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Study of Personality Architecture and Dynamics (SPeADy)

Subject Area Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term from 2015 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 272981829
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The term ‘personality’ is often very sparingly conceptualized and empirically investigated with a small set of descriptive personality traits (e.g., extraversion and emotional stability). Those traits are often seen as broad, relatively stable and biologically anchored dispositions which predict interindividual differences in thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Other characteristics, such as self-related beliefs and evaluations, values, motives, major life goals and interests are equally important as psychological characteristics with respect to human thinking, feeling and behaving, yet have been rarely treated as individual personality characteristics. Is the reduction of the construct personality to very few traits theoretically and empirically justified? An integrative model of personality should encompass all characteristics which are essential to reflect the full spectrum of the complexity of typical feeling, thinking, striving, and behaving of a person compared to other persons. Essential characteristics must capture the core of the individuality in its entirety. Which features of an adult person are core characteristics? Which features (i.e., surface characteristics) do result from specific core characteristics, constellations of them or interactions between these and experiences? The SPeADy project dealt with those questions and aimed at answering them with the use of longitudinal, multimodal, age-heterogeneous and genetically informative, multi-generational study designs. The combination of those designs allows to proof the classification of some traits as potential core characteristics (e.g., extraversion and emotional stability) and other individual features (e.g., self-esteem, control beliefs, social values, religiousness, major life goals, and interests) – often treated as less consistent across contexts, situations, and time and more environmentally malleable – based on several criteria. Furthermore, SPeADy allows the empirical falsification of several existing personality conceptions and personality models and new insights as well as unique implications for an integrative model of both personality description and explanation of inter- and intra-individual stability and change. SPeADy can do this from different perspectives (self- and other reports) and for different age groups against the background of a conceptualization of ‘personality’ as both a systematically structured and dynamically changing network of core and surface characteristics. This individual personality network may stabilize or change as a function of its interplay with the individual environment. Initial pioneering papers are out. They have enriched the knowledge about the architecture and the dynamics or our personality. Further publications will follow. There is still great potential in the SPeADy data, which remain openly accessible to the research community.

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