Biological and descriptive approaches to personality are concerned with identifying the fundamental dimensions along which people differ. My current research in collaboration with William Revelle examines the affective, behavioral, cognitive, and desire (the "ABCDs" of personality) components of basic individual differences. This research uses a web-based personality test that may be found at the Personality Project, a website devoted to current personality theory and research.

One of my interests concerning the structure of personality is to determine whether a general factor of personality (GFP; Rushton & Irwing, 2008) occupies the highest level in the hierarchy of personality traits across a number of personality inventories. In collaboration with William Revelle, we have reanalyzed several data sets in which researchers purportedly determined the existence and importance of a GFP, and we compared the general factor saturation in personality to the well-established general factor of cognitive ability. Preliminary analyses suggest that previous analyses of the GFP were flawed and that the correct method of evaluating the importance of a general factor (omega hierarchical analysis) shows the GFP to be meager in personality compared to cognitive ability.

The Study of Life Narratives

One way that people make sense of their lives is through the psychological construction of life narratives. My current research in collaboration with Dan McAdams examines the properties of individual scenes in people's life stories as well as the functions of life stories and their respective scenes.

I have conducted two studies investigating how college students use memories from their childhood and adolescence, their memories in general, and particular memories about lessons learned from authority figures. I was able to extend this research to include a community sample of adults age 30 and above. Participants were recruited through http://www.chicago.craigslist.org. Seventy-five adults from across the country participated in a three-part internet-based study. Participants narrated 6 episodes from their lives (learning a lesson, high point, low point, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood) and completed questionnaires assessing the phenomenological characteristics and functions of each scene. Participants also completed questionnaires assessing their psychosocial health and Big-Five traits. These data should bear on the following three questions: (1) Do people use scenes in their life stories for different functions? (2) Do the functions of scenes from relate to the psychosocial themes expressed in each respective scene? (3) Do the functions of each scene relate to the personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism as well as indicators of psychosocial health?

Intra-individual Variability in Personality States

Personality states may be thought of as having the same characteristics of personality traits, except whereas traits are thought to be stable, states may change rapidly over short periods of time. My current research in collaboration with William Fleeson examines the relationships between personality states, affect, and subjective judgments of one's own authenticity.

I have also begun to develop a project that aims to examine the structure of intraindividual variability in affect and behavior simultaneously. Variability in affect and variability in personality are internally consistent stable traits; however, the dimensionality of variability in affect and personality has received little attention, with preliminary studies showing either a 2 dimensional or multidimensional structure for affect and a unitary structure for personality. Studies investigating affect states and personality states together suggest that variations in affect and personality are uniquely related to each other and characteristics of the environment, but that does not necessarily inform investigations into the structure of variability. Thus, there have been no formal investigations that consider simultaneously the structure of affective variability and personality variability. I aim to examine this question using a number of datasets and methodologies: a) text-messaging experience sampling studies in naturalistic environments; b) traditional experience sampling studies; c) experience sampling in a structured laboratory environment; d) observer-coded affective and behavioral ratings in structured laboratory tasks.

CV

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Last updated September 17, 2009.