Personality Psychology Podcast

#29 Causal inference with Michael Grosz

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.

#28 Big Five vs. HEXACO with Colin DeYoung, Isabel Thielmann, Luke Smillie, and Reinout de Vries

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.

#27 Geography and personality with Fritz Götz, Elisa Militaru, and Markus Jokela

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.

#26 Spirituality and religiosity with Julie Exline

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.

#25 Behaviour genetics with Michel Nivard

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.

#24 Personality, doomsday prepping, science denial, and being wrong with Adam Fetterman

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.

#23 Personality: universalism and cultural context with Moin Syed

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. 

#22 Interviews at the 20th European Conference on Personality in Madrid

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.

#21 Personality and health with Nick Turiano, Damaris Aschwanden, and Yannick Stephan

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.

#20 Post-traumatic growth with Laura Blackie and Eranda Jayawickreme

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.