Jennifer L Tackett

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Psychology

The current pair of highly-powered, preregistered studies estimate the associations between personality/temperament and youth psychopathology, and evaluate the generalizability of these associations across diverse populations and research designs. In Study 1, a multilevel meta-analysis of 147 studies (N = 46,369) quantified the associations between...

Open science is challenging and frequently time-consuming work, but the payoff is greater assurance that published research is transparent, conducted rigorously, and protected against some forms of researcher bias. In this editorial, we reflect on progress made toward the integration of open-science practices at Clinical Psychological Science ( CPS...

Personality variability is an important individual difference construct that is the focus of major psychological theories and relates to socioemotional functioning. Although cross-situational personality variability has been studied extensively in adult populations, little is known about variability in children’s personality. In this study, we aime...

Personality variability is an important individual difference construct that is the focus of major psychological theories and relates to socioemotional functioning. Although cross-situational personality variability has been studied extensively in adult populations, little is known about variability in children’s personality. In this study, we aime...

Substantial research has examined the associations between youth personality traits and psychopathology, with little attention to the role that personal values might play. Previous work has indicated that youth’s personal values are related to, yet distinct from, personality traits. In adults, personal values are associated with psychopathological...

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (i.e., tendencies to experience low levels of guilt and empathy) are associated with severe and persistent conduct problems in youth. However, some youth with elevated CU traits do not exhibit severe externalizing problems, and further research is needed to identify conditions under which CU traits are more versus le...

The gender disparity in leadership positions is substantial and critical yet persists despite decades of focused study. Critical developmental periods, such as emerging adulthood, may be particularly relevant to attend to if we hope to find effective interventions to tackle this problem. The present study draws on longitudinal data covering four ye...

ARTICLE FREE TO ACCESS AT: https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2022.2158842. In this editorial statement, we briefly delineated a series of observations, guidelines, and directions for future research focused on the most common outcome of multi-informant assessments of youth mental health. Discrepancies commonly occur between estimates of youth mental...

Leadership traits and behaviors are observed early in human development, and although an improved understanding of youth leadership would usefully inform many real-world contexts (e.g., education, parenting, policy), most empirical work on leadership has been limited to adult populations. The purpose of the current article is to add a developmental...

Because deficits in self-regulation (SR) are core features of many diverse psychological disorders, SR may constitute one of many dimensions that underlie shared variance across diagnostic boundaries (e.g., the p factor, a dimension reflecting shared variance across multiple psychological disorders). SR definitions encompass constructs mapping onto...

Adolescence is a peak period for risk‐taking, but research has largely overlooked positive manifestations of adolescent risk‐taking due to ambiguity regarding operationalization and measurement of positive risk‐taking. We address this limitation using a mixed‐methods approach. We elicited free responses from contemporary college students (N = 74, M...

Recently proposed psychiatric taxonomies and classification systems, Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) and the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), aim to structure symptoms of psychopathology along a common set of dimensions. Hierarchical dimensional models of psychopathology are empirically supported and facilitate more productive rese...

The Portrait Values Questionnaire – Child Version (PVQ-C) assesses 10 basic human values in childhood but has been used only sparingly in research on child individual differences. The present study examined PVQ-C values in the context of associations with child personality traits and endorsement differences between gender and racial/ethnic identiti...

Personality disorder (PD) researchers proposed a highly innovative "paradigm-shifting" revamp for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (APA, 2013). Yet, 10 years later, Widiger and Hines (2022) summarize a developmental process plagued by disagreement and stagnation, with little evidence of the field having reape...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a quantitative nosological system that addresses shortcomings of traditional mental disorder diagnoses, including arbitrary boundaries between psychopathology and normality, frequent disorder co-occurrence, substantial heterogeneity within disorders, and diagnostic unreliability over time and...

Personality disorder (PD) researchers proposed a highly innovative “paradigm-shifting” revamp for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition (DSM-5; APA, 2013). Yet, ten years later, Widiger and Hines (this issue) summarize a developmental process plagued by disagreement and stagnation, with little evidence of the field h...

