Letter from the Editors
Jonathan Adler and Erik Noftle
Donald Trump, feminist psychology, subjective well-being, narrative identity, implicit motives, personality disorders, consulting to the Fortune 500, and replicability. Personality psychology—and by extension, this edition of P, the online newsletter for the Association for Research in Personality (ARP)—has it all. In reviewing the submissions for this issue we cannot help but be struck by the extraordinary breadth in our shared field. Personality psychology seems to be a center of gravity around which a remarkable number of other things (topics, professions, opportunities, etc.) orbit.
We imagine that every reader of this issue will find both something familiar and something new or unexpected.
Something Familiar
As always, we share reports from some of the key people whose dedication to our organization makes it all possible. Dan McAdams weighs in as President, Rebecca Shiner as Executive Officer, Allison Tackman and Kathryn Bollich as the Postdoc/Grad Student Representatives, and Rich Lucas and Simine Vazire as editors of Journal of Research in Personality and Social Psychological and Personality Science, respectively. As you might expect, everything is humming along smoothly at ARP and at our journals. We thank Jerome Rossier, the President of EAPP, our sister organization, for his updates about personality psychology in Europe.
You will also find interviews with winners of some of the major awards in our field, conducted by personality psychologists they have mentored or otherwise influenced.
Please take special note of the announcement of the next ARP conference, which will take place in Sacramento, California next June 8-10th, as well as the ARP-sponsored Lifespan Social-Personality preconference to SPSP, taking place in San Antonio on January 19th.
Something Unexpected
Like Rebecca Shiner, we were surprised by how many ARP members have been interviewed in the popular media with regards to the Presidential election. From USA Today, to The Atlantic, to FiveThirtyEight and many more, ARP members have recently served as expert educators about the science of personality.
We were also taken aback by the profound mixing of personality psychology's rich history with its vibrant cutting edge in the comments of the contributors. In this issue you will find references to the TAT, the MPQ, and Jungian archetypes sitting quite comfortably alongside discussion of the RDoC, scale development, and the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.
From our vantage point as recently-tenured personality psychologists - neither guardians of our field's history nor its newest contributors - we feel so lucky to be part of a field that simultaneously embraces such breadth while being committed to true depth. Every field has its fads, but personality psychology feels to us to be unwavering in its dedication to understanding the structure, development, and dynamics of individual differences. We hope you enjoy reading this issue of P as much as we enjoyed compiling it.
We want to close by offering our thanks to the contributors and to web committee member Ben Johnson, our newsletter publisher, and to Hogan Assessment Systems for their ongoing sponsorship of the newsletter.
--Jon and Erik