Sarah E. Hampson

Oregon Research Institute, USA

Sarah E. Hampson, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist at the Oregon Research Institute (ORI). She studies personality and health over the lifespan. Originally from the UK, she held academic appointments at the University of Lancaster and Birkbeck College of the University of London before moving to ORI in 1987. From 1995 - 2009, she was also Professor of Psychology and Health at the University of Surrey, UK.

She is a founding member, past Secretary, and past President of the European Association of Personality Psychology.  She investigates the influence of personality traits on health behaviors and health outcomes in prospective research, including the Hawaii longitudinal study of personality and health with which she has been associated for the nearly 20 years.

Keynote Presentation's Title:

Lifespan Trait Mechanisms: Findings from the Hawaii Longitudinal Study of Personality and Health

Keynote Presentation's Abstract:

Lifespan Trait Mechanisms: Findings from the Hawaii Longitudinal Study of Personality and Health

The Hawaii study is notable for the high-quality assessments of childhood personality, and extensive follow-up assessments in mid-life and early old age. These include cardiovascular and metabolic biomarkers of health status, leucocyte telomere length, and numerous other self-reported variables. Despite being only moderately stable from child to adult, childhood conscientiousness at mean age 10 was prospectively related to adult clinical health at mean age 51, as well as to trajectories of self-rated health assessed over 14 years in midlife. Lifespan mechanisms to account for the association between early personality and later health include health-behavior history and traumas experienced over the life course. Conscientiousness assessed in adulthood was not related to adult health status, suggesting that early trait influences have lasting effects on long-term personality and health mechanisms.

Prof. Dan P. McAdams

Northwestern University, USA

Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.  He was Chair of the Psychology Department 2009-2015.

Author of over 250 scientific articles and chapters, numerous edited volumes, and 7 books, Professor McAdams works in the areas of personality and life-span developmental psychology.  His theoretical and empirical writings focus on concepts of self and identity in contemporary American society and on themes of power, intimacy, redemption, and generativity across the adult life course.

Professor McAdams is the author most recently of The Art and Science of Personality Development (Guilford Press, 2015) and The Redemptive Self:  Stories Americans Live By (Oxford, 2006/2013).  He also wrote a psychological biography of U. S. President George W. Bush, entitled George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream:  A Psychological Portrait (Oxford, 2011).

He has won numerous awards in personality and developmental psychology including the Henry A. Murray Award for the study of lives, the Theodore Sarbin Award for theoretical innovations, the Jack Block Award for career contributions to personality psychology, and the 2006 William James Award for best general-interest book in psychology, for The Redemptive Self.  He currently serves as President of the Association for Research in Personality.

[Presentation's Title:

Caring Lives and Redemptive Life Stories

[Presentation's Abstract]

Caring Lives and Redemptive Life Stories

As first described by Erik Erikson over 50 years ago, generativity is an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations. Many studies show that highly generative adults engage in a wide range of behaviors aimed at leaving a positive legacy for the future, from effective parenting and mentoring activities to political and religious participation to community volunteerism. But caring for the next generation is hard work, full of setbacks and frustrations. Therefore, midlife adults need to formulate a good life story to support their generative efforts. What kinds of stories do they tell? Recent studies suggest that highly generative American adults construct redemptive stories to make sense of their lives, wherein a gifted protagonist typically journeys forth into a dangerous world, sustained by moral steadfastness and committed to transforming short-term suffering into long-term positive outcomes. As narratives of personal atonement, upward social mobility, liberation, and recovery, redemptive life stories translate into psychological terms such cherished and contested cultural notions as American manifest destiny and the American Dream. Even as they sustain hope and support a caring life, therefore, redemptive life stories reprise – for better and sometimes for worse – classic cultural themes regarding what it means to be a mature and morally exemplary adult in a particular cultural context.

Prof. Dr. Frank M. Spinath

University of Saarland, Germany

Frank M. Spinath is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Saarland University since 2004. He was trained and worked as a scientific researcher at the University of Bielefeld where he helped establishing the Bielefeld Longitudinal Study of Adult Twins (BILSAT), the first major twin study in Germany. In 2001 and 2002 he worked with Robert Plomin in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) in London, UK. In 2004 and 2005 he received Early Career awards from the Behavior Genetics Association (BGA) and the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID).

Since 2010, he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Personality, and he (co)authors more than 150 publications in the areas of personality, cognitive ability, and educational achievement. His main area of interest lies in the understanding of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in behavioral domains with relevance to academic and life success. Together with Rainer Riemann and Martin Diewald from the University of Bielefeld he is Principal Investigator of TwinLife, a longitudinal extended-twin-family study exploring the origins of social inequality and life-chances in a representative and genetically-informative German sample.

Presentation's Title:
Nature via nurture:
A personal reflection of 20 years in research
with genetically sensitive designs

[Presentation's Abstract]
Nature via nurture:
A personal reflection of 20 years in research
with genetically sensitive designs

This talk is conceived as a subjective, personal journey through twenty years of research in behavior genetics. It combines findings from our own research with results and methodological developments that have impacted the way behavior geneticists approach empirical analyses of individual differences in human behavior using genetically informative data today. Throughout the years, astonishing advances have been made. From the predominant focus on univariate heritability estimates, quantitative genetic researchers moved on to multivariate genetic analyses and are now incorporating dynamic gene-environment perspectives into their thinking and modeling. At the same time, after early high hopes and intermediate disenchantment, researchers in molecular genetics are currently developing fresh approaches to study the effects of genetic variation on individual differences in human behavior successfully. Furthermore, the field and has begun to embrace the requirement for international and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration in unprecedented and exciting new ways.

