Personality Psychology Podcast

Join Colin DeYoung, a neuroscience-focused personality professor, Isabel Thielmann, an expert in ethical behavior, Luke Smillie, who studies extroversion, and Reinout de Vries, a HEXACO model specialist, as they dive into the nuanced debate surrounding the Big Five and HEXACO personality models. They discuss each model’s strengths, the implications for understanding human behavior, and the complexities of measuring personality traits. Expect insights on ethical dimensions, political attitudes, and the importance of evolving personality assessments.

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, a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University, dives into the psychology of spirituality and religiosity. She shares her journey into the field and the nature of spiritual struggles many face. The conversation touches on balancing spirituality within conservative beliefs and the complexities of emotions like anger towards God, even among atheists. Exline discusses how personality traits shape these experiences and highlights the benefits of non-dogmatic spiritual direction and integrating spirituality into therapy.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

René Mõttus talks with Emily Willroth and Brett Ford about their recently published paper in the European Journal of Personality entitled: "Emotional responses to a global stressor: Average patterns and individual differences"