René Mõttus

University of Edinburgh | UoE · Department of Psychology

While personality trait assessments are widely used in candidate selection, coaching, and occupational counseling, little published research has systematically compared occupations in personality traits. Using a comprehensive personality assessment, we mapped 263 occupations in self-reported Big Five domains and various personality nuances in a sam...

Large biobanks have set a new standard for research and innovation in human genomics and implementation of personalised medicine. The Estonian Biobank was founded a quarter of a century ago, and its biological specimens, clinical, health, omics, and lifestyle data have been included in over 800 publications to date. What makes the biobank unique in...

While personality is generally considered stable, it may be influenced by common mental disorders (CMDs). In a large population sample of 55,056 individuals, we investigated the associations of CMDs, recorded in a national registry over 17 years, with self- and informant-rated Big Five personality traits. Besides comparing diagnosed and undiagnosed...

Regional differences in Big Five personality domains have been observed in several countries at different levels of geographical granularity, often correlating with the regions’ political, eco-nomic, social and health (PESH) indicators. We explored whether such observations are gener-alizable to a small and sparsely populated country, Estonia, usin...

Most Five-Factor Model (FFM) questionnaire items contain unique variance that is partly heritable, stable, and consensually observable, demonstrates consistent associations with age and sex, and predicts life outcomes beyond higher order factors. Extending these findings to the HEXACO model, we meta-analyzed single-item cross-rater agreement, herit...

Personality and psychopathology share a hierarchical dimensional structure, developmental trajectories and correlations with varied outcomes. However, quantifying the extent and details of their direct empirical overlap has been hindered by over-reliance on self-reports and broad construct domains. Using multi-method data, we estimated the Big Five...

Correlations estimated in single-source data are poorly interpretable and mask item-level overlaps between scales. We describe how correlations can be adjusted for errors and biases using test-retest and multi-rater data and compare adjusted correlations among individual items with their human-rated semantic similarity (SS). Adjusted correlations w...

Personality trait similarity among ordinary relatives is surprisingly low, with parent-offspring and sibling-sibling correlations usually r ≤ .15. We explain why these correlations are doubly distorted in single-method studies and argue that this issue can only be addressed with multi-method designs. In a sample of parent-offspring and sibling-sibl...

Despite numerous meta-analyses, the true extent to which life satisfaction reflects personality traits has remained unclear due to overreliance on a single method to assess both and insufficient attention to construct overlaps. Using data from three samples tested in different languages (Estonian, N = 20,886; Russian, N = 768; English, N = 600), we...

As COVID-19 vaccines’ accessibility has grown, so has the role of personal choice in vaccination, and not everybody is willing to vaccinate. Exploring personality traits’ associations with vaccination could highlight some person-level drivers of, and barriers to, vaccination. We used self- and informant-ratings of the Five-Factor Model domains and...

We conducted the largest study to date to examine the true associations between loneliness and personality traits combining self and informant reports. Using a method described by Mõttus and colleagues (2023) we obtained noise- and bias-free ‘true’ correlations (rtrues), which were used to produce regression model estimates of the true independent...

Like all behaviour, personality traits are substantially heritable, but their genetic background is poorly understood. Investigating traits’ genetic background could help explain disparities in health and other life outcomes that the traits likely contribute to. We describe two cohorts of the Estonian Biobank for whom, besides self- and informant-r...

Most of the literature has examined envy using predominantly self-report measures. In the current study, we combined self- and informant-reports to estimate personality domains’ (Big Five, Dark Dyad) ‘true’ correlations (rtrues) with benign and malicious envy using three samples tested in different languages (Estonian, N = 20,925; Russian, N = 767;...

Personality traits consistently relate to and allow predicting body mass index (BMI), but these associations may not be adequately captured with existing inventories’ domains or facets. Here, we aimed to test the limits of how accurately BMI can be predicted from and described with personality traits. We used three large datasets (combined N ≈ 100,...

