• Dr. Greg del Pilar gave a lecture on the 28th of August, describing the creation of the Mapa ng Loob and the development of what eventually became the PIRLab. This lecture is part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Mapa.

Watch here: Link to FB Live

• personalitymap.io is an AI driven tool that integrates known individual differences correlations into a database that allows searching and extrapolation to scale items that don't exist yet.  In June, they announced the expansion of their scope to cover an even wider set of items and variables, including the DSM personality disorders.  Registration to use the tool is free.

Read here: Full paper

• It is well-known from twin studies that some psychological traits display evidence of being heritable (passed-on from parent to child).  But large, high-powered genetic studies have found some genes that explain only a small amount of the supposed heritability.  This "missing heritability" has led to debates about whether the evidence for heritability is flawed.  Scott Alexander in a blog post does a good and even-handed job of explaining the problem and debate.

Read here: Full article

• Your friendly neighborhood dominatrix might be more well-adjusted than you, or so we might conclude from findings covered by psypost.org. In a paper published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Oscar Lecuona and colleagues surveyed 1,907 people in Spain on a range of individual difference variables as well as their participation in BDSM activities. It as found that "BDSM participants were more likely to have secure attachment styles, lower rejection sensitivity, and higher levels of well-being"

Read here: Full article

• In a recent paper to be publihsed in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Tal Boger, Sami Yousif, Samuel, McDougle, and Robb Rutledge report that there seem to be stable individual differences when people are asked to perform "randomly", that these seem to persist across different tasks, and even more interestingly, could display consistency evern after 1 year later. Whatever process, strategy, or interpretation of "randomness" that people rely on, it appears to be different for different people but also remarkably stable. 

Read here: Full paper

• An article in the APA Monitor on Psychology magazine talks about efforts to set up "adversarial collaborations". These are projects where scientists who have strongly contrasting theories or hypotheses work together to test whose account is better supported. This way of doing research is meant to increase rigor and trust in the findings achieved. 

Read here: Full article

• Itai Yanai and Martin J. Lercher, in a letter published in Nature, talk about something that most personality psychologists already know: that trait Openness is implicated in scientific creativity. While they seem to rebranding familiar things (turning "context of discovery" into "night science") and putting forward unorthodox takes (Openness as a "skill"), the essay is useful in that it introduces a wider scientific community to research on personality traits. 

Read here: Full letter

• In a preprint of a study that is due to be published in the journal Psychological Review, Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone review the evidence that perception of the famous Müller-Lyer illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Müller-Lyer_illusion) is dependent on culture. They claim that once methodological differences are accounted for, the Müller-Lyer illusion might be less dependent on culture than we previously thought. There was immediate pushback from some cultural psychologists on social media, so expect a lively debate and rejoinders to this paper in the near future.

Read here: Preprint version 

• Even for personality psychologists, the image of a narcissist as someone so self-absorbed so as to lack awareness of what others are doing and saying might be tempting. At the same time, there is agreement that social context matters for personality traits. Reconciling these two intuitions, a study published in the Journal of Research in Personality found that indeed state narcissism (personality tendencies in the situation) was affected by perceived features of the situation, and vice versa. For example, if the person thought that the situation was fun and enjoyable, the state of naricissistic agency was higher on average. Apart from the findings, what makes this paper from Sophie C. Bauditz, Aidan G.C. Wright, Ursula Hess, and Matthias Ziegler such an interesting read is how they used repeated controlled interpersonal interactions and sophisticated longitudinal modeling to analyze how past states and perceptions affect future states and perceptions.

Read here: Article full-text

• AI news is always hot news these days, so it isn't surprising that the APA posted a press release about an article recently published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, giving it the reassuring headline "Professional artists viewed as more creative than AI programs". Except of course that that wasn't what the study was about, and that is clear even from just reading the press release. It actually compared 15 professional artists against 15 people with no artistic training, and both groups were asked to provide prompts for an image generation program. That the professionals fared better doesn't seem surprising, nor is it fair to characterize the non-artist humans as being merely "AI programs". But the actual article from Paul Seli and colleagues is probably more interesting without the hype so you should go read it for yourself.

Read here: APA press release | Preprint article

• AJ Galang presented a paper about the problem of student creativity measurement at the National Conference on Educational Measurement and Evaluation (NCEME 2024), which was hosted by De La Salle University from August 29 to 31. AJ explained how the psychometric issues surrounding creativity measurement should make us cautious about making policies based on the PISA 2022 creative thinking results, which showed that  Filipino students scored poorly.  The organization behind the NCEME, the Philippine Educational Measurement and Evaluation, Inc. (PEMEA), awarded AJ with one of the best paper recognitions for the conference.

