Personality Assessment

Personality pertains to all sorts of individual differences in people’s experiential and behavioral regularities. This encompasses, for example, individual differences in people’s self-concept, in typical and maximal behaviors expressed in real-life contexts, in automatic associations between cognitive concepts, in affective reactions towards circumscribed environmental cues, and in the way other people react towards and perceive other individuals. Accordingly, in our research, we follow a multisource approach and aim at a comprehensive coverage of personality differences both conceptually and methodologically. Our research includes self-report questionnaires (for the assessment of the explicit self-concept), indirect tests (for the assessment of the implicit self-concept), informant-reports (for the assessment of personality reputations), direct behavioral observations (for the assessment of behavioral regularities) as well as associations between specific experiential and behavioral states (for the assessment of between-person differences in within-person if-then contingencies). We develop and apply assessment tools both in online survey contexts (self- and informant questionnaires), laboratory contexts (e.g., round-robin self- and other-ratings during group interactions, video- and audio-based behavioral codings; reaction-time based indirect personality tests, economic game paradigms) and real-life contexts (smartphone-based experience-sampling- and interpersonal perception assessments; online diaries, mobile sensing). We are also adopting our developed assessment tools for the use in different applied contexts including therapy, personnel selection and development, and forensic settings.