Research statement

People are sometimes described as having “a strong personality”. What does that mean exactly? We have the vague intuition that individuals vary not only in their skills (what they can do), in their beliefs, values, or tastes (why they do what they do) but also in their style of behavior, their specific manner to adjust to their environment (how they do what they do). Using “strong personality” to characterize someone mostly refers to these stylistic differences that are very hard to objectively define, measure and explain. The concept of temperamental personality traits has been formulated to describe this heterogeneity as individual differences in the balance between reactivity (that is the excitability and responsivity of an individual’s behavioral and physiological systems) and self-regulation (i.e., all the neural and behavioral processes functioning to modulate this underlying reactivity). Temperamental traits in particular contribute to explain differences of reactions to challenging contexts (e.g., frustration-eliciting or stress-eliciting situations).

My driving force is to shed light on a transversal mechanistic model of reactivity and self-regulation traits. My research thus focuses on the following questions: 

• How can we characterize individual differences of reactivity and self-regulation in different behavioral domains, in healthy and clinical populations? 

• How are these differences related to biological features, in particular individual brain features? 

• How can social factors modulate these differences? 

These questions constitute a major challenge to better understand the bases of individuality - why we become who we are - and the quality of specific person-environment interactions – why we feel good in some environments and not others. They can also contribute to take up the challenge of precision medicine – that is diagnosing, prognosing, and predicting illnesses more precisely to give the patient the right treatment at the right time. In particular, to improve their behavioral adjustment in everyday life, patients’ needs vary according to their specific issues in terms of reactivity and self-regulation.