An Interview with Psychologist Monica Reis-Bergan
Monica Reis-Bergan, Ph.D. is Professor and Assistant Department Head of Psychology at James Madison University. She specializes in the personality psychology.
Kendall Hewitt: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining today for this installment of The Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Kendall Hewitt, an interdisciplinary research intern at the Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice, specializing in anxiety disorders.
I'd like to welcome Dr. Monica Reis-Bergan today. Dr. Monica Reis-Bergan is a professor and assistant department head of psychology at James Madison University. She's an expert in the field of personality psychology, health psychology, and addictive behaviors, and has written several articles on the topic, including The Impact of Reminiscence on Socially Active Elderly Women's Reactions to Social Comparisons, and Self-esteem, Self-Serving Cognitions, and Health Risk Behavior. Before we get started, can you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and what made you interested in studying health and personality?
Monica Reis-Bergan: Hi. Well, first of all thank you for talking with me today. My interest in personality really comes from the opportunity to teach personality at James Madison University. In my research field in health and social psychology, personality is often a variable that's measured and sometimes just controlled for to see how different interventions might impact individuals. Over my time at JMU, I have really learned to love it as a teaching domain and also use it in my research, especially more recent research looking at health and social media.
Kendall Hewitt: Perfect. So, would you give us a little description of what personality psychology actually is and why it's interesting to researchers?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So, personality psychology is a relatively large and yet small area of psychology. So, it's large in that it impacts so many different disciplines in psychology, but it's small in that the researchers and theorists that focus on it and would focus only on it are very tiny. So, within personality, we talk about what is personality, and even looking at the definition of personality as something that different theoretical viewpoints don't always agree on as far as what it is. But in general, when we talk about personality, we're talking about some kind of enduring characteristic behavior pattern. As I like to tell my students, it's something that you know the person has and is often very difficult to change.
In terms of why is it interesting to researchers and really anyone, it's that for whatever situation you might have or even research paradigm, we recognize that people are coming with their own individual differences, and one of those individual differences is these elements of personality. So, trying to assess what that is, and then also, can you change it, and then the impact it has is what makes this such a great field.
Kendall Hewitt: Awesome, thank you so much. And I know we've talked a little bit about what personality psychology is, but in the way of categorizing personality, that's changed over time in my understanding. So, can you expand a little bit on that topic a little bit more and explain what system we use to categorize personality psychology today?
Monica Reis-Bergan: Well, I think that I would say that if you look at how do we categorize, and I think you're using that kind of making types or quality approach, it is changing and it will continue to change. As I tell my students, what they're studying today could be very different than what they're going to find in 2050. As we develop our assessment tools, we develop the ability to look at things in more and more detail and look at those differentiations. Each domain of personality also has a different way of thinking about it. So, if you look at a psychoanalytic perspective, you're often talking about types.
If we look at it from a trait perspective, the Big 5, HEXACO model, what are the models of the future in that sense? And then also, as culture changes, we start to develop different personality variables that we think are important. So, 30 years ago, we wouldn't have had a measure of FOMO or something of that nature. So, I think it's really important, especially when we look at personality, to have a contextual understanding of what do we have today, how do we think about it today, and that will be different tomorrow.
Kendall Hewitt: And then how are you able to use your knowledge of personality psychology in the real world? Do you often find yourself analyzing others around you and using your knowledge to understand them better?
Monica Reis-Bergan: That's a good one. In a sense that I think I'm always thinking about people, but I'm not sure that's because I'm a personality researcher that I would do that. I think we all naturally think about people and notice differences in people. I think that's why it's very interesting for people to try to create a type or a characterization of a particular type of person. My orientation is much more a social psychology with a personality perspective. So, I'm always looking at the social environment to see what factors I think might be related to why a person is displaying a certain behavior that they have. So, I'm not as true personality as some people might be in that sense.
Kendall Hewitt: And then what is one piece of your research that you've found the most interesting in your time when looking at personality? And is there any research questions or topics within research for personality that you want to explore more?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So last year, and we're in the process of working on this manuscript now, I worked with an honor's student that was very interested in TikTok, and to be honest, she thought TikTok was terrible for people, and that's a different conversation topic. But what it led to was really good conversations about what are some of the factors that might make... what are some people who might be impacted by TikTok more positively or negatively? And the personality variable that we chose to study was social comparison orientation, and this is the individual difference variable in terms of how much a person compares themselves with others in their environment, just more generally.