This article outlines the Phase 1 efforts of the HiTOP Measure Development group for externalizing constructs, which include disinhibited externalizing, antagonistic externalizing, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, substance use, and externalizing/maladaptive behaviors. We provide background on the constructs included and the process and is...

Lower levels of self-regulation have been implicated in multiple psychological disorders. Despite conceptual overlap (broadly reflecting self-regulatory functions), executive functions (EF) and effortful control (EC) are rarely jointly studied in relation to broadband psychopathology. The present study investigated associations of correlated factor...

Objective Hormones are often conceptualized as biological markers of individual differences and have been associated with a variety of behavioral indicators and characteristics, such as mating behavior or acquiring and maintaining dominance. However, before researchers create strong theoretical models for how hormones modulate individual and social...

Personality is not the most popular subfield of psychology. But, in one way or another, personality psychologists have played an outsized role in the ongoing “credibility revolution” in psychology. Not only have individual personality psychologists taken on visible roles in the movement, but our field’s practices and norms have now become models fo...

Personality is not the most popular subfield of psychology. But, in one way or another, personality psychologists have played an outsized role in the ongoing “credibility revolution” in psychology. Not only have individual personality psychologists taken on visible roles in the movement, but our field’s practices and norms have now become models fo...

Despite criticisms dating back to the 1950s, and minimal progress reducing mental health burdens, the dominant training model in clinical psychology has not changed. We argue that for clinical psychologists to reduce mental health burdens, they (collectively) need to devote a much larger proportion of their professional efforts to a broader range o...

Relational aggression-or behavior intended to harm the relationships of its victims-has been the focus of interdisciplinary study across developmental, clinical, personality, and social psychology in the last several decades. One of the primary measures used to assess relational aggression in youth is the Children's Social Behavior Scale (CSBS; Cri...

Objective The goal of the present study was to extend the findings of the dual-hormone hypothesis (DHH) literature by assessing whether the interaction between testosterone (T) and cortisol (C) is associated with dominance in an adolescent sample via multiple methods of measuring T, C, and dominance, and with pre-registration of hypotheses and anal...

Personality disorder (PD) symptoms in a parent generation may confer risk for problems in future generations, but intergenerational transmission has not been studied beyond parent–child effects. We examined the generational transfer of risk associated with PDs using structural models of grandparent personality pathology and grandchild psychopatholo...

The present study compared the primary models used in research on the structure of psychopathology (i.e., correlated factor, higher-order, and bifactor models) in terms of structural validity (model fit and factor reliability), longitudinal measurement invariance, concurrent and prospective predictive validity in relation to important outcomes, and...

Relational aggression – or behavior intended to harm the relationships of its victims – has been the focus of interdisciplinary study across developmental, clinical, personality, and social psychology in the last several decades. One of the primary measures used to assess relational aggression in youth is the Children’s Social Behavior Scale (CSBS;...

Shortcomings of approaches to classifying psychopathology based on expert consensus have given rise to contemporary efforts to classify psychopathology quantitatively. In this paper, we review progress in achieving a quantitative and empirical classification of psychopathology. A substantial empirical literature indicates that psychopathology is ge...

In early adolescence, levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness have been found to temporarily decrease, with levels of neuroticism increasing, indicating a dip in personality maturation. It is unknown whether these changes are related to the process of puberty, a major developmental milestone with numerous changes for children. Here, we first...

**Objective**: Hormones are often conceptualized as biological markers of individual differences and have been associated with a variety of behavioral indicators and characteristics, such as mating behavior or acquiring and maintaining dominance. However, before researchers create strong theoretical models for how hormones modulate individual and s...

The transition to adolescence is marked by enormous change in social, biological, and personality development. Although accumulating evidence has offered insight into the nature of higher-order personality trait development during this period, much less is known about the development of lower-order personality traits, or "facets." The current study...

Reports an error in "Criterion validity and relationships between alternative hierarchical dimensional models of general and specific psychopathology" by Tyler M. Moore, Antonia N. Kaczkurkin, E. Leighton Durham, Hee Jung Jeong, Malerie G. McDowell, Randolph M. Dupont, Brooks Applegate, Jennifer L. Tackett, Carlos Cardenas-Iniguez, Omid Kardan, Gab...