Gender differences in personality are typically summarised using broad personality domains. To acknowledge meaningful variation on lower levels of the personality hierarchy, we studied gender differences in facets and single-item nuances. We used machine learning methods to predict gender from aggregate traits of domains and facets, and unaggregate...

Using a comprehensive personality assessment, we mapped 263 occupations in the self-reported Big Five domains and various personality nuances in a sample of 68,540 individuals, cross-validating the findings in informant-ratings of 19,989 individuals. Controlling for age and gender, occupations accounted for 2% to 7% of the variance in Big Five doma...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.920580.].

Research in (mostly) Western samples has demonstrated that associations between personality traits and life outcomes are replicable and often driven by facets or nuances. Using three culturally different samples (English-speaking, N = 1,257; Russian-Speaking, N = 1,616; and Mandarin-speaking, N = 1,234) we investigated within and cross-sample predi...

The present study aimed to explore whether the tendency to compare one's abilities and opinions to those of others (social comparison orientation) could longitudinally mediate the association between narcissism and problematic SNS use. A total of 1,196 college students were assessed at three time points over 22 months. The results showed that narci...

Objective: Various personality traits have longitudinal relations with body mass index (BMI), a measure of body weight and a risk factor for numerous health concerns. We tested these associations' compatibility with causality in either direction. Method: Using three waves of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (N = 12,235, Mage = 53.33 at baseline)...

Despite numerous meta-analyses, the true extent to which life satisfaction reflects personality traits has remained unclear due to over-reliance on a single method to assess both and insufficient attention to construct overlaps. Using data from three samples tested in different languages (Estonian, N = 20,886; Russian, N = 768; English, N = 600), w...

Objective: Personality traits change in both mean levels and variance across the life span but the mechanisms underlying these developmental trends remain unclear. Social Investment Principle (SIP) suggests that social expectations drive personality changes in adulthood. Accordingly, we tested whether differences between personality traits in soci...

Trisecting and cross-tabulating (TACT) two related variables shows what their correlation means for individual people. For example, knowing an individual's conscientiousness (lowest, medium or highest third among other people) improves the accuracy of predicting their health by 1.4, their child's conscientiousness by 4.2, and their job performance...

Various personality domains and facets correlate with body mass index (BMI), but recent studies suggest that using narrower personality traits—nuances—could contribute to a more detailed understanding of personality–body weight associations. We used three large datasets with different inventories to describe nuances’ correlations with BMI and explo...

Various personality traits have longitudinal relations with body mass index (BMI), a measure of body weight and a risk factor for numerous health concerns, but causality in and direction of these associations is unclear. Using three waves of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (N = 12,235, mean age = 53.33 at baseline), we tested bidirectional longitu...

Mental health disorders share substantial variance, prompting researchers to develop structural models that can capture both generalised psychopathology risk and disorder/symptom‐specific variation. This study investigated the associations of the general and specific psychopathology factors with multiple personality trait hierarchy levels: broad do...

Background This study aimed to examine the relationship between the timing of physical activity and within-individual differences in depressive symptoms, positive affect, and negative affect in individuals with different baseline levels of depressive symptoms. Methods Experience sampling methodology (ESM) was used to measure real-time depressive s...

Most Five-Factor Model questionnaire items contain unique variance that 1) is heritable, stable, and observable; 2) demonstrates consistent associations with age and sex, and 3) is predictive of life outcomes over and above higher-order factors. This is consistent with items indexing a unique level of the personality trait hierarchy—nuances. Extend...

Objective: Personality traits change from childhood through late-adolescence, however the effects of social expectations and self-regulatory efforts remain unknown. This study aims to explore mechanisms underlying personality development by assessing mean levels personality traits from childhood to late-adolescence. Method: We used Common-Langua...

