Research Feed

Wu, Van der Linden, Liu et al. (2026) asked whether creativity is better predicted by individual personality traits or by an overall personality profile. Using 197 Chinese college students, they found that people who score high across all five traits simultaneously (open, conscientious, outgoing, agreeable, and emotionally stable) tend to be rated as more creative by peers and themselves, and perform better on creative thinking tasks. No single trait explained as much as the combined profile.

Aravindh et al. (2026) surveyed 260 retired older adults in Chennai, India, finding that roughly one-third showed problematic or at-risk internet use. Among Big Five traits, conscientiousness was negatively associated with internet addiction while neuroticism and openness were positively associated; extraversion and agreeableness showed no significant links. Younger age, higher education, and prior government employment were also independent predictors of problematic use.

Friesen, Rebasso, Chow, and Djupe (2026) surveyed 964 U.S. adults during the 2020 election cycle, finding that more extraverted people enjoyed political activities more, regardless of whether those activities were done alone or with others. Notably, extraverted men got a bigger enjoyment boost from politics than equally extraverted women, especially for activities involving debate or disagreement. Since enjoying politics predicts actually doing it, this gap may help explain why women participate less politically.

Zavhorodnia and Shepelova (2026) studied 147 Ukrainian university students (mean age 24, 78% women) during wartime martial law. Emotional stability was the strongest protective factor for subjective well-being, followed by openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Agreeableness unexpectedly predicted well-being decline, likely reflecting emotional exhaustion from caregiving demands in a predominantly female sample. Openness mediated effects of extraversion and novelty tolerance, and emotional stability moderated openness's protective role.

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.

Oberwemmer et al. (2026) tested whether spousal bereavement produces posttraumatic growth (PTG) as Big Five trait change in 256 Dutch adults tracked across seven years with matched controls. No growth-consistent changes emerged. Instead, bereaved individuals showed a temporary neuroticism spike surrounding the loss (more pronounced in men) followed by partial recovery, plus persistently lower conscientiousness post-loss. The authors suggest perceived PTG may reflect misattributing neuroticism's decline from its peak as genuine growth.

Among nearly 9,000 Brazilian teachers, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were elevated while Negative Emotionality was low, replicating the occupational personality profile found in Western samples. Teaching-specific social-emotional and instructional characteristics mapped onto this Big Five structure but formed a distinct sixth factor, with personality accounting for only about 27% of their variance, leaving substantial teaching-relevant individual differences unexplained by broad traits alone.

A 2026 South African study (n=118) found work engagement positively linked to all Big Five traits except neuroticism, which correlated negatively. Extraversion and conscientiousness were the strongest predictors. Basic psychological need satisfaction (especially "joyful connection") explained additional engagement variance beyond personality traits alone. Research purpose: This study investigated the associations among work engagement, personality traits, and basic psychological needs from an organisational neuroscience perspective. Motivation for the study: Few studies have explore...

When people feel more satisfied at work, they gradually become more conscientious and emotionally stable, and those personality shifts in turn make them even more satisfied, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. Two large studies confirmed this goes both ways, with effects building and then fading over time rather than operating steadily. This suggests workplaces aren't just where personality shows up, they're where it develops. Organizations that invest in employee satisfaction may be inadvertently cultivating more reliable, emotionally resilient workers, while employees should recognize that their job choices can fundamentally reshape who they are over time.

Applying the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits to six Polish elections (N=2,936), Maliszewski et al. found that voter turnout was consistently driven by stability, social integration, and rule-following personality profiles, while abstention clustered around distrust, hostility, and antisocial tendencies. Support for the liberal Civic Coalition correlated with openness, autonomy, and prosocial orientation. Strikingly, the conservative PiS party drew its core support not from orderly traditionalists but from profiles marked by chronic grievance, hostility, and antagonism toward established norms: patterns replicated consistently across election cycles.

Using cluster analysis with 426 Polish participants, Kotus identified three Big Five personality profiles predicting pet attachment. Cluster 1 (high extraversion, openness, emotional stability) showed lower attachment. Clusters 2 (high neuroticism, low extraversion/openness) and 3 (low openness, high conscientiousness, need for predictability) both showed stronger attachment, with animals serving compensatory social functions: particularly as human-relationship substitutes for Cluster 2 and stress-regulating companions for Cluster 3.

This multimodal AI system predicts Big Five personality traits from text, speech, and facial expressions using the myPersonality dataset (86,220 participants). GPT-3 achieved 89.1% accuracy, with Openness (91%) and Extraversion (90%) most reliably classified. Agreeableness proved hardest to detect via speech, while lexical features dominated trait prediction overall, outperforming audio and visual cues.

A 2026 multilevel meta-analysis (k=34 studies) found agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness positively associated with healthy eating and fruit/vegetable consumption; neuroticism was negatively associated. Agreeableness and conscientiousness also predicted lower sodium intake. Effect sizes were small but reliable, with openness-diet associations stronger in samples over age 30.

This study developed an efficient AI system for predicting Big Five personality traits from long-form life narrative interviews (the kind of detailed life stories people tell about key events and relationships). Rather than relying on questionnaires, which can be biased, the model reads how people naturally describe their lives. It accurately detected trait-relevant language: Openness in creativity and adventure, Neuroticism in health struggles and regret, Agreeableness in warmth and mentorship, suggesting personality leaves consistent, readable fingerprints in the stories we tell about ourselves.

Using a cross-sectional sample of 3+ million participants across 68 countries, this study examined how age moderates gender differences in Big Five personality traits. Women scored higher than men on Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness; men scored higher on Openness. The gender gap widened with age for all traits except Neuroticism, which narrowed. Cultural factors (particularly individualism, education, and later marriage ages) explained cross-national variation in these age-moderated gender differences.

Using NHATS data from 2,672 older adults, this longitudinal cohort study examined Big Five traits and social isolation risk over nine years. Higher extraversion and agreeableness predicted lower odds of baseline isolation, with extraversion remaining protective at three-year follow-up even after full adjustment. No trait significantly predicted isolation at six or nine years, suggesting personality's influence diminishes over longer time horizons.

A theoretical analysis argues the human Big Five personality model is inappropriate for describing great ape personality, as structural overlap between human and ape trait dimensions is below 50% for chimpanzees and as low as 25% for other great apes. The author proposes studying simpler, cross-species facets (like sociability, curiosity, and fearfulness) instead.

Among 127 creative adolescents and adults, hierarchical regression found that openness to experience and conscientiousness were the strongest Big Five predictors of creative self-beliefs, with openness showing the largest effect (β = 0.46). Extraversion also predicted creative self-beliefs once age was controlled. Self-compassion correlated positively with creative self-beliefs but lost predictive significance once personality traits (particularly neuroticism) were included, indicating substantial shared variance.

This study proposes a Character Model of Scientists (CMS) comprising four dimensions: personality traits, cognitive preferences, values, and habitual behaviors, each containing four elements drawn from a literature review of 24 studies. Big Five connections are explicit: scientists score higher in openness, with conscientiousness and agreeableness (cooperation) also represented. The model links to established Big Five theory, noting personality dimensions are harder to develop through training than values or behaviors.

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.