Introductions
EJP has partially renewed its team of Associate Editors. We had the chance to talk with several of the enthusiastic and freshly-minted Associate Editors. Specifically, we talked with Daniel Briley, Elisabetta Crocetti, Kenn Konstabel, Kristian Markon, Isabel Thielmann, and Jenny Wagner.
Read more about their research backgrounds and interests, and their hopes for submitted research at EJP below.
Q: Hi everyone, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your research?
Daniel: I am a developmental behavior geneticist studying individual differences in a range of variables, with personality theory and research guiding most of my interests. I am particularly interested in the ways in which genetically influenced characteristics combine and interact with the environment to produce the unique psychological characteristics of each person. I work with twin and family data to test for such interdependence. My work draws on ideas and methods from other branches of psychology and other social sciences in order to better understand psychological functioning. I am also a big fan of quantitative methods and enjoy a meta-analysis every once in a while (except during coding). When not crunching numbers, I spend my time with my wife, daughter, giant dog, and two cats running around the parks of central Illinois.
Elisabetta: I am an Associate Professor in social psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna, Italy. My primary scholarly interest concerns the processes of identity formation in adolescence. I am interested in examining how identity is formed and revised over time and which individual (e.g., personality, social-cognitive strategies, anxiety), interpersonal (e.g., family and peer relationships), social (e.g., civic participation), and cultural (e.g., migration) factors influence this dynamic. Most of my research is focused on the interplay between identity, acculturation processes, and intergroup relations in adolescents growing up in modern societies characterized by increasing levels of ethnic and cultural diversity.
I am also strongly interested in methodological and statistical issues related to social research, such as cross-cultural validation of measurement instruments, longitudinal data analysis, systematic reviews and meta-analysis.
Kenn: I did my PhD in personality psychology (University of Tartu, 2006) and then moved to a research institute to study children’s health behaviour. I still do research in both areas. In personality psychology, most of my published research is related to the question of measurement. For example, I am interested in the question of social desirability, and maximizing the informativeness of personality items while keeping their number at a minimum. Secondly and thirdly, I am interested in theoretical integration in personality psychology, as well as cross-cutting topics with health behaviour (e.g., lifestyle, and the mutual interactions of mood and activity).
Kristian: My research interests are broad but generally focus on how to model psychological and behavioral individual differences, especially as they pertain to adaptive or maladaptive functioning. I’m interested in many issues in this area, but especially in how to represent and measure psychological variables such as mood and ability, as well as how to model causes of those variables. I tend to prefer to approach these issues using large representative datasets and meta-analyses, and have a corresponding interest in meta-scientific issues like how to aggregate information across studies to draw inferences and evaluate models.
Isabel: I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. I received my Ph.D. in 2015 at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and was a visiting scholar at the Amsterdam Cooperation Lab, The Netherlands, in 2018.
In most of my research, I focus on individual differences in prosocial behavior (e.g., cooperation, fairness) and ethical behavior (e.g., honesty). Specifically, I take a person-situation-interaction perspective to understand which personality traits can (best) account for said behaviors in which situations. However, I am also interested in several other topics in the realm of personality psychology, including personality judgments (e.g., assumed similarity – the tendency to perceive similarity with others on certain traits), personality assessment (e.g., psychometric properties of personality questionnaires and nomological networks of trait constructs), self-other knowledge asymmetry (e.g., when do self-reports and informant reports of personality have incremental predictive validity beyond each other), and maladaptive personality traits (e.g., personality disorder features). Recently, I have also started to study personality change, most prominently personality change goals (i.e., how people want to change their personalities). So, overall, my interests are quite diverse and I love that our job as scientists allows us to work on different topics!
Jenny: I would describe myself as a differential life-span psychologist, driven by an interest in how and why people develop the way they do, and the potential impact this might have on the individual itself as well as its (social) surroundings. In this sense, I have been fascinated and, thus, put personality development and social relationships at the core of my research interest since I started my PhD. A second important aspect of my research is my interest in methods and statistics that enable us to translate our theories, thoughts, and ideas into testable hypotheses and then into statistical models.
