Message from the 2013 ARP Conference Program Committee

Ozlem Ayduk, Jessica Tracy, Brent Donnellan, R. Chris Fraley, Iris Mauss, Ken Sheldon, and Vivian Zayas

Jessica TracyOzlem AydukWe are excited to announce the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the Association for Research in Personality, which is scheduled to take place Thursday, June 20th, to Saturday, June 22nd, 2013, in Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to symposia and poster sessions, the program will feature an address by ARP President William Fleeson, as well as invited talks from two leading researchers in personality science, who are also two of the Editors of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Laura King (University of Missouri) and Jeffrey Simpson (University of Minnesota).

Immediately preceding the conference, on Thursday, June 20th, there will be a workshop on Studying Personality via the Autonomic Nervous and Neuroendocrine Systems, led by Iris Mauss and Sally Dickerson. This 6-hour workshop is open to all attendants for the additional cost of $30 for member students, $55 for general members, and $80 for all non-members.

More details of the meeting can be found at the following URL: http://www.personality-arp.org/conference.htm.

Although there is no official “theme” for this upcoming meeting, the Conference Program Committee is planning to accept symposia and posters that cover a broad range of substantive topics within the field. We conceive of personality science in wide-ranging terms, and intend for the conference to cover all of the content areas traditionally and currently studied by psychological scientists who address topics relevant to personality. This includes, but is not limited to, research on individual differences in personality, broadly conceived, including research both on their structure and social-cognitive mediators; genetic, affective, physiological, neuroendocrine, and evolutionary bases of personality processes and social behavior; and a wide range of narrower topics that fall within the domain of personality science, including personality judgments, emotions and emotional processes, motivation, romantic relationships and mating, the self and self-regulation, social cognition, and personality assessment. The overriding goal of the Program Committee is to develop a slate of presentations that broadly reflects the diversity of basic questions facing our discipline.

Invited Addresses

Presidential Address by William Fleeson: A Theory About Whole Traits

Invited Address by Laura King: Personality Psychology from the Inside Out

Invited Address by Jeffrey Simpson: Adult Attachment Orientations, Stress, and Romantic Relationships

ARP Methods Workshop: Studying Personality via the Autonomic Nervous and Neuroendocrine Systems

June 20, 2013

The methods workshop will consist of a psychophysiology module and an endocrinology module. Registration to the workshop includes access to both sessions. The registration fee is $30 for student members, $55 for general members, and $80 for all non-members.

Affective Psychophysiology

Instructor Iris Mauss

The psychophysiology module will provide a brief introduction to using ANS (autonomic nervous system) measures in the study of emotions, covering both individual-difference and laboratory-experimental approaches. Discussion will focus on theoretical as well as practical issues that need to be considered when using ANS measures in research. Among the many possible ANS measures, the workshop will primarily focus on vagal tone and vagal reactivity as a particularly interesting example case.

Endocrinology

Instructor Sally Dickerson

The endocrinology module will cover hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis measures of emotion and reactivity. The discussion will focus primarily on cortisol, both from a theoretical and methodological point of view. However, similarities and differences in collecting, assessing, and measuring other hormones, using cortisol as the comparison, will also be discussed.