Research Feed

This essay speculates about why some surveys find American liberals, especially young women, generally report more depression and anxiety than conservatives. It draws on a handful of studies, media coverage, and expert quotes. On personality, it notes that liberals tend to score higher in openness and neuroticism, while conservatives score higher in conscientiousness, which the author suggests might make them less willing to acknowledge stigmatized issues like mental illness. Other ideas include liberals labeling milder struggles as illness, social media use, and physical health differences. The author admits that since mental health diagnosis relies largely on self-report; which makes it interesting, but not a validated finding.

Wilson and Calanchini (2026) examined how cultural tightness — the strength of social norms and intolerance of deviance — predicts personality at regional levels. Across U.S. states, tighter regions scored higher in conscientiousness and lower in openness. Cross-nationally (56 countries), tighter nations scored lower in extraversion and the creativity facet of openness. Agreeableness, neuroticism, and most conscientiousness facets showed no consistent relationships with tightness.

Using a 2022 survey of 1,306 U.S. federal bureaucrats, this study examines how Big Five personality traits shape perceptions of agency politicization. Neuroticism is the standout finding: more neurotic employees are significantly more sensitive to formal politicization, perceiving greater appointee influence. Conscientiousness shows weaker, mixed effects; Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness show no consistent moderating role.

This research explores the 'personalization' of modern politics, where the individual traits of both voters and candidates drive political choice. The authors propose a congruency model, finding that voters prefer candidates whose personalities align with party ideology or mirror their own traits. Ultimately, political choice is a psychological matching process where voters seek leaders who reflect their own internal values and self-identity.

This research identifies five robust dimensions of spirituality that constitute the Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI): Cognitive Orientation, Experiential/Phenomenological, Existential Well-Being, Paranormal Beliefs, and Religiousness. While these dimensions correlate differentially with the Big Five, they remain conceptually unique. This suggests that spirituality represents a significant domain of human personality that is not fully captured by the standard Five-Factor Model framework.