Personality is often defined in terms of relatively stable patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that determine an individual’s distinctive way of experiencing and interacting with the world. The qualification “relatively stable” suggests a natural focus on enduring traits; yet the phrase “patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior” actually points to processes unfolding over time, implying variability and change within a person. In this talk, I will argue that stability, change, and variability depend on how much we zoom in or out. I will discuss three key design choices—the timeframe used for the measurements (e.g., past day, past week), the time interval between measurements (e.g., a minute, day, year), and the number of repeated measurements—that allow us to shape the temporal lens with which we observe a process. As a further guide in deciding how to study personality processes, I will highlight the importance of our research goal: Are we interested in description, prediction, or causation? And are we concerned primarily with characteristics of a population, in how a process unfolds within a person over time, or with both? I will discuss how answers to these questions have major implications for how to measure and model personality processes.her‹e

Individual differences in personality arise from a combination of inherited and social factors. Genetic research on personality has traditionally used indirect methods that compare the similarity of personality across family members (e.g. identical and fraternal twins). Recent large-scale efforts have enabled a dramatic shift to a genomic paradigm that directly estimates associations between personality and millions of genetic variants in samples of both related and unrelated individuals. These studies have begun to test fundamental questions about human personality, such as whether latent personality factors are valid, whether personality causes life outcomes (and vice-versa), and how genes and situations interact with one another to affect personality development. I provide an overview of key concepts and methods in personality genomics, highlighting recent findings pertaining to the Big Five personality traits, and I discuss key challenges, limitations, and opportunities associated with this new paradigm.