Table of Contents

Academic Webpages

Research Labs
  • The International Personality Item Pool is "A Scientific Collaboratory for the Development of Advanced Measures of Personality and Other Individual Differences" maintained by Lew Goldberg at the University of Oregon.
  • Personality, Motivation and Cognition Laboratory at Northwestern University is the home of the Personality-Project and inspired Scott Acton's "Great Ideas in Personality" page which is hosted at the PMC lab. Research is focused on the structure of emotion, web based measurement of personality, psychometric theory, and the patterning of relationships between affect, behavior, cognition and desires (the ABCD model).
  • Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience: Lifespan, Cognition and Health Section, Gerontology Research Center, National Institute of Aging: "studies dimensions of personality and their influence on processes of adaptation in adult men and women; determines methods and strategies for coping with stresses of adult life; and evaluates the effects of different coping mechanisms and personality dispositions on such outcomes as subjective well-being, social functioning, and physical and psychiatric health. Section scientists use epidemiological, experimental and longitudinal analyses of personality dimensions to study the interactions of aging with personality and psychological processes."

  • Personality Assessment R.J. Harvey at Virginia Tech has focused primarily on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), "Big Five" instruments, and specific scales that are of use in employment related settings. There is also some IRT analyses of Big 5 inventories.
  • Animal Personality Institute at University of Texas "is an interdisciplinary organization for bringing together research scientists whose work contributes to understanding personality and temperament in non-human animals. It is dedicated to building a stronger and integrative study of animal personality."
  • Riverside Accuracy Project "investigate the factors that influence the considerable accuracy with which people make personality judgments of others in real-life interactions. The four moderators of person perception which are being investigated through the Accuracy Project are the judge (why are some people better judges of personality than others?), the target (why are some individiduals easier to judge than others?), the trait (why are some traits easier to judge accurately?), and the information (what kind of information leads to more accurate judgments of personality?)."
  • Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin "is engaged in a broad program of research on the brain mechanisms that underlie emotion and emotion regulation in normal individuals throughout the life course, and in individuals with various psychiatric disorders. "
  • Attachment Laboratory at SUNY Stony Brook "Reports and commentary on attachment theory and research from Everett Waters, Judy Crowell, and colleagues at SUNY Stony Brook and the New York Attachment Consortium. A library of researchers' publication lists and on-line articles. Attachment measures for infant- mother, childhood, parenting, and marriage research. Course materials. Announcements and summaries of special events. Links to attachment related sites. Special Bowlby and Ainsworth sections. And a gallery of attachment artifacts and observations in the Bowlby- Ainsworth tradition."
  • The Personality Assessment Lab at Washington University "... Most knowledge of personality is based on evidence obtained from self-report measures. Unfortunately, there is only a modest correlation between the ways in which people describe themselves and the ways in which they are perceived by others. The research being conducted in our lab began several years ago as an exploration of discrepancies between self-report and informant measures in the assessment of personality and personality disorders. It has evolved into an extensive investigation of interpersonal perception for personality traits. We are studying ways in which people see themselves, ways in which they are seen by other people, and their beliefs about what other people think of them. These studies lie directly at the intersection between basic science and clinical research. They depend heavily on methods and concepts developed by investigators studying interpersonal perception. It is also concerned with the impact of personality traits on functional outcomes in people’s lives."
  • Adult Attachment Laboratory at U.C. Davis attempts "... to advance current understanding of adult attachment dynamics. Currently, research in the Adult Attachment Lab is focused on understanding the conscious and unconscious dynamics of the attachment behavioral system and associations between adult attachment style and other psychological constructs such as self-esteem, personality traits, death anxiety, and compassion and altruism."
  • Paul Barrett's web page tutorials on stats, pscyhophysiology, and life qualify as a laboratory as well as a personal home page. Great reference source. Unfortunately, because of his use of frames, it is difficult to point to particular portions for particular applications.
  • The Social Psychology Network, maintained by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University is in a category by itself. Although (as the name implies) focusing on social psychololgy, there are many useful resources for the personality researcher. Lists of labs, on line experiments, and researchers may be found there. A useful resource (among the many others on the page) is the Research Randomizer which supplies samples (with and without replacement) of pseudo random sequences.

    "the largest social psychology database on the Internet. In these pages, you'll find more than 12,000 links related to psychology. " Well recognized as the primary source for Social Psychology.