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Psychology Colloquia

31 October 2006

Title

"How Stable are Traits, Really? Assessing and Evaluating Temporal Fluctuations in a Short Big-Five Measure"
 

Speaker

David Schuldberg is Professor of Psychology at the University of Montana. He was born in Los Angeles, California and grew up in Seattle. He received his B.A. in Social Relations from Harvard University in 1973, and an M.A. and then Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his doctorate in 1981.

He joined the faculty of The University of Montana -- Missoula in 1984 and is now a Professor and the Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology. He took a post-doctoral fellowship in Clinical Research, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine in 1988-1989. At Montana, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, supervises grad students’ clinical work and research, pursues several lines of his own research, and engages in academic service.

Dr. Schuldberg’s research interests are varied. He is currently working in the areas of:

- Health psychology and the definition of physical and psychological heath.

- The application of nonlinear dynamics to modeling and data analysis in psychology.

- School-based treatment of childhood trauma.

- Dynamics of small-scale changes in emotion and self-reported characteristics.

- Rural -- and rural minority -- mental health issues.

He is also interested in creativity, serious mental illness (with an emphasis on schizophrenia), mental health services delivery, outcomes research, psychological assessment and measurement, and topics in research design.
 

Time & Venue

11:30am, SS 352.
 

Abstract

Personality traits are generally defined as stable and relatively unchanging. In contrast with short-term psychological “states,” they seem fixed early in development, constant over time, and invariant across situations and roles. However, recent interest in within-person variability suggests a reexamination of their stability.

The presentation discusses pilot data gathered from several pilot experimental participants who completed a very brief Big-Five personality measure on repeated occasions, approximately 100 times each. Data were gathered about twice per hour during a daily twelve hour period, each day for seven days; the subjects also responded to a ten-item mood questionnaire at each time. Ecological Momentary Assessment (Experience Sampling) methodology was used; participants carried a Personal Digital Assistant (Palm Pilot) which provided random prompts and recorded responses. Results indicate notable fluctuation in self-rated personality traits.

The second part of the talk raises more general questions about the dynamics of behavior. It argues for considering variability as a central part of personality, making the case for a Nonlinear Dynamical Systems approach to studying fluctuation and change. The argument for nonlinear and dynamic models can be made based on large-scale properties of human activity, as well as features of the smaller-scale systems that produce this behavior. Some researchers have even argued that normal, healthy behavior is characterized by technically defined “chaos.”

Importantly, it is quite easy to construct new models -- called Somewhat-complicated systems -- based on existing psychological theories and measures; small systems can model larger, complex, and very interesting, psychological phenomena.

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last revised 17 October 2006

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