Walter G. Klopfer Award

The Walter G. Klopfer Award is bestowed annually by the Society for Personality Assessment for distinguished contribution to the literature in personality assessment. Eligible contributions focus on statistically based research projects. The Journal for Personality Assessment Editor asks all Consulting Editors to nominate outstanding articles from the previous year, each of which is then rated by the Editor and Associate Editors.

Meet the 2022 Walter G. Klopfer Award Winners for paper, Detecting Idiographic Personality Change


Dr. Emorie Beck
is an Assistant Professor of Personality and Individual
Differences at the University of California, Davis. She received her PhD (2020) and MA (2019) from Washington University in St. Louis and her BA (with honors; 2016) from Brown University. Dr. Beck’s research focuses on what personality is, which has consequences for how we measure personality, what those measures predict both short- and long-term, and how personality is thought to change. She studies how to understand the personality of an individual relative to only themself, relative to some others, and relative to all others. To do so, she uses a mix of methods, including experience sampling methods, passive sensing, survey data, panel data, cognitive tests, and more measured across time intervals from moments to years along with an array of statistical approaches, including time series analysis and forecasting, hierarchical modeling, machine learning, network psychometrics, structural equation modeling, and more.

Dr. Joushua Jackson’s current research focuses on identifying the antecedents – such as genetic and environmental factors – that are responsible for changes in personality, with a particular focus on educational experiences. His work also examines the ways in which different assessment methods can influence how personality development is estimated. For example, some of his currentstudies examine the overlap and discrepancies between different modalities of personality assessment (e.g., self-reports, observer-reports, behavioral and physiological measures) across the lifespan.