University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Personality Program
Faculty ARP Members at UIUC
Brent Roberts
Chris Fraley
Ed Diener
Ying-Yi Hong
The personality program at UIUC is part of the larger Social-Personality-Organizational (SPO) division within the Psychology department. There are a number of faculty who work exclusively on personality issues or who have an avid interest in individual differences. Brent Roberts studies personality development in adulthood with a special focus on the assessment and development of conscientiousness. Chris Fraley studies attachment, personality development, and evolutionary psychology. Ed Diener is the champion of individual differences in subjective well-being. Fritz Drasgow is an expert on ability and personality assessment with a special focus on Item Response Theory. Chi-Yue Chiu and Ying-Yi Hong have an active interest in implicit personality theory and investigate individual differences within their larger focus on cultural phenomenon. Several clinical faculty have overlapping interest with personality psychology and work with SPO students, such as Howard Berenbaum (emotion and psychopathology) and Edelyn Verona (aggression and externalizing disorders). Students typically work closely with one advisor, but most collaborate with multiple faculty members. The department offers ample office and lab space and is currently building a genotyping lab for faculty and students to process genetic material. Also, the quantitative division at Illinois is one of the best in the country and affords students the opportunity to gain unparalleled quantitative expertise.
Graduate Student Life at UIUC
Students in the SPO division can choose to focus on personality, social, industrial-organizational psychology, or any combination of the three. The curriculum in personality psychology focuses on providing a firm statistical and methodological foundation combined with classes on fundamental issues covered in seminars on personality psychology, personality assessment, personality theory, and personality development. Small session seminars in current topics in personality psychology such as attachment, well-being, genetics, person perception, and evolutionary theory are often available either formally through the university or informally through sessions organized by students. Graduate students have a number of opportunities to learn about teaching through TAing or actually teaching courses ranging from introductory psychology to advanced research methods as well as supervising undergraduate honors research. All students are required to submit a first year paper. Qualifying exams take place at the beginning of the third year and consist of one weekend of closed book essay responses and one weekend of open book essay responses. The majority of students complete their dissertation in their fifth or sixth year. As with faculty, the students in personality subset of the SPO division are interested in a number of different topics with interests including personality development, health psychology, attachment, genetics, emotions, narratives, person perception, power, motives, identity, and the impact of social roles and social networks on personality.
