Personality Project

Scientific objectives:

1. To gain an increased understanding of the ways in which personality and situational determinants of motivation combine to influence motivational states, and how these motivational states in turn affect cognitive processes to determine cognitive performance.
2. To understand the structure of human personality at multiple levels of analysis, including within individual, between individual, and between self selected aggregates of individuals.

Methods:

1. Experimental studies of the effect of various motivational manipulations on cognitive performance.
2. Web based data collection using Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment (SAPA) techniques to examine the structure of large number of temperament, ability, and interest items from people around the world.
3. Using other telemetric techniques to examine the structure of affect, cognition and desire as they relate to behavior within individuals across time.
4. Development of open source programs and materials to facilitate these goals (E.g., the psych package).

Selected SAPA publications and presentations

Publications

• Revelle, W. (2024) The seductive beauty of latent variable models: or why I don't believe in the Easter Bunny Personality and Individual Differences (2024)
• Williams, A. L., Conway, C. C., Olino, T. M., Revelle, W., Zinbarg, R. E., & HiTOP Utility Workgroup (in press). Testing criterion validity in hierarchical models of psychopathology: Comparison of latent variable and factor score approaches. Clinical Psychological Science. https://osf.io/u3j5d
• Widaman, K.F. and Revelle, W. (2023) Thinking About Sum Scores Yet Again, Maybe the Last Time, We Don’t Know, Oh No . . .1: A Comment on McNeish (2023) Educational and Psychological Measurement, 1-23,.
• Revelle, W. and Condon, D.M (2023-draft) Using undim rather than omega in estimating undimensionality. Working paper.
• Waller,N. and Revelle,W.(2023) What Are the Mathematical Bounds for Coefficient α? Psychological Methods.
• Revelle, W. and Garner, K.M. (2023) Measurement: Reliability, construct validation, and scale construction (draft of a chapter to appear in Harry T. Reis, Tessa Wesrt and Charles M. Judd (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology.
• Widaman, K. and Revelle, W. (2022) Thinking thrice about sum scores, and then some more about measurement and analysisBehavior Research Methods.
• Wilt, J. and Revelle, W. (2022) It’s About Time: Emphasizing Temporal Dynamics in Dynamic Personality Regulation. Journal of Personality .
• Eagly, A.H. and Revelle, W. (2022) Understanding the Magnitude of Psychological Differences Between Women and Men Requires Seeing the Forest and the Trees. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 17, (5).
• Dworak, E.M. and Revelle, W. (2020) Astrology versus Astronomy: Comments on Ashton and Lee. European Journal of Personality, 34, 522-523.
• Revelle, W., Dworak, E. M., and Condon, D. M. (2020a). Cognitive ability in everyday life: the utility of open source measures. Current Directions in Psychological Science (2020)
• Revelle, W., Dworak, E. M., and Condon, D. M. (2020b). Exploring the persome: The power of the item in understanding personality structure. Personality and Individual Differences (2020)
• Dworak, E. M., Revelle, W., Doebler, P., and Condon, D. M. (2020). Using the International Cognitive Ability Resource as an open source tool to explore individual differences in cognitive ability. Personality and Individual Differences (2020)
• Elleman, L. G., McDougald, S., Revelle, W., and Condon, D. (2020). That takes the biscuit: A comparative study of predictive accuracy and parsimony of four statistical learning techniques in personality data, with data missingness conditions. European Journal of Psychological Assessment (in press)
• Revelle, W. and Wilt, J. (2019) The dynamics of personality Preprint of version submitted to the the Handbook of Personality Dynamics. (in press), Rauthmann J. (Ed).
• Revelle, W. and Condon, D. (2019) Reliability from alpha to omega: a tutorial. Preprint of final version for Psych Assessment
• Revelle, W. and Condon, D. (2019) Reliability from alpha to omega: a tutorial. Preprint of final supplement for Psych Assessment
• Revelle, W. and Condon, D. (2018) Reliability from alpha to omega: a tutorial. Preprint at Open Science PsyArXiv (https://osf.io/e685p/)
• Revelle, W. and Wilt, J. (2019) Analyzing dynamic data: a tutorial. Personality and Individual Differences. 136, (1), 38-51. DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2017.08.020
• Revelle, W., Elleman, L. and Hall, A. (2020) Statistical analyses and computer programming in personality A chapter for the Cambridge University Press Handbook of Personality Psychology (Phillip Corr, Ed().
• Wilt, J. and Revelle, W. (2017) A personality perspective on situations. In Funder, D., Rauthman, J., and Sherman, R., editors, Oxford Handbook of Psychological Situations. Oxford Univeristy Press
• Wilt, J. and Revelle, W. (2019) The Big Five, everyday contexts and activities, and affective experience Personality and Individual Differences, 136, (1) 140-147 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.12.032
• William Revelle, David M. Condon, Joshua Wilt, Jason A. French, Ashley Brown and Lorien G. Elleman (2016) Web and phone based data collection using planned missing designs. Authors preprint for the Sage Handbook of Online Research Methods, 2nd Edition by Nigel G. Fielding, Raymond M. Lee, Grant Blank.
• Condon, D. M. and Revelle, W. (2016). Selected ICAR data from the SAPA-Project: Development and initial validation of a public-domain measure. Journal of Open Psychology Data, doi:10.5334/jopd.25
• Condon, D. M. and Revelle, W. (2015a). Selected ICAR data from the SAPA-Project: Development and initial validation of a public-domain measure. Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/AD9RVY
• Condon, D. M. and Revelle, W. (2015c). Selected personality data from the SAPA-Project: On the structure of phrased self-report items. Journal of Open Psychology Data, 3(1), doi:10.5334/jopd.al
• Condon, D. M. and Revelle, W. (2015b). Selected personality data from the SAPA-Project: 08dec2013 to 26jul2014. Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/SD7SVE
• Condon, D. M. and Revelle, W. (2014). The International Cognitive Ability Resource: Development and initial validation of a public domain measure Intelligence, 43:52–64 doi: d10.1016/j.intell.2014.01.004
• Revelle, W., Wilt, J., & Rosenthal, A. (2010) Individual differences in cognition: New methods for examining the personality-cognition link. in Aleksandra Gruszka, Gerald Matthews, and Blazej Szymura (editors): Handbook of Individual Differences in Cognition: Attention, Memory and Executive Control (pdf of draft)

