President’s Letter to the Association for Research in
Personality
William Revelle Northwestern University
The ARP conference
As Dan McAdams says elsewhere in this issue, we are about to have our first free standing conference for the Association for Research in Personality which will be here in Evanston from July 17-18th. This will be the first two days of an amazing six days of personality and individual differences, for although we have organized the ARP as as a stand-alone conference, it will be held immediately before the biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID).
The ARP conference, so well organized by Dan, Brent Roberts, Emily Durbin, Bob Krueger, Jennifer Tackett and Kali Trzesniewski, will be the biggest ARP conference yet, with two keynotes, 14 symposia, and over 130 posters. There will be at least 221 people attending, 170 just for ARP and another 51 who are also staying for the ISSID meeting. We currently have a total of 347 people registered for one or the other or both meetings. The abbreviated schedule is part of this issue of P and the detailed program will soon be appearing on the ARP website. The subsequent ISSID conference will have six keynotes, 15 symposia, 71 papers and more than 50 posters. That program is available as either a HTML file (http://www.issid.org/issid.2009/issid.2009.html) or a pdf (http://www.issid.org/issid.2009/issid.program.pdf).
I am in the strange position of being president of both of these organizations and want to encourage you, my fellow ARP members, to meet my fellow members of ISSID. Some of them you already know, for they are long time ARP members. Some you do not yet know, but will have the chance to meet at a joint reception we will be having Saturday night, July 18th. This is a rare opportunity for those who have not yet attended either an ISSID or an EAPP meeting to meet the international personality community. This is just the second time ISSID has met in the US (the first time, organized by Paul Costa, was in Baltimore 16 years ago) and will not happen again for at least six to eight years. I think that you will find if you look at the ISSID program that you will have many reasons to want to stay for a few days and attend part of the ISSID meeting as well as the ARP conference. We know from advanced registrations that many of the ISSID members are coming early to take advantage of the ARP meeting.
As Dan has said in his article and as I have said in previous newsletters, we believe that personality is the core discipline of the behavioral sciences with a scope that ranges from neurons to narratives. Thus, Dan and the organizing committee have focused the ARP conference on the theme of the connections that personality makes with the rest of the behavioral, cognitive and neuro-sciences. This theme will continue in the ISSID meeting with an emphasis upon individual differences in ability and affective processes, and the cultural, social, biological and genetic underpinnings of these differences.
Dan will give the opening keynote address Friday morning which will then be followed by two days of symposia and a closing keynote, Saturday afternoon, by the economist James Heckman. Following the joint reception Saturday night, the ISSID keynotes on Sunday will be by Linda Gottfredson and Bob Hogan, Charles Carver will be on Monday, Ian Deary and Jan Strelau on Tuesday, and Gerry Mueller on Wednesday.
Because of the number of people who wanted to attend ARP and the high quality of the symposia submitted, the organizing committee has scheduled the symposia in two parallel sessions. Unfortunately, they could not accept some very good symposia because of the constraints upon time. Similarly, the ISSID meeting needed to have three parallel sessions intermixed with plenary sessions in order to fit everything in. However, we hope that both conferences are scheduled with enough free time to meet with each and to experience the charms of Evanston and Chicago.
Personality as the core of psychology
In my previous three columns for P, I have tried to communicate my excitement about the field of personality. I don’t think my optimistic take on the field is just due to my overactive Behavioral Activation System (although my colleagues will tell you that accounts for some of it). For if you look through the program of this year’s ARP and ISSID conferences, or examine the proceedings of last summer’s European Conference on Personality, you will see that the members of ARP, EAPP, and ISSID collaborate with researchers in many different disciplines. As an example of the breadth of the field, consider the symposia at next month’s ARP meeting. These will consider the implications of personality and cognitive ability for economic development, the role of behavior genetics in normal and abnormal behavior, the importance of personality for understanding health related behaviors and mortality, and an analysis of the personality of Barack Obama.
And this is what the study of personality is all about. How to integrate the diverse perspectives and analytical approaches that abound in psychology with a central focus on the individual. Most of us resonate to the belief that everyone is the same, some of us are the same, and yet none of us are the same (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948). The breadth of our interest is partly captured in research oriented handbooks such as Robins et al.. (2007) or Leary & Hoyle (in press) or the broader reviews such as Corr & Matthews (in press) or John et al.. (2008).
The breadth of our field is also seen in our publications. These partly reflect the strong guidance provided by the past editor of our flagship journal, The Journal of Research in Personality, Laura King and the new editor, Rich Lucas. Similarly, the editorial work of Chuck Carver and now Laura at JPSP, of Howard Tennen at the Journal of Personality of Tony Vernon and Sybil Eysenck at Personality and Individual Differences and of Jens Asendorf and now Marco Perugini at the European Journal of Personality has helped our field grow. Essential to our society has been the dedicated work of the editor of P, Brian Little. Without Brian’s subtle nudging, much of the organizational structure of ARP would not exist. But more than these editors, our field reflects the strength of the research that you, the members of ARP produce and disseminate.
Spreading the message
But coming to our conferences and publishing outstanding research is not enough. We need to inspire more undergraduates to go on to graduate school in personalty and we need to fight for more faculty positions in personality. For it is amazing that a field that is the fourth most taught in psychology has only 2% of the Ph.D.s in the field. As I have said before, personality psychology is the home of the generalist in psychology. Perhaps because of this, we find many personality researchers not in personality programs but as part of a clinical program, part of a social program, or part of I/O, or developmental, or a methodology program. The purpose of our ARP meeting and of our full six days of personality meetings in Evanston is to help all of our members realize that we are not alone but rather part of a broad and growing endeavor that has a long history and a promising future.
I hope to see all of you next month in Evanston for a full six days of personality theory, research, and fun.
References
Corr, P. J., & Matthews, G. (Eds.). (in press). The
Cambridge handbook of personality psychology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
John, O. P., Robins, R. W., & Pervin, L. A. (2008).
Handbook of personality: theory and research
(3rd ed ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
Kluckhohn, C., & Murray, H. A.(1948). Personality
in nature, society, and culture. New York: A. A.
Knopf.
Leary, M., & Hoyle, R. H. (Eds.). (in press). Handbook
of individual differences in social behavior.
New York, N.Y.: Guilford Press.
Robins, R. W., Fraley, R. C., & Krueger, R. F.
(2007). Handbook of research methods in personality
psychology. xiii, 719 pp. New
York, NY: Guilford Press.