Little research has examined age differences by using more than one source of information. We compared age differences in Five-Factor Model (FFM) facets and nuances in self-reports and ratings by knowledgeable informants using samples from three countries (Estonia, Germany, and the Czech Republic; N=5,624). We hypothesized that age differences woul...

Despite the widespread use of the Dirty Dozen (DD) and Short Dark Triad (SD3) as inventories for antagonist personality constructs, appropriately powered studies on their test-retest reliability (rtt) are lacking. We report the 12-day rtt-s of the DD and SD3 scales. Leveraging the test-retest data, we also calculated their convergent and discrimina...

Here is an overview of psychological measures that have been used at Estonian biobankThere have been data collection efforts:1) NEO-PI-3 in 2008-20152) 100 NP in 2021-22 (see file below). See https://osf.io/tcfgz/ for more information on the personality test3) Cognitive tests in 2022-23 . These tests can be seen here: https://gitlab.ut.ee/uku.vaini...

Despite the widespread use of the HEXACO model as a descriptive taxonomy of personality traits, there remains limited information on the test-retest reliability of its commonly-used inventories. Studies typically report internal consistency estimates, such as alpha or omega, but there are good reasons to believe that these do not accurately assess...

Various personality traits are known to correlate with body mass index (BMI). However, this index of adiposity conflates fat mass with lean body mass and may therefore lead to biased estimates of correlations. Yet, rarely have studies looked beyond BMI to understand how adiposity and other physiological characteristics relate to these psychological...

The present study conducted a meta-analysis to examine the relation between grit and subjective well-being (SWB). The association between grit (i.e., overall grit, perseverance of effort, and consistency of interest) and SWB (i.e., positive affect, negative affect, happiness, depression, life satisfaction, job satisfaction, and school satisfaction)...

Many personality traits correlate with BMI, but the existence and direction of causal links between them are unclear. If personality influences BMI, knowing this causal direction could inform weight management strategies. Knowing that BMI instead influences personality would contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms of personality deve...

To understand what was driving individual differences in voting intentions in a large German sample, we investigated the predictability of voting intentions from the Big Five personality domains, facets, and nuances, thereby tackling shortcomings of previous studies. Using random forest analyses in a dataset of N = 4,286 individuals (46.01% men), s...

Despite the widespread use and popularity of the Dirty Dozen (DD) and Short Dark Triad (SD3) as measurements of “dark” personalities, there appears to be a lack of appropriately powered studies on the test-retest reliability (rtt) of the two brief measurements. We report 12-day test-retest of the DD and SD3 at the level of domains and items. Levera...

Applying correlations that usefully describe trends in the population to individuals can often lead to incorrect conclusions. In individuals, high (as opposed to medium or low) values of one variable typically do not go with high values of another variable, even if these variables have a sizeable correlation at the population level. Even more unpre...

Objective: Personality traits change in both mean levels and variance across the life span but the mechanisms underlying these developmental trends remain unclear. Social investment theory is one of the leading theories trying to explain personality maturation, suggesting that social role expectations drive personality changes in adulthood. However...

Associations between personality traits and life outcomes are usually studied using the Big Five domains and, occasionally, their facets. But recent research suggests these associations may be driven by the items (reflecting nuances) chosen to measure these traits. Using a large dataset (N = 6,126), we examined associations with 53 self-reported ou...

Associations between personality traits and life outcomes are usually studied using the Big Five domains and, occasionally, their facets. But recent research suggests these associations may be driven by the items (reflecting nuances) chosen to measure these traits. Using a large dataset (N = 6,126), we examined associations with 53 self‐reported ou...

Background: Mental health disorders share a substantial amount of variance, reflecting a generalised vulnerability to any and all mental health problems. Studies on personality-psychopathology associations have previously been mainly focused at the domain-level of the personality hierarchy even though research has indicated that lower level persona...

This replication and extension of Mõttus and Rozgonjuk (2019) compared the extents of age-related information captured by different levels of the personality trait hierarchy (domains, facets and nuances, indexed by individual items) in several samples (N = 51,524) of different age ranges and cultural backgrounds, and tested with different instrumen...

