Personality Psychology Podcast

In this episode, Lucius Caviola discusses his psychological research on effective altruism and how people can be encouraged to give more effectively. You can try out effective giving yourself using his research-based donation platform  https://givingmultiplier.org/personality . The episode also explores Lucius' research on how we perceive the value of animals and think about future risks. 

Have you ever pondered about your purpose? In this episode, we talked with Gabrielle Pfund about sense of purpose. What does it mean to have a sense of purpose, how can we measure it, and how is it related to important life outcomes? Gabrielle also describes the characteristics of people who are more likely to have a sense of purpose and in what direction her research is headed.

There is a lot of interest in the idea that people can voluntarily change their personality traits. René Mõttus talks to Mathias Allemand, Gabriel Olaru, and Christoph Flückiger about personality change interventions. Why people want to change their personality traits, how can they do it, and how long could the effects last? They also discuss ethical issues related to trait change, and whether mos...

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talks with four researchers in the field of personality and aging about common trends in personality change into old age, antecedents and consequences thereof and, most importantly, individual differences.

In this episode, Marie Hennecke and Jana Nikitin talk about their research on goals and motivations. Specifically, they discuss why goals and motivations are important, how they change across the lifespan, and how we can achieve our goals—and even change our personality traits.

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...

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.

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...

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"

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talked with three experts about a dimensional approach to conceptualizing and measuring psychopathology, and the HiTOP model as an example of one of the advancements of this approach.

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.

René Mõttus speaks with Ian Deary, who has published many hundreds of articles on intelligence and personality traits, alongside several books. They discuss the value of robust empirical findings over grand theories and key findings about human intelligence. They also compare personality and intelligence research and discuss their future. And finally, this is the first episode of the podcast where...

In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann speaks with Chris Hopwood about his research on personality and psychopathology, and also his work on authenticity and realness, sustainable behavior, and veganism.