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TU Darmstadt | Psychologische Diagnostik, Differentielle Psychologie und MethodenThe individuality of persons ("personality") plays a major role and how differences in thinking, feeling and experiencing lead to behaviours that are similar or different depending on the situation. For example, personality can be described as the interplay of cognitive abilities and non-cognitive traits in conjunction with self-regulation (but also situational influences). The open research questions - as well as the applied psychodiagnostic contexts - require a broad spectrum of methods for measuring personality and persons in their situations and social relations, in order to be able to control sources of error of the individual measurement approaches.
Thanks to ever-improving (measurement) methods, modern personality psychology and the psychology of interindividual differences are increasingly penetrating areas which, from a scientific point of view, have tended to be difficult to capture due to the passage of time, or which have temporarily received relatively little attention due to historical fashions, e.g. unconscious mental content that determines human behaviour; reaction styles in dealing with interviewer questions or the control of response styles in classic, quantitatively evaluated self-report formats such as questionnaires etc. Psychological diagnosis often requires good control of measurement error in the measurement of latent traits. At the same time, the old call for observation of the behaviour of interest instead of supposedly causally-effective psychological constructs is receiving more attention in parallel, e.g. by using objective indicators based on spatiotemporally high-resolution environmental/contextual information (GPS tracking) and using sensors in everyday life (such as fitness/sleep watches) or also by leaving digital traces of behaviour on the web (Facebook, blogs), which are often regarded as "Big Data" but unfortunately are collected unsystematically and without control. The effects of these developments on the psychology's understanding of its own psychological constructs and their theoretical and practical relevance, as well as the effects when taking numerous indicators into account with regard to - despite an atheoretical approach - often nevertheless impressively powerful diagnostics, cannot be foreseen at the moment. 