The transition to adolescence is marked by enormous change in social, biological, and personality development. Although accumulating evidence has offered insight into the nature of higher-order personality trait development during this period, much less is known about the development of lower-order personality traits, or “facets”. The current study...

La préinscription, qui comprend la documentation des hypothèses, des méthodes et des plans d’analyse des données avant la collecte ou l’analyse des données, a été louangée comme une solution potentielle à la crise de réplication dans le domaine de la science psychologique. Pourtant, de nombreux chercheurs ont été lents à adopter la préinscription,...

Psychopathology can be viewed as a hierarchy of correlated dimensions. Many studies have supported this conceptualization, but they have used alternative statistical models with differing interpretations. In bifactor models, every symptom loads on both the general factor and 1 specific factor (e.g., internalizing), which partitions the total explai...

Despite criticisms dating back to the 1950s, and minimal progress reducing mental health burdens, the dominant training model in clinical psychology has not changed. We argue that for clinical psychologists to reduce mental health burdens, they (collectively) need to devote a much larger proportion of their professional efforts to a broader range o...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a developing dimensional nosology which provides a joint framework for study of psychopathology and personality pathology. Dimensional structural models of psychopathology often include an overarching dimension of psychopathology (p factor) representing covariation among all forms of psychopat...

Leadership traits and behaviors are observed early in development, and although an improved understanding of youth leadership would provide benefits in many contexts (e.g., education, parenting, policy), most empirical work on the topic has been limited to adult populations. This review emphasizes that adolescence is a critical period for leadershi...

Psychopathology can be viewed as a hierarchy of correlated dimensions. Many studies have supported this conceptualization, but they have used alternative statistical models with differing interpretations. In bifactor models, every symptom loads on both the general factor and one specific factor (e.g., internalizing), which partitions the total expl...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is an empirical structural model of psychological symptoms formulated to improve the reliability and validity of clinical assessment. Neurobiology can inform assessments of early risk and intervention strategies, and the HiTOP model has greater potential to interface with neurobiological measures...

The study of personality development has seen significant advances in the last two decades. For many years, youth and adult individual differences were studied from separate theoretical standpoints. However, more recent research has indicated that teenagers display personality traits in many of the same ways as adults. These personality traits are...

The study of personality development has seen significant advances since the 1990s. For many years, youth and adult individual differences were studied from separate theoretical standpoints. However, more recent research has indicated that teenagers display personality traits in many of the same ways as adults. These personality traits are moderate...

Genetic discovery in psychiatry and clinical psychology is hindered by suboptimal phenotypic definitions. We argue that the hierarchical, dimensional, and data-driven classification system proposed by the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium provides a more effective approach to identifying genes that underlie mental disorder...

Low agreeableness features centrally in personality profiles of Cluster B personality disorder (PD) diagnoses, and it has been associated with relational aggression (RAgg; intentionally damaging others' social relationships). Researchers have hypothesized that RAgg may be a potential developmental precursor for Cluster B PDs. However, a dimensional...

Adolescents are more likely to take risks. Typically, research on adolescent risk-taking has focused on its negative health and societal consequences. However, some risk-taking behaviors might be positive, defined here as behavior that does not violate the rights of others and that might advance socially-valuable goals. Empirical work on positive r...

Research across age groups has consistently indicated that psychopathology has a general factor structure such that a broad latent dimension (or p factor) captures variance common to all mental disorders as well as specific internalizing and externalizing factors. This research has found that the p factor overlaps substantially with trait negative...

Although an emphasis on adequate sample size and statistical power has a long history in clinical psychological science (Cohen, 1992), increased attention to the replicability of scientific findings has renewed focus on the importance of statistical power (Bakker, van Dijk, & Wicherts, 2012). These recent efforts have not yet circled back to modern...

As psychological research comes under increasing fire for the crisis of replicability, attention has turned to methods and practices that facilitate (or hinder) a more replicable and veridical body of empirical evidence. These trends have focused on open science initiatives, including an emphasis on replication, transparency, and data sharing. Desp...