Dr. Simine Vazire

University of California, Davis, USA

Simine Vazire is associate professor of psychology and director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge laboratory at UC Davis.  Before holding her current position, she was the Saul and Louise Rosenzweig chair in personality psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

She is currently Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science and senior editor of Collabra (an open access journal run by the University of California Press).

Her work examines the accuracy of self- and other-perceptions of personality, looking at how well people know their own personality traits, behaviors, and dynamic within-person processes.  She also works on research methodology, examining how we can best measure personality, behavior, and outcomes.  She also works on replicability issues in psychology.

Keynote Presentation's Title:

What Personality Psychology Can Contribute to the Replicability Movement, and What We Can Learn from It

[Presentation's Abstract]

What Personality Psychology Can Contribute to the Replicability Movement, and What We Can Learn from It

Personality psychology has a lot to contribute to the ongoing discussion about how to make psychological science more rigorous and reproducible. Some of the “new” practices being discussed have been routine in personality research for decades. For example, personality research has been particularly good at recognizing the importance of sample size, avoiding fetishizing novel and counterintuitive findings at the expense of incremental science, and using sophisticated statistical analyses. However, we also face unique challenges. For example, it is often difficult or impossible to pre-register our studies, or conduct exact replications. Moreover, our sophisticated analyses can be used to obscure any number of sins. There are ways to tackle these challenges and improve personality research. Many of these solutions are coming out of the science and meta-science of the replicability movement. As personality researchers, there is a lot we can learn from, and a lot we can contribute to, that movement.

Prof. Reinout W. Wiers

University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Reinout Wiers is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Faculty Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.

Work of his research-group is aimed at furthering our understanding into the (neuro-) cognitive processes involved in the etiology of addiction and related disorders and to use this knowledge to develop new interventions. His work on implicit cognitive processes in addiction is internationally known.

Wiers published over 200 international papers and many chapters, mostly on this subject and received the prestigious VIDI (2002) and VICI (2008) research grants from the Dutch National Science Foundation (N.W.O.), for research on implicit cognition and addiction. He is senior editor of the No. 1 SSCI Journal in the field of Substance Use (Addiction), and on the editorial board of many other journals in this field.

[Presentation's Title]
Personality, Addiction and Cognitive Bias Modification as add-on treatment: for whom does it work?

[Presentation's Abstract]

Personality, Addiction and Cognitive Bias Modification as add-on treatment: for whom does it work?

Dual process models have described addiction as a combination of relatively strong bottom-up cue-related neurocognitive processes and relatively weak top-down cognitive control processes (e.g. Bechara, 2005; Wiers & Stacy, 2006). In line with this perspective, we found across several studies a larger impact of memory associations and approach tendencies on behavior in adolescents with relatively weak cognitive control. Dual-process models have recently been criticized (e.g. Keren & Schul, 2009), but we think they can still be useful at a descriptive psychological level, while more work should be done to illuminate the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms (Gladwin et al., 2011). Moreover, dual process models inspired new interventions aimed at changing relatively automatic processes in addiction, varieties of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) paradigms (for a review: see Wiers et al., 2013). I will present work on attentional re-training in alcoholism and on approach-bias re-training, which have yielded clinically relevant results, and on the neural changes underlying these changes. Moreover, I will discuss moderation: for whom does CBM constitute a clinically useful extension of treatment? I will also argue that task requirements for assessment and modification are hard to reconcile: tasks that are optimal for assessment are not very suitable for modification and vice versa.

Prof. Charles S. Carver

University of Miami, Florida-USA

Charles S. Carver is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami, where he has spent his entire professional career. He received his Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in Personality Psychology. His work spans the areas of personality psychology, social psychology, health psychology, and more recently experimental psychopathology. Content of that work includes models of self-regulation, stress and coping, and more recently the cognitive-behavioral and genetic structure of several classes of disorder.

This research has been supported at various times by the National Science Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Carver has been honored by divisions 8 and 38 of the American Psychological Association for career contributions to the areas of Health, Social, and Personality psychology. He served for 6 years as Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology’s section on Personality Processes and Individual Differences and 6 years as an Associate Editor of Psychological Review. Dr. Carver is author of 10 books and over 380 articles and chapters.

Title of the keynote conference:

Impulse and Self-Control: Exploring Serotonergic Function and Dual Process Models in Personality and Psychopathology

Co-authors:

Charles S. Carver, University of Miami

Sheri L. Johnson, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract of the keynote conference:

The serotonergic system has been linked to several properties of personality and psychopathology, including sensation seeking, impulsive aggression, and depression. We have suggested that serotonergic function influences the balance of influence between a lower-order system that responds quickly to cues of the moment and a higher-order system that responds deliberatively. This presentation will explore associations among these various concepts.