denissen about what personality is, how personality psychology is unique as a field, and what its most significant achievements have been so far—but also about what is still puzzling and what can be improved for the future.