Lower levels of self-regulation have been implicated in multiple psychological disorders. Despite conceptual overlap (broadly reflecting self-regulatory functions), executive functions (EF) and effortful control (EC) are rarely jointly studied in relation to broadband psychopathology. The present study investigated associations of correlated factor...

Structural models of psychopathology provide dimensional alternatives to traditional categorical classification systems. Competing models, such as the bifactor and correlated factors models, are typically compared via statistical indices to assess how well each model fits the same data. However, simulation studies have found evidence for probifacto...

The categorical model of personality disorder classification in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed. [DSM–5]; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) is highly and fundamentally problematic. Proposed for DSM–5 and provided within Section III (for Emerging Measures and Models) was the...

As psychological research comes under increasing fire for the crisis of replicability, attention has turned to methods and practices that facilitate (or hinder) a more replicable and veridical body of empirical evidence. These trends have focused on “open science” initiatives, including an emphasis on replication, transparency, and data sharing. De...

Neuroticism is the personality trait most consistently and strongly connected to psychopathology. The majority of research on the relationship between traits and mental illness has focused on neuroticism’s connection with broad psychopathology spectra or discrete disorders. However, both personality and psychopathology are hierarchically-organized...

Neuroticism is the personality trait most consistently and strongly connected to psychopathology. The majority of research on the relationship between traits and mental illness has focused on neuroticism's connection with broad psychopathology spectra or discrete disorders. However, both personality and psychopathology are hierarchically-organized...

Students engage in learning activities with different achievement goal orientations. Some students pursue learning for learning sake (i.e. mastery goal orientation), some are driven by gaining favourable judgement of their performance (i.e. performance approach goal orientation), and others focus on avoiding negative judgement (i.e. performance avo...

Despite psychological scientists’ increasing interest in replicability, open science, research transparency, and the improvement of methods and practices, the clinical psychology community has been slow to engage. This has been shifting more recently, and with this review, we hope to facilitate this emerging dialogue. We begin by examining some pot...

Objective: Symptoms of psychopathology covary across diagnostic boundaries, and a family history of elevated symptoms for a single psychiatric disorder places an individual at heightened risk for a broad range of other psychiatric disorders. Both twin-based and genome-wide molecular methods indicate a strong genetic basis for the familial aggregat...

Recent work in personality development has indicated that the magnitude of individual differences in personality increases over child development. Do such patterns reflect the differentiation of individuals by genotype, an increasing influence of environmental factors, or some (interactive) combination of the two? Using a population-based sample of...

Research across age groups has consistently indicated that psychopathology has a general factor structure, such that there is a broad latent dimension (or p factor) capturing variance common to all mental disorders, as well as specific internalizing and externalizing factors. This research has found that the p factor overlaps substantially with tra...

The last decade has seen enormous advances in research transparency in psychology. One of these advances has been the creation of a common interface for openness across the sciences-the Open Science Framework (OSF). While social, personality, and cognitive psychologists have been at the fore in participating in open practices on the OSF, clinical p...

Recent research has illustrated the utility and accuracy of a thin-slice (TS) approach to child personality assessment, whereby unacquainted observers provide personality ratings of children after exposure to brief behavioral episodes. The current study sought to expand on this approach by exploring formal multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) models for c...

Personality researchers and clinical psychologists have long been interested in within-person variability in a given personality trait. Two critical methodological challenges that stymie current research on within-person variability are separating meaningful within-person variability from (a) true differences in trait level; and (b) careless respon...

For more than a century, research on psychopathology has focused on categorical diagnoses. Although this work has produced major discoveries, growing evidence points to the superiority of a dimensional approach to the science of mental illness. Here we outline one such dimensional system-the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)-that is...

Adolescent gambling is a serious and increasingly common problem. Studies in adults have found several within- and between-person associations between personality and gambling. We aim to extend these findings to a sample of adolescents selected for gambling behavior. Participants consisted of a racially diverse sample of adolescents between the age...

This chapter reviews the current state of research on defining and organizing normal-range personality traits in youth, the work defining and organizing maladaptive personality traits in youth, and evidence for the hierarchical organization of both normal-range and maladaptive early personality traits. Direct comparisons of work on younger populati...

