John Mayer wins award for distinguished contribution to the literature in personality assessment

Wednesday, May 12, 2021
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John Mayer, professor of psychology, has won the 2020 Martin Mayman Award from the Society for Personality Assessment for his article in the Journal of Personality Assessment, “An Integrated Approach to Personality Assessment Based on the Personality Systems Framework.” The award recognizes the best theoretical paper published in the Journal each year.

The article, which appeared in the Journal’s 2020 volume 102, issue 4, theorizes a new approach to personality assessment that can be used by clinical psychologists when assessing and describing a client’s personality. Psychologists commonly amalgamate information from a variety of interviews and test data to understand social contexts and personality traits, a time-consuming process that requires a range of skills. Mayer outlines how the Personality Systems Framework for Assessment, which he developed, would be an efficient tool for assessment by integrating information from these diverse sources, focusing on the parts of personality that the information describes.

Watch a 20-minute video presentation by John Mayer about his award-winning paper.

“I initially trained as a clinical psychologist and have always been fascinated by the issue of how to best describe a person,” says Mayer. “Although I left clinical training for further education in research psychology, the issue of how to depict personality was never far from my mind and this paper represents a return to those roots.”

Mayer’s research, broadly, focuses on people-centered intelligences and, in particular, emotional and personal intelligences, including their conceptualization and measurement. Mayer and his colleague, Peter Salovey — later joined by David Caruso — developed the concept of emotional intelligence, sought to improve its measurement and to understand what it predicts.