Specifically, the study that we did looked at TikTok engagement and young college women, and so how much they clicked on, they liked, those kinds of things to different kinds of TikTok material. And what we found was that individuals who engaged in TikTok, so liked, all of those things, in addition to having high social comparison orientation, meaning they were more likely to compare with others, had more of the negative body eating disorder types of symptoms associated with TikTok. So, while we couldn't say that TikTok was bad for everyone, we could say there does seem to be a relation between TikTok engagement and this personality variable on this outcome variable, so.
Kendall Hewitt: That's super interesting. Is there anything that you hope to research in the future within the personality field?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So, some current studies right now are students that are looking at super fan behavior. So, the idea that 20 years ago we would've maybe read a book about someone, but now, influencers, celebrities, we have almost daily information about them, especially if you're someone that's scouring multiple social media sites and other kinds of information. So, what types of people are more likely to develop these parasocial relationships with celebrities or influencers? And specifically, are there certain personality indicators that might make some people more likely to be super fans?
Kendall Hewitt: That's very interesting. I'd be very interested to read that research in the future.
Monica Reis-Bergan: We just finished data collection and we did find among our college students that about 50% identify as super fans or “stans”, I guess, is the word.
Kendall Hewitt: Got it.
Monica Reis-Bergan: So, we found that super interesting,
Kendall Hewitt: Very interesting. And then going into that, many children and adolescents these days are using BuzzFeed quizzes or magazine quizzes to find what their personality type is. How do you feel about that and how accurate would you say that those are?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So, as you know from my class, I really believe that if we're going to have a measure, we really need to look at the reliability and validity of that measure. And that's often a pretty painstaking process in psychology to make sure we have enough types of validity evidence to really have faith in our measures. So, a lot of the measures you're going to find on TikTok or BuzzFeed or wherever are not going to be particularly valid. However, I think that there's a lot of value in talking about personality and talking to your boss or your friends or your family, just about the enduring characteristics, the behaviors that you perceive for yourself to be stable, that is valuable self-knowledge.
We do know that our own perceptions of our own personality have what we might call causal force. Like, if I think I'm really friendly, I'm more likely to go and do things that I think friendly people do. And then if other people think I'm friendly, they're more likely to select me to be in clubs and organizations. So that self-knowledge piece, even if it's not the exact correct number, maybe you're really a 35.7 instead of a 23.2, but just the knowledge that you have about yourself I think is very valuable.
Kendall Hewitt: So, do you think it would be beneficial for people to actually take valid and reliable quizzes to know what their personality type is?
Monica Reis-Bergan: I mean, I do think that especially that's part of that metacognitive self-discovery if someone's so inclined. However, I honestly think people can live happily ever after without ever knowing their score and extraversion as well. So, I think it really comes down to a lot of psychology is when you have a problem, let's explore what the problem might be. In that case, I think personality is a great thing to look at what kind of enduring beliefs, cognitions, behaviors do people have, especially that don't seem to change based on situations, as a great way to see how can this be an issue, likewise people who are striving to be better, to also have that self-reflection. But I don't think it's necessary.
Kendall Hewitt: And then how popular and accessible do you think the study and research of personality psychology is compared to other psychology disciplines such as social psychology? I know you mentioned that earlier. How accessible do you think that personality psychology is to the general public?
Monica Reis-Bergan: I'm going to start or stage back from that question. I think personality research is almost everywhere because a lot of your clinical research, your I/O research, your health research, they're including personality measures in them, because as they try to look, they're going, and we're going to account for this individual difference. We're going to measure this difference. We think this difference might be important. So, it really transcends far beyond personality journals per se. So that's number one. But as far as the general population, I do think that the language we use in personality is so universal, and so it comes from language in part.
We talk about, where did our traits come from? They come from the differences in people that we notice and then we create a word for that difference. And then we have that word in our language. Allport used the dictionary to help determine what kind of traits people might have. And I think that happens in every culture, not just the English language. We want to notice and identify those people that we want to seek or we want to stay away from. So, I think it's there whether it's always in the language that researchers or theorists use, maybe not. But I also think FOMO is a great example. Fear of missing out came in part from culture as a variable that people notice this person has this fear of missing out. Okay, let's develop a scale to measure it.
Kendall Hewitt: Yes, that's really interesting. I feel like there's always new scales coming out. You mentioned that personality psychology is always going to consistently change. And I want to take a step back, could you explain your education and career path that brought you to where you are today? And if someone were to take a similar career path, what advice would you give them?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So, as I mentioned at the very beginning, I don't necessarily consider personality psychology as part of my professional identity. I'm really more of a health social psychologist. In the part of my college degree, obviously, I took a personality class. We obviously measured personality in almost all of our studies, but I didn't think of myself as a personality psychologist because I wasn't... At that time, I felt like because I wasn't trying to understand what personality was, instead I was using personality to ask other questions and being like, this might impact these people in a different way than it would impact people with a different personality per se. And that's really how I think about myself today as well. I appreciate personality, I love teaching it but to try to actually understand it from just the sole study of personality, I'm really more interested in how it's related to other kinds of behaviors like social media, health, substance use, those kinds of things.
