Response to the critiques (and encouragements) on our critique of motivation constructs

The target article argued that motivation constructs are treated as black boxes and called for work that specifies the mental computational processes underlying motivated behavior. In response to critical commentaries, we clarify our philosophical standpoint, elaborate on the meaning of mental computational processes and why past work was not sufficient, and discuss the opportunities to expand the scope of the framework.

Modeling Dynamic Personality Theories in a Continuous-time Framework:An Illustration

Personality psychology has traditionally focused on stable between-person differences. Yet, recent theoretical developments and empirical insights have led to a new conceptualization of personality as a dynamic system (e.g., Cybernetic Big Five Theory). Such dynamic systems comprise several components that need to be conceptually distinguished and mapped to a statistical model for estimation. In the current work, we illustrate how common components from these new dynamic personality theories may be implemented in a continuous-time modeling framework. As an empirical example, we reanalyze experience sampling data from Sherman et al. (2015) with N = 180 persons (with on average T = 40 [SD = 8] measurement occasions) to investigate four different effects between momentary happiness, momentary extraverted behavior, and the perception of a situation as social: (1) between-person effects, (2) contemporaneous effects, (3) autoregressive effects, and (4) cross-lagged effects. We highlight that these four effects must not necessarily point in the same direction, which is in line with assumptions from dynamic personality theories.