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Research studying personality differences between men and women has focused on the Big Five and has disregarded the role of sexual orientation. When comparing men and women, research converges in small to moderate differences favoring women in extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Results on sex-differences on conscientiousness and openness to experience remain less clear. Research taking into account sexual orientation has found support for the “Shift Hypothesis”, which establishes that personality scores of homosexual men should be more similar to heterosexual women than to heterosexual men (conversely for homosexual women). A competing theory is the “Inversion hypothesis”, which argues that personality scores of homosexual men should be indistinguishable from heterosexual women and, conversely, personality scores of homosexual women should be indistinguishable from heterosexual men. Our research aims to compare personality scores at different levels – i.e. item, facet, and domain – of people with different sexual orientations to test both, the Shift and the Inversion Hypotheses.

An investigation into: 1) Whether laypeople have consistent expectations about how the Covid pandemic has lead to observable changes in personality traits (nuances operationalized as 257 personality items); 2) How these expectations are correlated with self-reports-based changes in the personality nuances (the same 257 items; that is, whether the stereotypic expectations are accurate); 3) Whether the nuances that primarily reflect behavioural, affective, cognitive or motivational content have changed the most in self-reports (that is, in which of these domains has personality changed the most in relation to the pandemic).

Certain psychological predispositions of men and women could explain the large sex segregation of the labor market. This study explores whether personality sex differences are mirrored by personality differences across occupational fields (e.g.- STEM vs. Non-STEM). Hence, this study aims to answers the research question: Do personality differences across occupational fields mirror personality sex differences?

For the past 30 years, researchers have come to an agreement on personality traits developing throughout the lifespan, especially in early adulthood between 20 and 60 but even into old age (Roberts & Mroczeak, 2007). While there are individual differences, mean level changes of personality traits show a positive trend. This means people become more dominant, confident, warm, responsible, and calm, on average. They often become more planful, productive and involved contributors to society, something that some have described as social maturation (Roberts & Woods, 2006, Caspi et al. 2005). However, firstly, most of the research has looked at mean level change in personality traits on a domain level the Five-Factor Model/ Big Five, which bundles traits into Agreeableness, Consciousness, Neurotism/ Negative Emotion, Openness to Experience and Extraversion. However, age differences are better predicted by more specific traits such as facets and nuances (Mõttus et al, 2020), showing that not all facets and items of one domain develop in the same direction, sometimes even towards opposite ends (Schwaba et al.2022, Bleidorn et al., 2009; Costello et al., 2017; Klimstra et al., 2018; Soto & John, 2012; Terracciano et al., 2005). However, there has been very little research looking at these more specific changes in personality traits. Secondly, the maturation principle of average trait changes is widely accepted but rarely formally tested (Schwaba et al 2022). Therefore, this study will use a list of 198 items which have been selected from the IPIP item pool by Mõttus & Henry. These items have been tested for reliability and consensual validity, and have been argued to be a useful inventory for nuances. After a definition of personality maturity has been derived based on the opinions of the experts in the field of personality development, these 198 items will be rated by a lay audience according to the definition in terms of how much they reflect personality maturity. In the next step, items' average maturity ratings will be compared to their correlations with age obtained in different data, expecting a positive correlation so that items rated as reflecting higher maturity show a positive correlation with age, items rated low on maturity show a negative correlation with age, and items rated neither low nor high in maturity show no age differences. Lastly, Ausmees et al. (2022) found that social desirability plays a significant role in self-ratings. Traits that seem socially desirable and age differences in them were often amplified in self-ratings when comparing them to informants' ratings. As maturity may be argued to be confounded with social desirability, we will test if the correlation between traits' age differences and maturation ratings remains significant, controlling for items' social desirability as rated by a separate sample. This is arguably even more interesting as this study will only use self-reported data. As we have got social desirability ratings of the items available already available, this will data will be compared to the data collected in terms of maturity.

Using a very large population sample, we aim to explore the relations between self- and informant-reported Big Five personality domains, their facets and nuances on the one hand and vaccination status in objective medical records on the other hand. We believe that identifying the specific personality traits linked with non-vaccination can reveal common person-level obstacles to vaccination and inform efforts to address these in the current and future vaccination efforts (e.g., how vaccination is made available and communicated to the public). Beyond describing the links between personality traits and vaccination status, we aim to assess whether or how strongly vaccination can be predicted from past measurements of personality traits.

Environment-friendly behaviors may be desirable in helping to solve worldwide ecological issues. This has sparked interest in the associations of such behaviors with established psychological constructs such as the Five-Factor Model personality traits. Of these, Openness has been most consistently linked with proenvironmental behavior; yet, the extent of causality in this association is unclear. Using a sample of 168 individuals, including 84 sibling pairs, the present study replicated the association while controlling for factors in which families differ (environmental factors that siblings share and a proportion of genetic variance). Proenvironmental behavior was correlated with Openness ( r = .51) and the association could be observed both between ( r = .57) and within families ( r = .29), with adjustments for various demographic variables. These findings indicate that more open individuals tend to engage in proenvironmental behaviors, even when controlling for possibly confounding factors shared and not shared between siblings.

