An Interview with 2019 Emerging Scholar Award Winner Courtland Hyatt
1. What got you into personality psychology in the first place?
I started my research career working in an aggression lab, which involved running aggression paradigms wherein participants were given the opportunity to shock their (ostensible) opponent. During these experiments, we manipulated some aspect of the environment (e.g., competitive vs. neutral cues, sexual orientation of the opponent) to test if levels of aggression were higher in a hypothesized condition. In many of these studies, we found little or no effect for condition, but we consistently found that low FFM Agreeableness and related complex profiles (e.g., psychopathy, narcissism, sadism) were related to aggressive behavior across conditions. As a result, I became much more interested in person-level, rather than situation-level, variables as important predictors of harmful interpersonal behavior. Of note, this shift coincided with my entry into a clinical psychology graduate program, and as part of my clinical training, I began thinking a lot about the ways that these distal-seeming personality traits could manifest in ways that meaningfully impacted proximal functioning. I feel fortunate that my early training was in a setting that emphasized both nomothetic and idiographic perspectives on personality.
2. What are you most interested in these days?
One of my primary interests these days is the intersection between personality and psychopathology. In the clinical-personality literature, there has been a clear shift toward characterizing personality disorders in terms of traits and trait-related processes. I am captivated by the idea that personality traits are integral to understanding the occurrence of other forms of psychopathology as well. For example, I don't think the notion of what constitutes a "trait" vs. "symptom" is always clear. If a client reports to a clinician that they have been feeling really sad in the past few months, is this a symptom of a depressive disorder? Or is this better conceptualized as a recent elevation in their trait depressivity that may be linked to a psychosocial stressor? Should we think about sleep disruptions the same way? What about paranoia? Maybe this is semantic squabbling and clinicians should use the same treatment regardless of how the trait/symptom is conceptualized; maybe there are important treatment considerations that should be made based on how we make sense of the difficulties that a client reports. I think this area of research is contentious, fascinating, and potentially beneficial to mental health interventions.
Another current interest of mine is the Open Science Movement. The obvious reason why is because I believe that the members of the OSM corpus are ushering in a paradigm shift that is reorienting the focus of psychological science toward rigorously conducted, replicable research. I think the importance of this reorientation can't be overstated. Although the pace of progress can seem simultaneously very slow and very fast, it's really exciting to get involved in something so important early in my career. The second major reason why I find OSM interesting is that it has been inspiring to see a large community of global scholars coming together in pursuit of a common goal. Changing the nature of how science is done is daunting, but it has been cool to see that there are many important roles for researchers at all levels to play.
3. Which topics do you want to tackle in the future?
The main topic I want to tackle in the future is to understand how aspects of low FFM Agreeableness (and related profiles) lead to aggressive behavior. Imagine that you've just witnessed person X hit person Y — why did person X do this? The distal answer that personality psychologists may offer is that person X is disagreeable and generally predisposed to that type of behavior. While faithful to the literature, I think this answer is unsatisfying and somewhat tautological. Thus, the goal of my future research is to "zoom in" on instances of aggressive behavior and try to identify the proximal individual difference variables that contribute to aggression. Of course, there are many, many contributing factors at play when considering aggressive behavior, and so in order to have a more robust understanding of aggression as a construct, it is crucial to investigate it from multiple methodological vantage points (e.g., informant report, EMA, psychophysiology, behavioral measures).
Another topic I'd like to tackle is the impact that culture has on personality and psychopathology. I'd hypothesize that the extent to which your personality conforms to a cultural ideal impacts your ability to flourish within that culture. For example, I'm pretty high in FFM Openness, and therefore I think I'm happier living in a cultural setting that promotes novel ideas, has lots of music venues and art galleries, etc. On the other hand, I may feel less "at-home" in a cultural setting that is less congruent with these aspects of my identity, and this likely has ramifications for my psychological health. Doing this type of research would also (hopefully) allow me to travel and work with personality researchers in all parts of the world, which I would love to do!