Remembering Memphis J. S. Tanaka Dissertation Award Winner Talk: Colin DeYoung
In order to help us know Colin better and to help young researchers know just what it takes to win the Tanaka award, we asked Colin to provide us with a profile of himself and his research.
Personality Psychology between Phenomenology and Neuroscience
Colin G. DeYoung
Having been given the admirable suggestion to approach this piece in the spirit of Dan McAdams (WWDD?), I will tell my story chronologically. If you just want to know what sort of dissertation was deemed worthy of this year’s J.S. Tanaka Award, skip to the end. If you want to know where I think personality psychology might be headed, skip the next three paragraphs. If, however, you want to get some vague sense of my personality or a more detailed sense of how I got to be a personality psychologist, start here:
Though I have always been interested in the mind, I came to personality psychology along a trajectory of increasingly empirical disciplines: In my senior year of high school, I took a course on existential philosophy with an excellent teacher. It was remarkable to discover a group of writers who were not only deeply interested in what thinking, being, and awareness are all about, but who also seemed to share many of the concerns of an angst-ridden, overly intellectual teenager. As an undergraduate at Harvard, therefore, I eagerly declared philosophy as my major, but a moral philosophy course that was only occasionally of any interest and a philosophy of language course that was (and still is) the most dreadfully boring thing I’ve ever encountered sent me hunting for alternatives. I stumbled across the History of Science Department, which had recently begun to offer an interdisciplinary major entitled Mind, Brain, and Behavior. In this program, I could major in the history of science but get credit for courses in philosophy, as long as they were related to the mind. Perfect! I concentrated on the history of psychology and psychiatry and wrote my senior thesis on Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, attempting to evaluate its status as a scientific theory at the time when Jung introduced it (1910s).
One of the requirements of the history of science major was that, in whatever scientific discipline one was studying historically, one also had to take a certain number of current science courses. This led me as a sophomore to my first course in psychology, Personality and Its Transformations, taught by Jordan Peterson, who was (and still is) the most interesting lecturer I’ve ever encountered. I spent the first few weeks of his class amazed and excited; here was someone formulating much more clearly than I had what seemed to me to be the most pressing questions in life: why are we the way we are? why do people differ? how do we go about deciding what to do in life? What was more, he had some incredibly penetrating answers. I was hooked. But I stuck with my history of science major. After all, I was getting credit for taking psychology courses, and I didn’t have to spend my spare time working in a lab – the appeal of working directly with scientific data was not yet apparent to me.
Nor was it, I must confess, during the year following graduation in which I was an itinerant backpacker and decided that the only activity that both interested me and might bring in money over the longer term was graduate school in psychology, preferably under the supervision of Jordan Peterson. Jordan had moved to the University of Toronto during that year, so Toronto was where I found myself, earning a degree in personality psychology. Because I had not been in the Psychology Department as an undergrad, I had little notion of what grad school would be like. My only contact with graduate students had been as teachers. I didn’t know what work in a lab would entail (I also had no idea that being a grad student in psychology meant attending conferences in various parts of the world, usually on someone else’s dime – amazing!), but as soon as I started playing with data, I saw the appeal. I like to think, but I like to have something to constrain my thinking and to increase the likelihood that it will be useful and of interest to others. This principle (pace philosophers) ruled out philosophy as a career (though philosophy remains one of my hobbies). It has also governed the trajectory that my work as a personality psychologist has taken, once again toward “harder” empirical science – specifically, toward personality neuroscience.
