OpenLB
Open Library of Bioscience

What is published in personality psychology, and which trends emerge over time? We examined in six major personality-psychological journals (European Journal of Personality, Journal of Individual Differences, Journal of Personality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, Journal of Research in Personality, and Personality and Individual Differences) 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 2 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 nine keyword-domains (from most to least mentioned): (Mal-)Adjustment, Basic Dispositions, Characteristic Adaptations & Narratives, Modalities, Other, Socio-Cultural, Methodology, Stability/Change, and Biological. The top 5 most mentioned keyword-topics were "B5 Constructs," "Emotion," "Internalizing," "Health/Well-being," and "Dark Tetrad," and the top 5 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).