Institute of Personality and Social Research

IPSR was founded in 1949 as IPAR (the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research). IPAR's early research focused on the relations between personality and performance, with forays into higher levels of human performance such as creativity, aesthetics, leadership, and profession-specific accomplishments. IPAR pioneered the notion that a full understanding of personality requires viewing the individual in a number of different situations. This was accomplished through intensive multi-day assessments, which included administration of self-report inventories, careful observation of behavior in structured and unstructured situations, and detailed in-depth interviews. The highly innovative IPAR approach made it a magnet for visitors who came to learn its methods and work with its data sets, and who went on to pursue research that clearly carried the IPAR stamp. Because of the enormous influence it had on the field, any genealogy of personality research in the decades following World War II would find almost all of the prominent researchers in the field to be connected in some tangible way to the IPAR lineage.

Starting in the 1980s, social scientists began moving away from "trait" approaches that highlighted the distinctions among individuals and moved more toward the study of basic processes that were common to people such as learning, cognition, and socialization. Although Berkeley was one of the last bastions of traditional personality research in this country, it became clear that IPAR needed to be based on a broader foundation. In 1992, IPAR addressed this issue by changing its name to IPSR (the Institute of Personality and Social Research), embracing the study of social processes as well as the study of individual differences. This change in name and focus provided IPSR with an opportunity to revitalize, reenergize, and reinvent itself.

In its current form, IPSR encompasses a distinguished membership from a broad range of disciplines including business, neuroscience, psychology, public health, public policy, education, economics, and social welfare. The IPSR intellectual community is united by a focus on social and personality research that contributes to understanding and fostering well-being, health, and equality for all.
 

IPSR's five focal research areas are:

Personality

This area continues the Institute's historical focus on personality assessment, personality development, and the implications of personality for performance and health. Moreover, it embraces new approaches toward the assessment and conceptualization of personality (e.g., multi-method assessment, the "Big Five" dimensions of personality).

Emotion

This area addresses the fundamental nature of emotion and its biological substrates, the centrality of emotional expression and regulation in development, the ways that emotions differentiate people and cultures, the critical role that emotion plays in social processes (e.g., affiliation, attachment, conflict), and the role that emotion and emotion regulation play in well-being, health, and illness.

Culture

This area addresses the influence of culture on fundamental social and behavioral processes such as cognition, emotion, affiliation, identity, development, relationships, and personality. It also examines how these processes shape people’s happiness, well-being, and health. 

Health and health disparities

This area addresses the role of stress and basic behavioral processes (e.g., appraisal, emotion, coping) in health and illness. Emphases include individual and cultural differences in health behavior and symptomatology; the physiological underpinnings of resilience, health, and disease; and the reciprocal influences between health systems and the individual.

Social, intergroup, and organizational processes

This area addresses the ways that personality, emotion, culture, and health impact on and are impacted by social, intergroup, and organizational processes. This includes work on relationships, power and status, intergroup bias and discrimination, inequality and health disparities, organizational behavior, and political influences on behavior and information processing.

IPSR Programs and facilities:

IPSR programs and facilities support collaborative and interdisciplinary research amongst its members. IPSR provides office space and meeting rooms at 2121 Berkeley Way. Research resources include small and large group testing rooms, a video coding facility, and a video recording and editing studio. IPSR houses a number of archival data sets concerned with the assessment and development of personality that have been collected over the past half century. IPSR sponsors a weekly colloquium series as well as conferences and special events that are open to the Berkeley community. IPSR provides research grants that support doctoral and postdoctoral trainees’ research.