Presentations

• William Revelle and Kayla Garner Revisiting old ideas for scale construction European Conference on Personality, Berlin, July, 2024.
• William Revelle and Kayla Garner Alternative metaphors for validity: Spear fishing versus fishing nets World Conference on Personality, Curacao, April 2, 2024
• William Revelle and Kayla Garner Dart Boards vs. Fishing Nets:Alternative metaphors for validity Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, Iowa City, Iowa, October 12, 2023
• William Revelle The seductive beauty of latent variables Presented as the ISSID Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Study of Individual Differences lecture at the meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Belfast, July, 2023.
• Kayla Garner and William Revelle. Understanding Leader and Ambition in broader personality space European Conference of Personality, Madrid, July 2022
• Kayla Garner and William Revelle. Mapping ambition across the USA Regional Cultural Differences Conference. Barcelona, July, 2022
• Kayla Garner and William Revelle. Validation and correlates of Ravens-like matrices International Society for Intelligence, Vienna, July 2022
• William Revelle 55 years of personality research: a progress report and a personal history Given as the Jack Block Award address at the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, February 12, 2021.
• William Revelle Open Science <-> Open methods and open data Presented (virtually) at the 4th Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence andBig Data in Education, Beijing, China, December 12, 2020.
• William Revelle Science by analogy: PWAS or Persome Wide Association Studies Presented to the Kellogg Behavioral Brown Bag, October 16, 2020.
Wide Association Studies Presented the Institute of Personality and Social Research, U.C. Berkely, January 22, 2020.
• William Revelle The future is open Part of a symposium: Into the future: ISSID Presidents' perspectives, International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Florence, Italy, July, 2019.
• William Revelle and David Condon Structure of personality profiles using PWAS International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Florence, Italy, July, 2019
• Dworak, E., Revelle, W., & Condon, D. From 2006 to 2018: Understanding twelve years of personality and ability data. International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Florence, Italy, July, 2019
• Lorien Elleman, Sarah K. McDougald, David M. Condon and William Revelle That takes the BISCUIT Poster award winner at Association of Research on Personality, June, 2019.
• William Revelle and Ashley Brown Modeling the dynamics of action presented as part of an expert meeting on Measuring and Modeling Persons and Situations, Alexandria, Virgina, March 2019.
• William Revelle Personality research: an open and shared science. University of Zurich, February, 2019.
• William Revelle, David Condon and Sonja Heintz Assessing Personality with Massively Missing Completely at Random Data: An information theoretic approach Paper presented as part of an experts meeting on personality measurement, Edinburgh, Scotland, September 6-8, 2018
• William Revelle and David Condon Using SAPA to study the structure of 6600 personality and ability items. Presented to the European Conference on Personality, Zadar, Croatia, July 19, 2018.
• William Revelle and David Condon Alternative measures of reliability: from alpha to omega Presented to the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 19, 2018.
• William Revelle (2018) Formal models for personality dynamics. SPSP/ARP Preconference on Personality Dynamics, Processes, and Functioning, Atlanta, March 1, 2018.
• William Revelle and Joshua Wilt (2017) The dynamics of affect: the example of anxiety part of a symposium: Anxiety from cognitive and differential perspective, International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Warsaw, Poland (July 28, 2017(
• William Revelle and David Condon Using MMCAR to explore the structure of personality and ability Presented to the International Meeting of the Psychometric Society, Zurich, July 21, 2017.
• David Condon and William Revelle The Times They Are A-Changin’ (in Personality Assessment) European Conference on Psychological Assessment Lisboa, Portugal July 8, 2017
• William Revelle Personality Research: an open and shared science Presented at the SouthWestern Psychological Society, April, 2017
• William Revelle and David Condon Personality, Ability and Interests: Real World Outcomes Presented as part of a symposium Broadening the scope of personality research: The place of Personality, Ability, and Interests in Determining Real World Outcomes at European Conference on Personality: Timosoara, Romania, July, 2016,
• William Revelle and David Condon Embrace your Missingness part of a symposium: Approaching Complex Research Designs From the Perspective of Missing Data, Association for Psychological Science, Chicago. May 26, 2016
• William Revelle Personality at three levels of analysis Keynote address to the 2nd World Conference on Personality, Buzios, Brazil. April 2, 2016
• William Revelle Personality as Open Science Presentation to the Cognition Brain and Behavior Group, Department of Psychology, Harvard University. March 24, 2016
• William Revelle keynote to Serbian Current Trends in Psychology Conference October 24, 2015
• William Revelle and David Condon presentation to International Society for Intelligence Research September 19, 2015.
• Introduction to ISSID 2015 presentationAugust 30, 2015
• Ashley Brown ISSID 2015 presentation
• Lorien G. Elleman ISSID 2015 presentation
• Joshua Wilt ISSID 2015 presentation
• David M. Condon ISSID 2015 presentation

