Personality Psychology Podcast

What is a good life? And can people have it? A recent European Journal of Personality paper authored by Emily Willroth and colleagues explored this question among U.S. Americans and Japanese, and also asked whether most people have the lives that they want.

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talks with three experts on what narrative identity is, what important contributions it makes to the field of personality psychology, and what is needed to further advance research on narrative identity.

Personality research occupies itself with not only the Big Five traits but a myriad of other important constructs. Bill Chopik talks in this episode about his research on attachment, optimism, and honesty, and also close relationships (including pets). He shares his experience with cross-cultural and lifespan studies, and important lessons from grad school.

Many researchers like to think of personalities as patterns of dynamic states. Thanks to technological advances, they can now measure the states and build statistical models from these measurements. Other researchers may have remained more sceptical: after all, isn’t personality something relatively stable, by definition? Can state models really help us better understand how people differ from one another in their personality traits? Trying to make sense of this topic, René Mõttus speaks to three experts on the topic: Gabriela Harari, Kai Horstmann and Whitney Ringwald. They discuss what personality states are and how these relate to personality traits, the primary focus of personality research.

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.