The Personality Studies Lab studies the interplay between personality and psychopathology with a primary focus on externalizing (EXT) disorders and outcomes. Within the broad EXT grouping, our interest lies most strongly with the domain of Antagonism vs. Agreeableness. We see this as the core of multiple disorders including narcissism/narcissistic personality disorder, psychopathy/ASPD, and other related constructs (e.g., Machiavellianism). We tend to use structural models of general and pathological personality for much of our work (e.g. Five Factor Model/Big Five; DSM-5 AMPD) as we find it has great utility in organizing many of the constructs used in psychology and psychopathology with fewer concerns re: jingle-jangle fallacies. We work on a variety of issues within this topic including diagnostic models of personality disorder, creating and validating assessments for these constructs, and building parsimonious empirical models of personality and psychopathology. The Personality Studies Lab is deeply interested in and committed to the Open Science Movement. We believe there are numerous methodological, quantitative, and individual factors that contribute to a psychological science that's far less replicable or credible than it should be. These include practices such as p-hacking/cherry picking, HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known - or turning exploratory work into confirmatory work post-hoc), being non-transparent about data exclusion rules, use and effect of covariate inclusion, manipulations, or the number of analyses run. As such, the PSL works to adopt open science practices whenever possible by preregistering our studies, using Registered Report formats, making data, code, and materials available, as well as making decisions regarding sample size both transparent and predicated on using samples with sufficient statistical power and the ability to yield precise estimates.