Recent PMC Publications

The Personality, Motivation and Cognition lab is more than just SAPA, for we are interested in the broad questions of what is personality, how does it vary within and between individuals, how does it relate to emotional states. We are also very interested in the Open Science movement. For more information about the PMC lab see the publication list for William Revelle , David M. Condon , Joshua Wilt, Jason French, Ashley Brown and Lorien Elleman.)

The Personality Project

A continously growing set of pages meant to guide those interested in personality theory and research to the current personality research literature. Although some of the readings are available on-line, all should be available from most university libraries. Information about scholarly societies and graduate training programs in personality is provided for those interested in pursuing further study in personality theory. Course syllabi from personality theory and research courses are being added gradually. Links to active researchers and personality laboratories are added when found (and as time allows).

Psych and other Computer Programs developed at the PMC lab

Obviously the most visible program developed at the PMC lab is the psych package which has been released to CRAN since 1997. psych is a general purpose toolbox for personality, psychometric theory and experimental psychology. Functions are primarily for multivariate analysis and scale construction using factor analysis, principal component analysis, cluster analysis and reliability analysis, although others provide basic descriptive statistics. Item Response Theory is done using factor analysis of tetrachoric and polychoric correlations. Functions for analyzing data at multiple levels include within and between group statistics, including correlations and factor analysis. Functions for simulating and testing particular item and test structures are included. Several functions serve as a useful front end for structural equation modeling. Graphical displays of path diagrams, factor analysis and structural equation models are created using basic graphics. Some of the functions are written to support a book on psychometric theory as well as publications in personality research. For more information, see the personality-project.org/r web page

To download the development version of psych from the personality-project.org/r server: install.packages("psych", repos="https://personality-project.org/r",type="source"). As of version 1.9.12, psych now has a separate package ("psychTools") which includes the larger data sets previously available in psych. They both may be downloaded from CRAN.

How to use the psych package: (A number of pdf tutorials on using the psych package.)

• How to use the psych package for factor analysis and data reduction.
• How to use the psych package for for scoring personality scales
• How to use the psych package for mediation, moderation and regression analysis
• How to use the psych package for finding coefficient omega

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Version of October 15, 2020.