An Interview with 2019 Emerging Scholar Award Winner Olivia Atherton
1. What got you into personality psychology in the first place?
At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I decided to switch my major to Psychology and was eager to learn everything I could. I ended up taking the Introductory class for every area of psychology — biological, cognitive, developmental, industrial-organizational, abnormal, social, and personality (which was unnecessary requirement-wise, but quenched my thirst to learn about all aspects of the field). When I took Intro. to Personality, which was team-taught by Brent Roberts and Caroline Tancredy, I was very excited to learn that people were actively conducting research on topics that had long been a fascination of mine. About halfway through the semester, I went to Brent's office hours to ask if I could be a research assistant in his lab, and the rest is history!
2. What are you most interested in these days?
During my time in graduate school, my work has focused on the development of self-regulatory traits, like effortful control and conscientiousness, and their influence on a wide range of problem behaviors in adolescence, including drug use, relational aggression, school behavioral problems, and psychiatric disorders. Through this research, I have found that the average adolescent experiences a temporary "dip" in self-regulation during adolescence — providing some support for the idea that youth struggle with attaining personality maturity during this time. Concomitantly, there are increasing opportunities to engage in risky and problematic behaviors during adolescence, which suggests that the teen years may be a recipe for repeated self-regulatory failures. In fact, my work has shown that a vicious and recursive cycle exists, where an adolescent's poor effortful control is associated with increasing problem behaviors over time; and engaging in these problem behaviors, in turn, further erodes youths' capacity to self-regulate. To better understand the line between normative and non-normative self-regulatory development, I am currently exploring precursors to the development of effortful control and problem behaviors. Preliminarily, it seems as though some developmental influences are common to both effortful control and problems behaviors, whereas others are unique to one or the other.
3. Which topics do you want to tackle in the future?
This is a difficult question to answer because there are too many! Some of the big research questions that I think would be most interesting to tackle in the future include: What is the role of goals and motives for stability and change in self-regulatory traits? What is the best way to improve self-regulation, either volitionally or through direct intervention? Would the same interventions work for both youth and adults, and for both ethnic minority and majority youth? Where is the line between normative and non-normative development of self-regulation? What is the role of personality in the tendency for many youth to "mature out" of problem behaviors (e.g., drug use) in young adulthood, and what influence does the maturing out process have on subsequent personality development? What are the socialization processes through which childhood temperament dimensions develop into adult personality traits?