• We often think that people who are organized and focused in the way they approach their lives probably do so by exerting effort and willpower constantly to avoid distractions or temptations.  In effect, we think that state self-control explains trait self-control. In a paper published in Current Opinion in Psychology, Michael Inzlicht and Brent Roberts effectively dismantle this idea and argue that trait self-control is mostly independent and is not predicted by state self-control. Highly recommended read.

Read here: "The Fable of Self-Control"

• AJ Galang facilitated a workshop on the use of psychophysiological methods for graduate students and faculty on 19 July. The training session covered gaze and pupil recording techniques, electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and electrodermal activity (EDA).

• Over at  The Psychologist, which is the blog/digest of the British Psychological Society, Naomi Fisher writes about how the diagnostic categories that were invented to guide clinical practice are increasingly being appropriated and reframed by lay people as social identities. This seems to be part of a larger trend where people, especially the young, are seeking ever more specific forms of belonging by self-diagnosing or self-labeling and seeking like-minded people (often online).

Read here: Article 

• Continuing with the theme of identity, Fiona Sampson wrote a very insightful article for aeon.co about the nature of identity, interrogating it through the case of adopted children.

Read here: Article

• Finally, it seems not a year goes by without someone claiming to discover a single latent factor for something that explains everything. We've already seen single factors for personality and psychopathology, all of which are very dubious. A new paper in PNAS claims to have found a single factor for "impulsivity". Thankfully, Eiko Fried and Orestis Zavlis were immediately on the case and have done a very good job of deflating these claims (especially on why bifactor models should always be viewed with suspicion; Google for "fit propensity" to find out more).

Read here: Article | Fried and Zavlis' critique

• A major review paper covering personality psychology research on what predicts scientific creativity was published in the open-access journal Collabra: Psychology, the journal of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. The paper points out unresolved issues about this field and how to incorporate or test previous findings with the changing nature of careers in science in the 21st century.
  
  Read here: Article
  
  

• The open-access journal Personality Science announced its relaunch. As the official publication outlet of the European Association of Personality Psychology, the journal had already been operating since 2020. As the front page of their official website states, "The journal publishes highest-quality theoretical, methodological, empirical, applied, and commentary papers continuously once they are ready – exclusively in an online open-access format (i.e., with no article processing charges or paywalls)."
  
  Visit here: Personality Science Journal

• Although it is a very vague term, it is often pointed out that one thing that is similar between Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and many other politicians of a similar vein is that they are populists. This roughly means that they claim to represent "ordinary people" against some demonized "elite". PsyPost reported on a study published in the journal Electoral Studies that found links between Dark Triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy) and having populist leaning attitudes. The good thing about the study is that it had a decent sample size (more than 6,000 across a few European countries), but on the other hand they used short versions of the already brief Short Dark Triad scale, and the infamous Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) which, to put it mildly, is not a very good measure of personality traits.
  
  Read here: PsyPost coverage | Electoral Studies Article

• It might be that some people neither choose their lives to be happy and enjoyable, nor be something full of meaningful achievements. Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate had previously explored the possibility of a third dimension (or is it mode?) of what might be considered a "good life" by articulating the notion of a "psychologically rich" life focused on exploration and change. In a new paper with Youngjae Cha, they tried to further characterize the differences between these forms of the good life by investigating whether they are differentially related to measures of cognitive complexity (e.g. whether they prefer simple vs. complex explanations, or whether they prefer to consider things holistically). In an initial study (n = 436, US sample) and in a pre-registered replication (n = 516, US sample) published in the Journal of Research in Personality, they consistently found that a psychologically rich life was associated with more attributional complexity and holism, but the other dimensions were not. This is further reason to believe that possibly there is indeed something distinctive about lives that seek something else other than happiness or meaning.
  
  Read here: Article

Laboratory Workshop for Teaching Psychology 150 (Theories of Personality)

The UP Personality and Individual Differences Laboratory conducted a workshop on teaching contemporary scientific personality psychology at the Lagmay Hall Room 209A on August 23, 2023. The workshop began with a comparison of the old and new ways of teaching personality theories. Following this, Prof. Marie Rose Morales and Dr. Adrianne John Galang presented some module ideas and assessment frameworks. It ended with a discussion of other assessment strategies for the course. 

The event was attended by various faculty members of the UP Department of Psychology and led to comprehensive modules in Psychology 150, including teaching and learning materials and formative assessments.