Acceso usuarios
John F. Rauthmann, Niclas Kuper
What is published in personality psychology, and which trends emerge over time? We examined in six major personality–psychological journals (European Journal of Personality, Journal of Individual Differences, Journal of Personality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, Journal of Research in Personality, and Personality and Individual Differences) what content—as captured by keywords attached to journal articles (14,227 full articles, with 23,900 unique keywords that attracted a total of 62,578 mentions)—was featured in the first 2 decades of the new millennium (years 2000–2021). From 406 consolidated keywords that received 20 or more mentions across all years and journals (capturing a large portion of the literature and hence reasonably representative), we identified 44 keyword-topics, grouped into nine keyword-domains (from most to least mentioned): (Mal-)Adjustment, Basic Dispositions, Characteristic Adaptations & Narratives, Modalities, Other, Socio-Cultural, Methodology, Stability/Change, and Biological. The top 5 most mentioned keyword-topics were “B5 Constructs,” “Emotion,” “Internalizing,” “Health/Well-being,” and “Dark Tetrad,” and the top 5 most mentioned keywords were personality, big five, narcissism, sex differences, and depression. We also examined co-occurrences, rank-order stabilities, trajectorial trends, and associations with citations for keywords, keyword-topics, and keyword-domains as well as similarities between the sampled journals. We cast a descriptive and systematic portrait of contemporary published personality–psychological content, contrast those insights with earlier accounts of trends in personality psychology, and venture predictions for the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
