Personality Psychology Podcast

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"

Bob Krueger, a clinical psychologist from the University of Minnesota; Odilia Laceulle, a developmental psychologist at Utrecht University; and Johannes Zimmerman, a professor of personality psychology from the University of Kassel, dive into the complexities of personality and psychopathology. They discuss the shift from traditional diagnostic models to dimensional approaches like HiTOP. The conversation reveals the interplay of personality traits and mental health, particularly in youth, and critiques outdated methods, advocating for more nuanced, evidence-based evaluations in clinical practice.

Rebekka Weidmann talks with Paul Eastwick about his recently accepted paper in the European Journal of Personality entitled: "Predicting Romantic Interest during Early Relationship Development: A Preregistered Investigation using Machine Learning"

Lisanne de Moor speaks with Ulrich Orth, Ketaki Diwan, and Lorenzo Filosa, three self-esteem researchers, about what self-esteem is, why it has attracted so much scientific attention, some interesting new discoveries, and some outstanding research questions.