Q: How did you become interested in personality psychology?
Daniel: I became interested in personality psychology as a drifting undergrad, not really sure about my interests. I took a course on personality psychology, and something clicked. The ideas and studies gave me a language to describe behavior in a way that was new and exciting. The classic question of nature and nurture had interested me from intro psychology. I wanted to know how it was that extraverts got to be the way they were and how some people could live with a messy desk. Personality psychology introduced me to thinking about these issues in concrete, empirical ways.
Elisabetta: My interest started when I was preparing for my master’s thesis in Psychology. I wanted to personally understand how social transitions and important life events (such as the university-to-work transition) affect the way in which we perceive ourselves and we define our identity. Thus, I “fell in love” with research on self and identity, and this is still my main focus as I see that the more I research this topic, the more I get interested in it.
Kenn: As an undergraduate student, I was highly skeptical of personality questionnaires: how on earth can one claim to assess something as complex as personality based on a standardized set of short but not even unanimously unambiguous questions? This led me to develop an interest in how people respond to questionnaires, and eventually, to my first papers on social desirability and lay beliefs of co-occurrence of traits. Since then, my attitude towards questionnaires has become somewhat less negative, but I have never ceased to be a firm believer of the value of skepticism.
Kristian: I have a longstanding interest in what makes one person similar or different from another, going back to adolescence, and how people change. I’m not sure that I could pinpoint it to any particular thing. My interest in the behavioral sciences started with an interest in evolutionary and population biology, but quickly expanded from that.
Isabel: I was already intrigued by how people differ early on during adolescence. I think the moment I first experienced the explicit interest in personality psychology was at school in a class where we talked about Freud and his early research. This was also the time when I started to develop the idea to study psychology, so understanding individual differences was actually one reason why I got interested in studying psychology in the first place. Personality is so tangible because it is visible in our everyday interactions: we all differ and can see this in how we think, behave, and feel. This is fascinating in and of itself. Learning how psychologists describe these individual differences by means of broad personality factors during my studies increased my interest in personality psychology even further. Eventually, I got in touch with my later Ph.D. supervisor Ben Hilbig who introduced me to the HEXACO model. That was the time when I decided that I would like to stay in academia and work towards further understanding the various effects that personality has on our social life.
Jenny: My interest in personality research developed during my doctoral thesis. I worked on a project addressing the regulation of social relationships and the role of interindividual differences in selecting, establishing and shaping social relationships across the adult life span. In particular, I remember a paper on self-esteem development across the life-span, which painted a quite negative picture of late life, and that really sparked my curiosity. Given the strong life span perspective during my PhD, I increasingly focused on the role of individual resources and conditions of developmental trajectories of personality and social relationships.
After my PhD, I continued to investigate developmental trajectories together with Oliver Lüdtke as a post-doc at Humboldt University in Berlin and as a research group leader at the IPN in Kiel. During this time, I became particularly interested in adolescence and young adulthood with its many demands in both academic and social contexts. I was rather astonished by how little we knew on the role of personality in the early years of life, and how personality interacts with diverse school-related variables from a longitudinal perspective. In 2019, I was fortunate enough to organize an EAPP Expert Meeting on youth personality development together with Marion Spengler. During this meeting, we discussed these topics with a group of enthusiastic personality and developmental researchers. Inspired by this, my team and I focus on these younger cohorts in our current research projects. Specifically, we try to understand the sources and implications of personality development by integrating lab-based behavioral and mobile data into our longitudinal studies.
Q: In your new position as Associate Editor at EJP, what kind of research are you hoping to see?
