RESEARCH STATEMENT

My programmatic area of research focuses on the ways that people think about personality.  Understanding how people think about personality can be used to help individuals understand themselves and others. These understandings are often necessary to help people in the areas of education, counseling and relationships.  This research can also be used to help personality researchers choose conceptually related variables for research.  I have two areas of focus: the first area concerns the way that people organize personality functions and the second investigating people’s ability to think divergently about personality.

Divergent Thinking About Personality

It interests me that some people are able to use life transitions such as the move from high school to college or a career promotion as an opportunity to grow personally, while others struggle with change.  Some people are able to think about their own personalities in flexible ways to reinvent themselves even when the change is negative, while others are crushed by a positive change.  For example, a person who is diagnosed with life threatening cancer may be able to find new meaning in life by supporting a charity which is searching for a cure. In contrast, the chairperson of a department may fail when given a chance to become a university president if they are not able to integrate new skills into their personality.  This ability to re-invent the self is a creative ability and divergent thinking is one component of creativity.

Convergent and divergent thinking are two types of thinking that people use to solve problems.  When a person uses divergent thinking, they are looking for one correct answer, such as the answer to the problem 1+1.  Alternatively, using divergent thinking leads to many good answers.  Many people can draw flowers, but few will create masterpieces, such as Van Gogh’s Sun Flowers. While there are general tests of divergent thinking, I have not been able to find research on the ability to think divergently about the self.  One reason for this gap in research may be that until recently we have not had a way to measure convergent thinking about personality.  This has changed with the development of the test of personal intelligence (TOPI) (Mayer, Panter & Caruso, 2012).  The TOPI measures people’s personal intelligence−convergent thinking ability about personality.  To study divergent thinking about personality I had to develop a way to measure this construct, and I used the form of the TOPI as a basis for the items that I developed for my measure.  The TOPI measures four theoretical areas of personal intelligence; (1) recognition of personally relevant information, (2) formation of accurate personality models, (3) guidance of one’s choices by using personality information, and (4) systematization of one’s goals, plans and life stories.

Though convergent tests of thinking such as the TOPI ask for one correct answer, tests of divergent thinking ask for multiple good answers.  By taking the theoretical areas of the TOPI and transforming them into areas of divergent thinking, it is possible to test the ability to think divergently about personality.  The four theoretical areas of divergent thinking are: (1) The ability to generate original, but meaningful information (clues) about personality, (2) ability to generate original but meaningful personality models, (3) The ability to generate novel choices based on information about personality, and (4) The ability to systemize plans, goals and life stories in a novel way.  I developed test items to measure these areas.  I will use this measure to identify the relationship between performance in divergent thinking about personality with other personality characteristics, such as personal intelligence.  These studies will form the basis of my dissertation.

 

Mapping the Mind

Since the study of personality first began, researchers including people like Freud and Allport have sought to form a map of personality functioning to organize the subject area. As geographical maps indicate spatial relationships between objects, conceptual maps indicate conceptual similarity between personality functions.  These maps can be used by researchers to identify conceptually similar functions or traits.  The map can also be used as a concrete diagram to explain the functioning of personality to students and clients.  Many personality psychologists have tried to form maps themselves because they recognize the utility and importance of these maps for organizing the field of personality.   However, these maps were largely the result of theory not research; my map is an improvement to previous maps because it is based in research.  I asked almost 1000 participants to contribute to the formation of the map. To do this I used multidimensional scaling to derive a map based on a dissimilarities matrix of all the contributions from participants.  This map will be intuitive to understand because it is based on the way that the average person understands personality functioning. The map will also be a resource for researchers to identify conceptually similar variable for research.  The map can serve as a tool to identify if important variables have been left out of the research plan.

Summary and future directions

My background in counseling has led me to want to understand more about personality functioning to provide a basis for research based interventions My central goal is to understand the way that people think about personality, their own and other’s, because this understanding influences communication about personality and personal development. These abilities touch many areas, such as education and counseling.  In order to effectively communicate to students about personality, we need a conceptual framework for the field.  A framework based on people’s intuitions about the relationships among personality functions will help students learn about personality more efficiently because the new learning will be based on organization of the information that they already intuitively know.  This new framework provides a graphical depiction of this intuitive organization that could be used to not only help students to understand personality, but also explain to clients which areas of their own personality are well developed and other areas, which could be developed more fully.  Additionally, this information can help further personality research. Further, if we understand how people can reinvent themselves by thinking divergently about their own personality we may be able to coach people to become better at this skill.  I wish to continue research in the areas that I have mentioned to help provide a basic science foundation for research in the areas of counseling and education.