European Assocation of Personality Psychology (EAPP), President's Report
Jérôme Rossier
Dear friends and colleagues,
First, I would like to thank all the members of the Association for Research in Personality (ARP) who participated in our EAPP conference in Timisoara, Romania, last July. This conference was a great success with more than 350 participants from more than 40 countries from all around the world. As usual, many ARP members participated in our conference and more than 20% of the participants came from the United States. They contributed to this success in an important manner by giving, organizing, and presenting very well received keynotes, symposiums, talks, and posters. In particular, we had the pleasure and honor of having a keynote address given by the ARP president, Dan P. McAdams, and entitled Caring lives and redemptive life stories. Dan P. McAdams also organized a symposium entitled The role of life narrative in personality psychology, with contributors from the United States but also from Germany and Switzerland. These presentations emphasized the importance of taking peoples' narratives into account to understand their development during the entire life-course. The symposium entitled Effects of childhood adversity on adult personality and subjective well-being, which was sponsored by the ARP and organized by Bertus Filippus Jeronimus, was also a great success. It included presentations from colleagues from Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, and the UK. The long-term impact of negative or positive events during childhood is indeed a very important and interesting topic, considering that these impacts could also be the results of virtuous or negative circles that develop over the life-span.
Our next conference will take place in Zadar, Croatia, in 2018, one of the most beautiful cities on the Mediterranean coast. We hope to see many ARP members there again. However, before seeing you in Zadar, I hope that many EAPP members will attend the conference you are organizing in Sacramento, California, next June. I'm convinced that a close collaboration between the ARP and the EAPP is very important to continue to promote and to continue to develop our field. If our respective associations already have a relatively long tradition of cooperation, I'm convinced that we should try to collaborate more intensively with a larger group of associations, and in particular with the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID) and the World Association of Personality Psychology (WAPP).
The EAPP also has the pleasure to announce that we have a new vice-president or president-elect, Jaap Denissen, a new secretary, Anna Baumert, and two new EC members, Anu Realo and Florin Sava. These new members will continue to work for the development of personality psychology in Europe and over the world, with the help of our past-president, Filip de Fruyt, our treasurer, Dick H. P. Barelds, and the editors of the European Journal of Personality, Manfred Schmitt, and Mitja Back. We also would like to thank the members who left our board, Marco Perugini, who has been the editor of our journal and a president of our association, Ioannis Tsaousis, who has been a very effective secretary, Martina Hřebíčková who organized a very successful conference in Brno, and Wendy Johnson, who was a very successful editor of our journal. Thank you to all of them!
Our field is developing very well, and we observe, among others, an increase in studies that develop a more holistic approach to peoples' traits and behaviors. Indeed, many studies that evaluate the relationship between personality and behaviors also consider the underlying mechanisms involved in this association. The identification and description of the processes involved in the expression of personality in terms of behavior is certainly an important step to model the dynamic interaction between people and their environment. In the recent years, we have observed an increase in the number of longitudinal studies in our field. This allows us to better understand individual development and how personality may have an impact on many important aspect of peoples' lives, such as the quality of the relationships they have with significant others, their professional life, or their overall level of well-being. Moreover, over time, people's paths or the environment may also have an impact on how individuals express their personality. All these complex adaptive mechanisms, implying the existence of feed-back loops, have an influence on people's behaviors. All these studies are using a diversity of approaches and methods. The program of our last conferences, and certainly the one of the coming ARP conference in Sacramento, illustrate that this diversity is indeed sustaining innovation in our field.
Best wishes,
Jérôme Rossier, EAPP President