Personality psychology has great potential for integrating findings from various subdisciplines into a broad and holistic understanding of psychological functioning. As neuroscientific techniques become increasingly sophisticated, we can use them to understand how influences from the genome and environment play out in the brain’s ongoing processes, shaping the ways that individuals experience and act in the world. I believe that personality psychology will benefit, in its search for the nature of personality, from the constraints placed on it by personality neuroscience. Additionally, I think it’s important to point out that personality neuroscience needs personality psychology more than the other way around. The accomplishments of the last 75 years in personality psychology should be guiding neuroscientists as they explore individual differences. We have mapped out the phenotype with remarkable success. We know (not perfectly, of course) how different traits and psychological functions relate to each other and fit into the bigger picture provided by the trait hierarchy and by research on characteristic adaptations and life narratives. If personality neuroscience fails to avail itself of this knowledge, its results will accumulate piecemeal and will not inform us coherently about the individual as a whole.
I have another, more deeply felt reason for wanting to keep personality psychology in the driver’s seat as I move into neuroscience, and this harkens back to the beginnings of my academic career, in existential philosophy. A number of the philosophers often identified with existentialism identified themselves as phenomenologists. Their concern was the nature of human experience as it presented itself to the individual. I am a phenomenologist at heart. Although I am certainly interested in explaining the behavior of individuals, I am equally interested in explaining the nature of individual experience. In the third person, traits describe patterns of behavior. In the first person they describe patterns of experience – emotional, cognitive, motivated, embodied experience. Self-report questionnaires constitute a real (though simplified and standardized) first-person methodology. As a phenomenologist, I want to know why it’s like what’s it’s like to be the particular person that one is. As a materialist (more or less), I want my understanding to be grounded in the biochemical world. It is the latter inclination that drives me to study traits rather than life narratives; traits are regular enough to allow an interface with neuroscience, at this early stage.
Guided by the principles described above, my research has focused primarily on three topics: first, the overall structure of the trait hierarchy and the neurobiological processes that cause correlations among phenotypic traits; second, cognitive abilities such as intelligence, decision making, and creativity; and third, the impulsive and antisocial tendencies that have been described as “externalizing behavior.” Fortunately, these topics are related to each other enough that I was able to patch together a reasonably coherent dissertation, titled “Cognitive Ability and Externalizing Behavior in a Psychobiological Personality Framework.” In this work, I explored the higher-order factor structure of the Big Five and developed a neurobiological theory of the higher-order factors or metatraits, which we have labeled Stability and Plasticity (DeYoung, 2006; DeYoung, Hasher, Djikic, Criger, & Peterson, 2007; DeYoung, Peterson, & Higgins, 2002). I developed and tested a more detailed theory of the neurobiological sources of Openness/Intellect, the Big Five trait that is consistently positively associated with cognitive ability (DeYoung, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005). I investigated how externalizing behavior is related to the metatraits and to cognitive ability. And, lastly, I explored the role of the dopamine D4 receptor in the negative association between externalizing behavior and cognitive ability (DeYoung et al., 2006). The neuroscientific methods employed in the research for my dissertation were molecular genetics and neuropsychological tests of prefrontal cognitive function. I am currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship with Jeremy Gray at Yale, where I am learning to do structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, which should further my quest to understand the psychobiology of personality.
References
DeYoung, C. G. (2006). Higher-order factors of the Big Five in a multi-informant sample. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 1138-1151.
DeYoung, C. G., Hasher, L., Djikic, M., Criger, B., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Morning people are stable people: Circadian rhythm and the higher-order factors of the Big Five. Personality and Individual Differences, doi:10.1016/j.paid.2006.11.030.
DeYoung, C. G., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M.. (2002). Higher-order factors of the Big Five predict conformity: Are there neuroses of health? Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 533-552.
DeYoung, C. G., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2005). Sources of Openness/Intellect: Cognitive and neuropsychological correlates of the fifth factor of personality. Journal of Personality, 73, 825-858.
DeYoung, C. G., Peterson, J. B., Séguin, J. R., Mejia, J. M., Pihl, R. O., Beitchman, J. H., Jain, U., Tremblay, R. E., Kennedy, J. L., & Palmour, R. M. (2006). The dopamine D4 receptor gene and moderation of the association between externalizing behavior and IQ. Archives of General Psychiatry, 63, 1410-1416.