Among the main topics of individual differences research is the associations of personality traits with life outcomes. Relying on recent advances of personality conceptualizations and drawing parallels with genetics, we propose that representing these associations with individual questionnaire items (markers of personality “nuances”) can provide incremental value for predicting and explaining them—often even without further data collection. For illustration, we show that item-based models trained to predict ten outcomes out-predicted models based on Five-Factor Model (FFM) domains or facets in independent participants, with median proportions of explained variance being 9.7% (item-based models), 4.2% (domain-based models) and 5.9% (facet-based models). This was not due to item-outcome overlap. Instead, personality-outcome associations are often driven by dozens of specific characteristics, nuances. Outlining item-level correlations helps to better understand why personality is linked with particular outcomes and opens entirely new research avenues—at almost no additional cost.

The chapter argues that individuals are dynamic systems that continually transact with their situational experiences. Computational modeling may provide a useful set of tools for generating and refining hypotheses regarding general principles of such person-situation transactions. Building computational models encourages conceptual rigor and allows proof-of-principle testing of hypotheses, even though the models do not provide empirical evidence. It has been previously hypothesized that person-environment transactions (systematic situational influences on personality) tend to increase, whereas random influences may decrease the magnitude of individual differences. The chapter introduces a framework (personality space framework; PSF) for building computational models that play through such scenarios. The models suggested that any kind of accumulating situational experiences may tend to make people more alike until variance reaches a plateau, regardless of whether the experiences are random or systematically tied to pre-existing trait levels. The simulations also suggested that person-environment transactions may contribute to the emergence of personality “factor(s)”.

Drawing parallels with genetics, we propose that representing associations of personality with life outcomes using individual questionnaire items can provide a low cost leverage of existing knowledge base and data. For illustration, we show that item-based models, trained in sample to predict eleven outcomes, clearly outperformed models based on Five-Factor Model (FFM) domains or facets in an independent sample, with average proportions of explained variance being 8% (for the item-based model), 3.4% (domain-based) and 5.7% (facet-based). This suggests that personality-outcome associations are often driven by specific characteristics represented by single items (sometimes called nuances) rather than higher-order structures purported to underlie the items. Item-based models also tend to have the highest predictive specificity (discriminant validity), whereas the FFM domains are most likely to predict outcomes' general valence rather than their distinctive aspects. Similar to polygenic scores widely used in genetics, item-level effects can be aggregated into polyitem scores, whereas correlations among polyitem scores can be interpreted as personality correlations (analogous to genetic correlations). Personality correlations quantify the extent to which outcomes overlap in personality correlates and can help to understand how personality is correlated with outcomes or account for co-variations of outcomes (e.g., by calculating the proportion of the correlation between outcomes that can be ascribed to personality characteristics). An empirical illustration focuses on body mass index, potentially related lifestyle aspects, and educational level. Overall, the proposed approach allows gleaning more and conceptually novel information about how personality may intersect with life outcomes—from already existing data.

This study aims to evaluate a number of procedures that have been proposed to enhance cross–cultural comparability of personality and value data. A priori procedures (anchoring vignettes and direct measures of response styles (i.e. acquiescence, extremity, midpoint responding, and social desirability), a posteriori procedures focusing on data transformations prior to analysis (ipsatization and item parcelling), and two data modelling procedures (treating data as continuous vs as ordered categories) were compared using data collected from university students in 16 countries. We found that (i) anchoring vignettes showed lack of invariance, so they were not bias–free; (ii) anchoring vignettes showed higher internal consistencies than raw scores where all other correction procedures, notably ipsatization, showed lower internal consistencies; (iii) in measurement invariance testing, no procedure yielded scalar invariance; anchoring vignettes and item parcelling slightly improved comparability, response style correction did not affect it, and ipsatization resulted in lower comparability; (iv) treating Likert–scale data as categorical resulted in higher levels of comparability; (v) factor scores of scales extracted from different procedures showed similar correlational patterning; and (vi) response style correction was the only procedure that suggested improvement in external validity of country–level conscientiousness. We conclude that, although no procedure resolves all comparability issues, anchoring vignettes, parcelling, and treating data as ordered categories seem promising to alleviate incomparability. We advise caution in uncritically applying any of these procedures. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology

It has been argued that facets do not represent the bottom of the personality hierarchy— even more specific personality characteristics, nuances, could be useful for describing and understanding individuals and their differences. Combining 2 samples of German twins, we assessed the consensual validity (correlations across different observers), rank-order stability, and heritability of nuances. Personality nuances were operationalized as the 240 items of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R).Their attributes were examined by analyzing item residuals, controlling for the variance of the facet the item had been assigned to and all other facets. Most nuances demonstrated significant (pp