Research

Personality organization in the self, in relationships, and in context.

My research asks how relatively enduring features of personality become expressed in the way people understand themselves, relate to others, and function in everyday life. I am especially interested in what changes when the same phenomenon is viewed across people, perspectives, relationships, situations, and timescales.

01Self

Self & Personality Organization

How is a coherent, adaptive way of relating to oneself organized, and how does it break down in personality pathology?

This work examines personality functioning, identity, self-relational processes, and developmental severity. I am interested in how constructs such as personality organization, internalization, and self-directed hostility fit within contemporary dimensional models of psychopathology without losing the clinical phenomena those theories were built to describe.

Questions

What does personality functioning represent beyond a score on a particular measure?
How do self-directed patterns such as self-love, self-attack, and self-control relate to broader psychopathology?
How should severity be distinguished from personality style?

Examples

Criterion A as developmental severity
SASB introject and the self-system
Personality functioning and traits
Identity and diagnostic self-understanding

Start with Criterion A →

02Relationships

Relationships & Interpersonal Dynamics

Personality is not only something a person has. It is also expressed in the situations people create, interpret, and repeat with one another.

This program studies interpersonal problems, motives, values, perceived capabilities, complementarity, informant perspectives, and moment-to-moment interaction. The interpersonal circumplex provides a common language for asking how different surfaces and perspectives align, diverge, and change with context.

Questions

Which interpersonal patterns are characteristic of the person, and which belong to a relationship or situation?
What can close others see that self-report does not capture?
When is disagreement across interpersonal surfaces clinically meaningful?

Examples

Stable and context-sensitive complementarity
Informant-report interpersonal problems
Angular discrepancy across circumplex surfaces
Multisurface interpersonal assessment

Explore the interpersonal work →

03Context

Structure, Context & Process

A pattern that distinguishes people from one another is not necessarily the process that changes within a person from one moment to the next.

I study the relation between stable individual differences and context-sensitive psychological processes. This includes asking whether patterns generalize across relationships and objects, how interpersonal coordination changes with conversational demands, and whether between-person constructs explain within-person dynamics or instead operate as more stable set points.

Questions

When does between-person structure generalize to within-person process?
What belongs to the person, the relationship, the situation, or the timescale?
When divergence across levels appears, what psychological information does it contain?

Examples

Dyadic observational coding
Ecological momentary assessment
Person × object designs
Multilevel and location-scale modeling

See a current dyadic project →

04Clinical meaning

Diagnosis & Clinical Meaning

Diagnostic systems do more than organize symptoms. They shape formulation, treatment, stigma, and the ways people understand themselves.

This work examines what dimensional models preserve or obscure when they replace traditional personality disorder categories, how diagnostic language affects clinical meaning, and why lived experience should play a larger role in the development and evaluation of personality disorder nosology.

Questions

What information do dimensional models preserve, and what do they leave out?
How does diagnostic language affect stigma and self-understanding?
Whose perspective should count when a diagnostic system is judged clinically useful?

Examples

AMPD coverage of borderline personality concepts
BPD and treatment outcome
Diagnostic stigma and lived experience
Public scholarship on nosology and identity

Read the lived-experience commentary →

How I study these questions

Methods follow the level of the phenomenon.

The method is important because different designs make different psychological claims possible.

Interpersonal circumplexStructural Summary MethodDyadic observationEcological momentary assessmentMultilevel modelingBayesian estimationLocation-scale modelsMonte Carlo simulationMultimethod assessmentText & narrative analysisR package developmentOpen science

Collaboration

Research grows through conversation.

I welcome conversations about personality functioning, self and interpersonal processes, dimensional psychopathology, multimethod assessment, and projects that connect quantitative rigor with clinical meaning.

Start a conversation