Personality and Social Psychology

Some standard personality questionnaires (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - 2, Baron Emotional Quotient Inventory, Millon Clinical Multiaxional Inventory) have been translated into Dutch and research is done in order to construct local norms and to validate the different questionnaires in different clinical settings and with different groups of patients. At the same time new scales are constructed to measure personality disorders (DSM-IV taxonomy) and we are in search of 'types' of different forms of psychopathology (alcoholics, paedophilia, recidivists, etc.). In addition, we are also exploring how people make causal and dispositional attributions. In one avenue of research, we investigate connectionist models of the cognitive process underlying attributions, and related phenomena such as illusory correlation and cognitive dissonance. We are currently moving from a feedforward network approach to a (modified) recurrent network approach. Another avenue of research is the spontaneity of attributions. Overview of main research topics of PESP: 1. Norms and validation of personality or psychopathology questionnaires; 2. Structure of personality disorders; 3. Attribution Theory/Connectionist models.