To prepare students for academic and applied research careers, the Social & Personality area emphasizes grounding in the basic theories of social and personality psychology, as well as training in quantitative and research methods. Students specialize in a subtopic that forms their area of research (e.g., emotion, identity formation, personality development, social cognition). Faculty in the Social & Personality area specialize in close relationships, identity development, emotion, emotion regulation, person perception, personality assessment, personality development, political psychology, resilience, sense of purpose, social cognitive development, and well-being.
Collaboration across other training areas and with faculty in other departments is encouraged as needed to meet students’ unique training goals. Many of our Social & Personality faculty conduct research that connects to other training areas such as Aging & Development (e.g., social cognitive development in childhood; emotion regulation across the adult lifespan) and Clinical Science (e.g., the role that personality plays in the development of mental illness) or other departments and schools on campus (e.g., Engineering, the Medical School, Statistics and Data Science).
In addition to mentored and collaborative research, students in the Social & Personality area complete coursework in Theories of Social Psychology, Theories of Personality Psychology, Quantitative Methods, and Research Methods. The overarching goal of this training model is to prepare students to approach research problems in a variety of ways and settings.