Rationale: Personality traits change in both mean levels and variance from childhood through mid-adolescence, but the mechanisms underlying these developmental trends remain unknown. We tested the possible roles of social pressure and self-regulation. Methods: The Common-Language California Child Q-Set was used to measure youths’ mean-level persona...

Many health problems that occur later in life have their origins in behaviours and associated lifestyle habits established earlier in life. We aimed to gain new insights into the structure of health and well-being of late adolescents and emerging adults through examining a multi-dimensional network that quantitatively estimates the personality simi...

Various personality traits are known to correlate with body mass index (BMI). However, rarely have studies looked beyond BMI to understand how adiposity and other metabolic characteristics relate to psychological traits. We explored personality traits’ phenotypic and genetic associations with basal metabolic rate (BMR) and an improved index of adip...

This replication and extension of Mõttus and Rozgonjuk (2019) compared the extents of age-related information captured by different levels of the personality trait hierarchy (domains, facets and nuances, indexed by individual items) in several samples (N = 51,524) of different age ranges and cultural backgrounds, and tested with different instrumen...

The HEXACO model of personality is currently one of the most widely-used in its field. While numerous studies report HEXACO facet and domain alpha reliabilities (), few have examined its test-retest reliability (rTT)—a fundamental property of psychological tests. We thus report 12-day rTT of the 100-item HEXACO-PI-R domains, facets, and items and c...

Although the Dark Triad (DT) of personality has been studied for almost two decades, research regarding its structure is lacking, which is pertinent to understanding personality-outcome associations. This study examined the structure of the DT domains, both independently and as a cluster. Initial results were replicated with a validation sample. Pa...

Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking work on information theory (Shannon, 1948a) was published just as the field of psychological testing was reaching its potential. Many of the fundamental underpinnings of psychological testing theory were proposed in this same era and the application of these ideas over the ensuing decades has greatly informed our und...

Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking work on information theory (Shannon, 1948a) was published just as the field of psychological testing was reaching its potential. Many of the fundamental underpinnings of the psychological testing theory were proposed in this same era, and the application of these ideas over the ensuing decades has greatly informed ou...

Age differences in personality traits can inform us on the magnitude and qualities of personality development and describing them accurately is therefore of utmost importance. Little research yet has examined age differences by combining more than one source of information, despite many psychologists knowing that any one assessment method is prone...

Voting decisions of individual voters have the power to influence political developments by enabling certain parties and politicians to govern their country. Therefore, it is of tremendous importance to understand what is driving individual differences in voting intentions and decisions. This study investigated the predictability of voting intentio...

In pursuit of a more systematic and comprehensive framework for personality assessment, we introduce procedures for assessing personality traits at the lowest level: nuances. We argue that constructing a personality taxonomy from the bottom up addresses some of the limitations of extant top-down assessment frameworks (e.g., the Big Five), including...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science—description, prediction and explanation—and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of...

Objective A prerequisite of any psychological instrument used to compare individuals from different groups is measurement invariance (MI). It indicates that the test measures the same psychological constructs regardless of the particular grouping variable of the test-taker. Our purpose was to evaluate the MI across sex, age groups and educational l...

Climate change mandates us to understand why individuals do (not) behave pro‐environmentally and personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Past research has mostly focused on how broad domain‐level personality traits were associated with pro‐environmental attitudes and behaviors. In two datasets (N = 501 and 287), we examined whether per...

Although the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change continues to grow, public discourse still reflects a high level of scepticism and political polarisation towards anthropogenic climate change. In this study (N = 499) we attempted to replicate and expand upon an earlier finding that environmental terminology (“climate change” versus “...

Climate change mandates us to understand why individual’s (do not) act environmentally and personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Research has mostly focused on broad do-main-level associations between personality traits and pro-environmental behaviors and attitudes. In two datasets (N = 501 and 287), we examined whether facets provid...

