Stirling Behavioural Science Centre at the ICPS this March

The full program for the Inaugural Conference of Psychological Science is now online. There is a great set of speakers and workshops worth checking out. Several members of the Stirling Behavioural Science Centre, including me, are giving a symposium on Thursday March 12 on the topic of "Personality and socio-economic events: towards an individual specific economic science". Details below.

PERSONALITY AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC EVENTS: TOWARDS AN INDIVIDUAL SPECIFIC ECONOMIC SCIENCE 

Thursday, 12 March 2015, 13:30 - 14:50

Subject Areas: Behavioral Economics, Personality/Emotion Psychology, Developmental Psychology

Chair: Michael Daly Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, United Kingdom

Chair: Liam Delaney Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, United Kingdom

Socio-economic events such as changes in income, employment, or disability are known to affect human well-being and development. This symposium extends this work by asking: 1) do early life individual differences influence the socio-economic events people encounter throughout life, and 2) does personality shape how people react to such events.

Early life individual differences and socio-economic events across life
Michael Daly 
Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, United Kingdom 
Can childhood temperament and well-being influence socioeconomic events over life? This talk presents a series of studies using data from three nationally representative cohort studies to show that early individual differences in self-control and distress predict subsequent income changes, disability, and social mobility over periods of up to five decades.

Adolescent personality and youth unemployment during an economic recession
Mark Egan 
Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, United Kingdom 
Using data drawn from British and U.S. cohort we show that adolescent personality traits influence youth unemployment levels and condition how likely people are to become unemployed during two separate economic recessions. Quasi-experimental methods including sibling fixed effects and differences-in-differences models are employed and future applications of this approach discussed. 

Co-Author: Michael Daly Ph.D, Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling

Co-Author: Liam Delaney Ph.D, Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling

Personality and the well-being effects of socio-economic events
Alex Wood 
Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, United Kingdom 
Does personality determine how people react to socio-economic events? Across three studies using high frequency longitudinal datasets we outline how personality traits shape the well-being effects of income changes and the life satisfaction consequences of unemployment. We discuss how the inclusion of personality measures in longitudinal surveys can be used to enhance our understanding of hedonic adaptation. 

Socio-economic events and long run changes in individual difference traits
Christopher Boyce 
Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, United Kingdom 
If personality can influence resilience to socio-economic events it is important to know whether personality can change. We show that individual differences in personality and well-being change over time to the same degree as income, and that such change is linked to the experience of life events such as unemployment.

Co-Author: Alex Wood Ph.D, Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling

Co-Author: Liam Delaney Ph.D., Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling