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What is published in personality psychology, and which trends emerge over time? We examined in six major personality-psychological journals (EJP, JID, JOPY, JPSP:PPID, JRP, PAID) 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 two 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 9 keyword-domains (from most to least mentioned): (Mal-)Adjustment, Basic Dispositions, Characteristic Adaptations Narratives, Modalities, Other, Socio-Cultural, Methodology, Stability/Change, Biological. The top five most mentioned keyword-topics were “B5 Constructs”, “Emotion”, “Internalizing”, “Health/Well-Being”, and “Dark Tetrad”, and the top five 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.
Rauthmann et al. (Tue,) studied this question.