Leveraging Personality Assessment to Better Understand Traumatic Stress and Discrimination in Daily Life

This research explores personality assessment using experience sampling methodology (ESM) as a framework for better understanding temporal dynamics associated with different conceptualizations of traumatic stress (i.e., post-traumatic stress symptoms, race/gender/age discrimination). College student participants (N = 278) completed a 14-day diary study, which included daily measures of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) and daily items capturing self-concept, interpersonal bothers, emotions, and defenses. Results indicated that traumatic stress-related scales were associated with aggregated mean levels and variability in AMPD dysfunction, aggregated mean levels of self, other, emotion, and defense variables, and moderated several within-person associations relevant for psychodynamic theory (e.g., self-other and emotion-defense patterns). We extend these findings into an ESM case study to demonstrate how to leverage sample-wide scores and patterns in person-specific data.