Personality pathology—which is characterized by a pervasive, maladaptive, and inflexible pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—has long been defined as a set of categories that are distinct from each other a “normal” personality. Research over the past three decades has challenged that assumed separation and instead suggested that abnormal p...

The association between depression and neuroticism is complex; however, because of the difficulty in assessing neuroticism during mood episodes, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood. In this study, we sought to decompose neuroticism into finer grained elements that were uncorrelated with psychiatric symptoms and exam...

The categorical model of classification in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is sorely problematic. A proposed solution is emerging in the form of a quantitative nosology, an empirically based dimensional organization of psychopathology. More specifically, a team of investigators has proposed the Hierarc...

Shortcomings of approaches to classifying psychopathology based on expert consensus have given rise to contemporary efforts to classify psychopathology quantitatively. In this paper, we review progress in achieving a quantitative and empirical classification of psychopathology. A substantial empirical literature indicates that psychopathology is ge...

There has been a growing conversation about how best to ensure the replicability and credibility of published research in psychology in recent years. However, clinical psychologists have only recently entered this discussion (Leichsenring et al., 2017; Tackett et al., 2017). The pace ofreform in psychological science has been surprisingly rapid, an...

Despite increasing interest in issues of replicability, open science, research transparency, and improving methods and practices in psychological science, the clinical psychology community has been slow to engage. This has been slowly shifting, and the authors of the present article hope to facilitate this emerging dialogue. We begin by examining s...

The categorical model of classification in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; APA, 2013) is sorely problematic. A proposed solution is emerging in the form of a quantitative nosology, an empirically based dimensional organization of psychopathology. More specifically, a team of...

Recent research has illustrated the utility and accuracy of a thin-slice (TS) approach to child personality assessment, whereby unacquainted observers provide personality ratings of children after exposure to brief behavioral episodes. The current study sought to expand on this approach by exploring formal multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) models for c...

Parenting is often conceptualized in terms of its effects on offspring. However, children may also play an active role in influencing the parenting they receive. Simple correlations between parenting and child outcomes may be due to parent-to-child causation, child-to-parent causation, or some combination of the two. We use a multirater, geneticall...

Adolescent gambling is a serious and increasingly common problem. Studies in adults have found several within- and between-person associations between personality and gambling. We aim to extend these findings to a sample of adolescents selected for gambling behavior. Participants consisted of a racially diverse sample of adolescents between the age...

The categorical model of personality disorder classification in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed. [DSM–5]; American Psychiatric Association, 2013 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psyc...

Although testosterone is associated with aggression in the popular imagination, previous research on the links between testosterone and human aggression has been inconsistent. This inconsistency might be because testosterone’s effects on aggression depend on other moderators. In a large adolescent sample (N = 984, of whom 460 provided hair samples)...

The last decade has seen enormous advances in research transparency in psychology. One of these advances has been the creation of a common interface for openness across the sciences – the Open Science Framework (OSF). While social, personality, and cognitive psychologists have been at the fore in participating in open practices on the OSF, clinical...

Puberty is a complex biopsychosocial process that can affect an array of psychiatric and medical disorders emerging in adolescence. Although the pubertal process is driven by neuroendocrine changes, few quantitative genetic studies have directly measured puberty-relevant hormones. Hair samples can now be assayed for accumulation of hormones over se...

We discuss the authors' conceptualization of replication, in particular the false dichotomy of direct versus conceptual replication intrinsic to it, and suggest a broader one that better generalizes to other domains of psychological research. We also discuss their approach to the evaluation of replication results and suggest moving beyond their dic...

We discuss the authors' conceptualization of replication, in particular the false dichotomy of direct versus conceptual replication intrinsic to it, and suggest a broader one that better generalizes to other domains of psychological research. We also discuss their approach to the evaluation of replication results and suggest moving beyond their dic...

Differences in behavior, feelings, and thoughts have consequences for important life outcomes at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. These individual differences—commonly organized into the Big Five personality traits Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness-to-Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness—develop as early as chi...