WFU Psychology

Dustin Wood

Education

	B.A., American University, 2001
	M.A., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2004
	Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2007

Major Area:  
Personality Psychology


Research Interests:

Very broadly, I am interested in how personality traits shape our social experiences, and in turn, how social forces and experiences shape our personalities.  Some of my more specific interests are outlined below.

Norms, Expectations, and Personality Traits

People are regularly concerned with whether they act in a “normal” fashion, but what does it mean to be normal? I have attempted to address this question by identifying the characteristics that are associated with perceived normality. My research has suggested that the personality correlates of perceived normality differ by age in ways that track the mean-level development of personality traits.  As people progress from childhood to adulthood, acting conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable becomes more important to seeing oneself as “normal” (Wood, Gosling, & Potter, 2007), and becomes more consensually expected by others (Wood & Roberts, 2006).  Both of these changes parallel the fact that people tend to become more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable over the life span.  I am currently interested in exploring the extent to which norms for personality traits and other constructs vary across social or cultural groups, and understanding how conceptions of normality are learned and internalized.

	Wood, D., Gosling, S.D., & Potter, J. (in press).  Normality evaluations and their relationship to personality traits and well-being.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
	Wood, D., & Roberts, B.W. (2006). The effect of age and role information on expectations for Big Five personality traits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 1482-1496.

The Role of Preferences in Guiding Behavior and Development

One of the primary sources of social norms may be preferences that are shared across many individuals (e.g., people may generally be concerned about their weight largely because of widespread preference for skinnier mates by the opposite sex).  Further, preferences may represent the “active” part of personality traits which allow traits to predict which situations people will enter and how they will act in these situations (e.g., extraverts likely go to parties more than introverts because of a greater preference for these social situations).
Despite the conceptual importance of our preferences for both understanding how we behave and in how we make others behave, preferences are rarely measured explicitly.  I am attempting to explore the importance of preferences in a variety of settings.  First, I have shown that personality traits are associated with individual differences in mate preferences.  For instance, extraverts show greater preference for members of the opposite sex that look confident and fashionable, while agreeable or conscientious people show greater preference for members of the opposite sex that look traditional and soft-hearted.  Further, preferences for communal mates increase with age, again paralleling the actual increase of communal traits such as conscientiousness and agreeableness (Wood, Brumbaugh, & Fraley, 2007).

Wood, D., Brumbaugh, C.C., & Fraley, R.C. (2007). Ecologically-measured mate preferences and their relation with dispositional characteristics. Manuscript in preparation.

General and “Context-Specific” Personality Traits

An important issue among personality psychologists concerns how individuals can have stable personality traits and yet also vary their behavior considerably across contexts. I have attempted to address this problem with the Personality and Role Identity Structural Model, or PRISM. Within this model, the way that individuals see themselves in general is a judgment formed largely by understanding how they act across multiple other contexts, such as with their friends, parents, romantic partner, coworkers, and so on. 
I have shown evidence that how individuals believe they act in narrow contexts (e.g., at work) is slowly integrated into their understanding of their general personality over time. For instance, the way that college students believe they act within clubs and organizations might slowly be internalized into how they see themselves in general (Wood & Roberts, 2006). In my current work, I am currently attempting to understand where “contextualized personalities” come from (Wood, in press).  For instance, I am exploring why some youths report acting more responsible in after-school youth programs than they do in general, and whether acting responsible in this context for an extended period of time eventually “overflows” to impact how the youth acts in other contexts (e.g., at school or at home) (Wood, Larson, & Brown, 2007).

	Wood, D. (in press).  Using the PRISM to understand the importance of general personality traits.  Journal of Personality.
	Wood, D., & Roberts, B.W. (2006).  Cross-sectional and longitudinal tests of the Personality and Role Identity Structural Model (PRISM). Journal of Personality, 74, 779-809.
	Wood, D., Larson, R., & Brown, J. (2007). Developing responsibility in youth program participants.  Manuscript under review.

Courses taught: 

Personality Research