xii Preface
chapters linking personality to religion, to subjective well-being, to psychopathology, to 
personality disorders, and to health.
The final section is entirely new for the fourth edition. In addition to the well-es -
tablished research topics and traditions covered in the preceding sections, we wanted to 
give voice to new researchers and cutting-edge topics. Thus, Part VIII includes shorter 
and more focused chapters on several emerging issues and new directions: interventions 
designed to change personality, ecological sampling methods that help us understand 
personality in everyday life, the interaction of personality and environments, the degree 
to which people have self-  insight, and the link between personality and economics.
Planning the fourth edition of the Handbook  and overseeing its publication pro -
vided many opportunities for us to reflect on the past and present state of the field. 
Handbooks generally serve to provide an up-to-date summary and evaluation of current 
knowledge in a scientific discipline; thus, each edition of the Handbook of Personal -
ity provides a snapshot (or time capsule) of our discipline at a particular point in time. 
However, when published with some regularity, handbooks also serve to chronicle the 
history and development of a field. When we look back to the original 1990 edition, it 
becomes clear that the pace of change has been rapid and remarkable.
The field has made significant advances in the three decades since the 1990 edition. 
Several important conferences organized by the next generation of personality psychol -
ogists, including a meeting at the University of Michigan and several annual meetings 
at the Nags Head conference center in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, helped to 
change the climate in the field from adversarial competition to open-minded discussion 
and collaboration.  These positive developments eventually led to the founding of the 
Association for Research in Personality (ARP) in 2001. This society provides a single 
organizational home for all researchers interested in personality and organizes a bian -
nual conference that offers much-needed opportunities for interaction and exchange of 
ideas and findings.
The Handbook of Personality reflects these historical and generational changes as 
well. The 1990 edition featured the influence and continued presence of the “pioneer 
generation” that discovered and divided the terrain of personality into various subfields. 
This generation included Albert Bandura, Jack Block, Raymond Cattell, Seymour Ep -
stein, Hans Eysenck, Lewis Goldberg, Richard Lazarus, John Loehlin, David Magnus -
son, Walter Mischel, and Bernard Weiner. While their enduring contributions continue 
to give shape to the field, only two of the 28 chapter authors from the first edition 
remain in the fourth edition today (Dean Simonton and Oliver John). The change of 
interest and focus in the literature is apparent also in the content: The five content areas 
that form the major body of the current edition did not exist in the 1990 edition, and 
topics that seem indispensable from today’s perspective had not been articulated then, 
such as the evolutionary basis of personality, self- and emotion regulation, and well-
being and happiness. Moreover, we are relieved to see that our then male-dominated 
field has slowly become more diverse. Specifically, in the 1990 edition, women were 
senior authors of only two  of the chapters, whereas in the fourth edition that number 
has increased to 14 (or one-third) of the chapters.
The inevitable march of time is also apparent in the editorship of the Handbook . 
At the time of the first edition, the now senior editor was an assistant professor, and the 
junior editor had just started graduate school. The founding editor of the Handbook , 
Lawrence Pervin, passed away in 2016. We are grateful to him for having launched the 
Handbook , and are proud to carry on the tradition of providing a reference volume by, 
and for, the next generations of personality researchers. We also want to thank all of the 