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to humanity and requires immediate action. Schuldt, Konrath, and Schwarz (2011) suggested that beliefs in environmental phenomena can be influenced by the terminology used to describe it: changing question wording from global warming to climate change resulted in a 6.3 percentage point increase in belie...

Importance: Many personality traits robustly correlate with BMI, but the existence and direction of causality are unclear. As personality traits also correlate with various other mental and physical health outcomes, understanding causality in these intersections is widely useful; understanding causality between BMI and personality specifically coul...

We investigated the distinction between traits (also labelled basic tendencies or dispositions) and (characteristic) adaptations, two related features of the personality system postulated to influence how personality manifests throughout the lifespan. Traits are alleged to be universal, causal, and enduring entities that exist across cultures and t...

With climate change and its consequences believed to be among the most vital challenges for humanity and the Earth’s ecosystem, it is important to understand why individuals (do not) adopt pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Because no recent work has systematically combined the accumulati...

Obesity is a widespread health condition¹, likely to be driven by the increased availability of inexpensive high-calorie food². People vary greatly in their behavioural response to food. Such variation is likely to be driven by behavioural styles3,4, as behaviour accounts for overall food intake⁵. A prominent hypothesis is that people with obesity...

In pursuit of a more systematic and comprehensive framework for personality assessment, we introduce procedures for assessing personality traits at the lowest level: nuances. We argue that constructing a personality taxonomy from the bottom up addresses some of the limitations of extant top-down assessment frameworks (e.g., the Big Five), including...

We examined the extent to which the Big Five domains, 30 facets, and nuances (uniquely represented by individual questionnaire items) capture age differences in personality, expecting domains to contain the least and nuances the most age-related information. We used an Internet sample (N = 24,000), evenly distributed between ages of 18 and 50 years...

Accepted for publication in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (24/10/2019). We examined the extent to which the Big Five domains, 30 facets and nuances (uniquely represented by individual questionnaire items) capture age differences in personality, expecting domains to contain the least and nuances the most age-related information. We u...

Environment-friendly behaviors may be desirable in helping to solve worldwide ecological issues. This has sparked interest in the associations of such behaviors with established psychological constructs such as the Five-Factor Model personality traits. Of these, Openness has been most consistently linked with proenvironmental behavior; yet, the ext...

Personality researchers often supplement or substitute self-reports with ratings from knowledgeable informants, at least implicitly assuming that the same constructs are measured regardless of the source of ratings. However, measurement invariance (MI) of personality constructs across these rating types has rarely been empirically tested. Here, thi...

Among the main topics of individual differences research is the associations of personality traits with life outcomes. Relying on recent advances of personality conceptualizations and drawing parallels with genetics, we propose that representing these associations with individual questionnaire items (markers of personality “nuances”) can provide in...

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...

Classical psychometrics held that scores on a personality measure were determined by the trait assessed and random measurement error. A new view proposes a much richer and more complex model, including trait variance at multiple levels of a hierarchy of traits and systematic biases shaped by the implicit personality theory of the respondent. The mo...

The purpose of this study was to explore how individual and environmental predictors of intergenerational social mobility intersect in rarely studied post‐communist developing society of Estonia. We used a contemporary cross‐sectional dataset (n = 759) to assess the influence of cognitive ability and parental socioeconomic status to the participant...

In two studies, we examined the genetic and environmental sources of the unfolding of personality trait differences from childhood to emerging adulthood. Using self-reports from over 3,000 representative German twin pairs of three birth cohorts, we could replicate previous findings on the primary role of genetic sources accounting for the unfolding...

Obesity, a broad health marker, has inconsistent associations with broad personality domains, possibly because the links pertain to only some facets of these domains. Collating published and unpublished studies (N = 15,311), we meta-analysed the associations between body mass index (BMI) and 30 Five-Factor Model facets. BMI had a positive associati...