As far as advice to other students, I think I tell all of my students to look and see what you're curious about and realize that those curiosities can change. And personality finds itself in a lot of different domains, whether it's cognitive, it can be I/O, it can be all of these different areas that students might be curious about, and then think, oh, what personality individual difference might be important to study? So, personality is really nice to teach because I feel like students have a lot of different opportunities of which to interact with it and may pursue it more depending on the opportunities they have.
Kendall Hewitt: And once you finished your bachelor's degree, did you go straight into a master's and then straight into a PhD, or how did that fit into your life?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So yes. So, I went directly from my undergraduate degree into a PhD program of which I got my master's degree as part of that, and all of them at the same school.
Kendall Hewitt: Oh, wow. What was that like for you? Did you enjoy doing the master's along the way programs and finishing your PhD that way?
Monica Reis-Bergan: Yeah. So, I was a little bit strange in that I was an elementary education major, who then had a double major in psychology that started as a minor, and I actually was planning to teach and I also happened to be doing research, a paid research assistant, and it just came about that I was so curious. It was in the early '90s and some of the questions about HIV/AIDS datasets that we were working with and just questions about people's health cognitions was very curious for me. And so, I just started doing the lab work and then I happen to have an extra class, so I took an advanced statistics class and then they were like, oh, have you considered graduate school? I'm a first-generation college student, I really hadn't. And then it was like, well, apply to graduate school. And so, I didn't really have the knowledge, skills, or experience to really scope out schools and think about it in that way. I was very fortunate that I had people that saw in me that this might be a good career path.
Kendall Hewitt: Very nice. And then once you graduated from your PhD program, did you go right into teaching psychology at a university and just begin research through that?
Monica Reis-Bergan: So obviously, you do a lot of research in graduate school. And in my case, I also did quite a bit of teaching. So, my first personality class, I actually taught at community college while I was working on my PhD and teaching at the university. So that was a lot to do, but I loved teaching personality. It's such a fun topic to teach and students are so excited to learn about it. So, a little different experience than my teaching statistics that they're not always so thrilled about. So definitely, I was looking for an academic home where I would have the opportunity to teach, as well as the opportunity to do research and work with students in that way. So actually, when I got here, I really hoped I would teach social psychology because I love social psychology. But I've been here for 23 years, and that class has always been filled by another faculty member, and so I just keep teaching personality very happily and health psych and research methods and statistics. I guess my position at James Madison is what cemented and really made me appreciate even more personality.
Kendall Hewitt: That's very interesting. And you've mentioned, so as a health and personality expert, are there any tips that you would give college students or research excerpts that you believe would be beneficial for everyone to know?
Monica Reis-Bergan: I don't know that I have a really great answer to that, but I think one of the things from teaching personality, and I'm just going to talk a little bit about my final project in my personality class, is that I have students who are already so interested in people, do a psychobiography project, and in that psychobiography project, they study someone in depth and then they think about how the different personality theories, which are pretty different from one another- you have a psychoanalytic theory, you have a phenomenological theory, you have trait theory, you have social cognitive theory- really fundamental different ways of thinking about what personality is and how it impacts people, to take those different lenses and look at one person. And when we look at the reflections from that assignment, what I find is that a lot of students start to realize that you have this person and this behavior, and it can really be interpreted in a multitude of different ways.
And I think that, that appreciation I think is what's important. So, when you see someone and they're behaving in a certain way, one of the questions might be why, and that why really depends on the view or the lens or the perspective that you're looking at. And the next steps really depend on the perspective you're looking at. So, I think it's important for students and people to be open-minded in that process of, there's not just one answer, they don't have a personality type, they're not an X person, for example, but let's look at it from all these different perspectives.
Kendall Hewitt: Very interesting. And then lastly, is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today?
Monica Reis-Bergan: Personality just is this great phenomenon. I always tell students, it's within the person. You can't go to the store and buy a new one. It's not like a backpack on the first day of school. And so, I think we will continue to be perplexed by what it is, to see how it changes. The more we learn about biopsychology, the more we learn and study how... biological functioning, the connection between mind and body, we might even learn more about personality from that. And then at the same time, our cultural world is changing, looking at how COVID could change locus of control and those kinds of things. So, I think it's just a really great and exciting place to study and to think about.
Kendall Hewitt: Well, thank you so much for joining us today and giving all your insight. I hope our listeners enjoy!
Monica Reis-Bergan: All righty. Thank you.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.