Our research is generally focused on how people with different personality styles experience emotions and make behavioral choices. Our goal is for our research is to better identify youth who are at risk (versus not at risk) of having later mental health challenges and contribute to designing individualized interventions for mental health challenges. For example, having interventions that are tailored for people's individual personality styles may be more effective than giving everyone the same type of intervention.
How are people's personality traits related to how they feel and behave?
Everyone is different, and we want to learn more about how people with different personalities tend to experience emotions and react to situations.
We have one study focused on how college students with different personality styles experience emotions like anxiety, sadness, and anger and how they react when they feel those emotions.
We have another similar study focused on teens and emerging adults. For this study, participants also complete some tasks while wearing sensors in a cap on the head (an EEG cap) and sensors to measure heart rate and tiny amounts of sweat on the skin. We can therefore learn more about how youths' brains and bodies respond to different emotions.
How do parents/caregivers think about their children's personality traits and behaviors?
Parents/caregivers provide a valuable point of view on how their children typically feel and behave. However, when we give adults questionnaires to fill out about their children, we don't always know what information they think about to choose answers. Learning more about adults' point of view and how that might be different from children's point of view is helpful to improve our measures of child personality, emotional experiences, and behaviors.
Our study described above with teens and emerging adults also offers an option for parents/caregivers to share what they think about their child's personality and behavior.
We also are starting an online study soon to better understand how parents/caregivers interpret questions on the types of questionnaires psychologists use to assess children's feelings and behaviors.