Event Date
Dr. Emorie D. Beck
Persons in Contexts: Idiographic Psychological Dynamics
Abstract: Psychology is fundamentally a study of persons, including their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, as well as the contexts and social structures in which they are embedded. Yet, the bulk of psychological research focuses on aggregated patterns across people, which obfuscates the complex dynamics through which an individual life unfolds. In this talk, I highlight a re-emerging psychology based in dynamic systems theory that emphasizes the individual and uniqueness (i.e. idiographics) as well as the group and commonality (I .e. nomothetics). First, I discuss ongoing work investigating a person as a dynamic system of shared and unique social, cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and contextual factors that unfold over time. Second, I link short-term dynamics with long-term change, demonstrating how to bridge idiographic and nomothetic approaches. Third, I discuss the applied relevance of idiographic approaches for behavioral targeting and intervention tailoring. I conclude by summarizing this work in the broader context of psychology.
Bio: Dr. Emorie Beck is an Assistant Professor of Personality and Individual Differences at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Beck’s research focuses on what personality is, which has consequences for how we measure personality, what those measures predict both short- and long-term, and how personality is thought to change. She studies how to understand the personality of an individual relative to only themself, relative to some others, and relative to all others. To do so, she uses a mix of methods, including experience sampling methods, passive sensing, survey data, panel data, cognitive tests, and more measured across time intervals from moments to years along with an array of statistical approaches, including time series analysis and forecasting, hierarchical modeling, machine learning, network psychometrics, structural equation modeling, and more.
This Series: The Department of Communication Brown Bag Series is a regular meeting for developments in Communication and related disciplines, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Communication.