Daniel: Research methods in psychology have undergone some shifts recently. I am hoping to see more pre-registered, open science submissions. I am also hoping to see an increased emphasis on effect size estimation, rather than significance testing, and the accompanying larger sample sizes which facilitate better estimation. More substantively, it would also be interesting to see an increase in the usage of polygenic scores in personality. Behavior genetic methods have been a strong part of personality psychology. Modern techniques allow for testing social science questions, even if the researcher is not at all interested in identifying specific genes or really anything having to do with biology, which is often where I find myself in my work.
Elisabetta: I would like to see more research tackling how self and personality development is embedded in the social context. For instance, how the experience of migration or growing up in the context of socio-economic inequality is related to the development of personality and identity? How other critical transitions and life circumstances (like facing the current COVID-19 pandemic) are intertwined with personality development? In general, I hope to see more research on adolescents from diverse ethnic and cultural groups.
Kenn: I hope to see good research, that is, research that yields new and dependable information on important issues. Research that would not just be a nice addition to the authors’ CVs but that would actually advance our knowledge. I do not have a complete recipe for such research but I can think of a few key ingredients.
(1) Recognizing the difference between things and constructs: no operationalization is fully equivalent with the phenomenon it is intended to capture, nor is it free from random and systematic measurement error. As a consequence, we need to use different sources of information whenever we want to make a claim with some degree of generality.
(2) Clear use of language (including, but not limited to terminological clarity) is a precondition to clarity of thinking. Some terms in our field (let alone neighbouring fields :-) ) resemble trademarks rather than scientific notions. Popularizing personality psychology is important, but it should not come at the expense of clarity of thinking. Solving the jingle-jangle puzzle may be difficult without some changes in habitual terminology but that does not necessarily mean inventing a lot of new strange terms.
(3) Crossing the disciplinary boundaries. There are several disciplines that have a legitimate say on matters of personality – both within psychology (e.g., cognitive and developmental psychology, but why not even social psychology?) and outside of it (e.g., social history, linguistics, sociology, ethology, physiology, to mention only a few).
Kristian: I’m excited by the opportunity to be an associate editor at EJP! One of the best things about being an editor is seeing what others create, so I’m reluctant to say that I’m looking for anything in particular. One thing I appreciate about EJP is a rigorous approach to basic personality science, and I hope to see that continue. There are many important debates in personality science in recent years pertaining to fundamental questions about measurement and inferences that we make about individuals, how we represent the variables involved and their causal relationships with one another, and I would like to see that develop further. Open science and big data paradigms jointly provide an opportunity to address these types of issues in ways that have not been done before.
Isabel: In general, I am happy to see diverse, open, transparent, creative, and reliable research that can help us further understand various personality psychological phenomena. Our field has very much to offer, and it would be a pleasure to see this variety covered in EJP.
Regarding specific topics, one can of course come up with many things. Let me just note a few examples that came to my mind immediately. First, I think that the field can profit from more research studying the processes underlying individual differences in behavior. We do know quite a bit now about how individuals differ and that personality affects thoughts, feelings, and behavior. However, the underlying processes are not well understood yet. Second, I hope to see more integrative work that bridges the gap between different lines of personality research. For example, in several areas within personality psychology, various measures exist that allegedly measure the same (or distinct) constructs. More work is needed to integrate these different approaches to ultimately reach consensus regarding terminology and measurement of certain constructs. Third, I think the field can profit from increased reliance on alternative sources of personality-relevant information beyond self-reports. This call for more comprehensive personality assessment has been repeatedly voiced in the past, and I am looking forward to seeing research tackling this issue in the future.
Jenny: I think this is hard to say because researchers should always strive for their own research questions and objectives. But perhaps I can highlight two aspects that will hopefully characterize future research. First, I hope to see diversity with respect to sample characteristics such as age, culture, or educational backgrounds, but also data structures and sources, or methodological approaches. Second, I hope for increasingly interdisciplinary and integrative research in which we as personality psychologists act as experts to stimulate other fields, but are also open to the influence of other psychologists and researchers beyond our own field to enrich our own thinking.