[BIC-announce] Talk on personality, genes, and development; February 25 noon, MNI Room NW125

[A. Dagher, Dr.]

Header: 

Talk on personality, genes, and development; February 25 noon

Speaker: Rene Mõttus 
University of Edinburgh and University of Tartu
Title: A Just-One-Structure of personality: How personality can be a highly heritable phenomena with no underlying structure
Date: Monday, February 25, 2019
Time: noon 
Place: NW-125
Host: Uku Vainik

RSVP your interest at uku.vainik at gmail.com <mailto:uku.vainik at gmail.com>, so I can upgrade space if needed.

The talk focuses on the “puzzle of parallel structures” (McCrae et al., 2001, Journal of Personality, pp. 515), whereby the co-variance structures of personality characteristics are very similar at genetic, environmental and phenotypic levels. This is puzzling because there is no a priori reason for such similarity. A powerful test of this phenomenon is presented, based on 240 personality items measured in nearly 3,000 pairs of twins; given that, on average, more than half of the genetic variance in individual items is unique to them, item-level analyses are well suited for this purpose. Possible explanations as well as implications for personality development and measurement are discussed. Specifically, I will put forward a model whereby personality structure as we see it is a purely phenotypic, developmental phenomena emerging from gene-environment transactions.  

Bio: 
René Mõttus (PhD), Lecturer of Individual Differences in the University of Edinburgh, has published over 60 journal articles on various topics related to individual differences, many in flagship journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Health Psychology or Psychology and Aging. His research topics span from cognitive / personality epidemiology, schizophrenia, behaviour genetics and personality development to cross-cultural psychology, psychometrics and computational modelling. He is currently focusing on the role of gene-environment correlations in personality development and increasing the predictive power of personality traits. René is an Associate Editor in the European Journal of Personality and the Journal of Personality, respectively the second and third-ranking empirical personality journals. In 2018, René received the prestigious Early Career Award of the European Association of Personality Psychology. 

Google Scholar profile:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5dm650AAAAAJ <https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5dm650AAAAAJ>


Best,

Uku Vainik
Postdoctoral fellow at Alain Dagher's lab
Montreal Neurological Institute, Canada
Research Fellow at Institute of Psychology,
University of Tartu, Estonia
uku.vainik at gmail.com <mailto:uku.vainik at gmail.com>
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ouXTgzIAAAAJ <https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ouXTgzIAAAAJ>

- - -
Alain Dagher MD
Montreal Neurological Institute
McGill University
3801 University St.
Montréal QC Canada H3A 2B4
(514) 398-1726






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