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William Fleeson

William Fleeson

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My work focuses on the nature of traits, morality, and borderline personality disorder. When studying the nature of traits, I examine actual behavior, behavior patterns, and behavior contingencies in order to identify the mechanisms constituting moral traits. When studying morality, I focus on honesty, the morally exceptional, and moral personality. When studying borderline personality disorder, I focus on patterns of symptom expression and mechanisms that underlie those patterns. My work on these lines of research has resulted in several publications in leading journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Personality, and Journal of Research in Personality, the 2002 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Theoretical Innovation Prize and the 2016 SPSP Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality Psychology, and several public and private grants.

Primary Interests:

  • Emotion, Mood, Affect
  • Ethics and Morality
  • Life Satisfaction, Well-Being
  • Motivation, Goal Setting
  • Person Perception
  • Personality, Individual Differences
  • Research Methods, Assessment
  • Self and Identity

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Journal Articles:

  • Conner, T. S., Tennen, H., Fleeson, W. & Barrett, L. F. (2009). Experience sampling methods: A modern idiographic approach to personality research. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3, 1-22.
  • Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E., & Fleeson, W. (2009). Introduction to personality and assessment at age 40: Reflections on the legacy of the person-situation debate and the future of person-situation integration. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 117-119.
  • Fleeson, W. (2007). Situation-based contingencies underlying trait-content manifestation in behavior. Journal of Personality, 75, 825-861.
  • Fleeson, W. (2001). Towards a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 1011-1027.
  • Fleeson, W., Furr, R. M., & Arnold, E. M. (2010). An agenda for symptom-based research. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 157.
  • Fleeson, W., & Gallagher, P. (2009). The implications of big-five standing for the distribution of trait manifestation in behavior: Fifteen experience-sampling studies and a meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 1097-1114.
  • Fleeson, W., Malanos, A., & Achille, N. (2002). An intra-individual process approach to the relationship between extraversion and positive affect: Is acting extraverted as “good” as being extraverted? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1409-1422.
  • Fleeson, W., & Noftle, E. (2008). The end of the person-situation debate: An emerging synthesis in the answer to the consistency question. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 1667-1684.
  • Fleeson, W., & Noftle, E. E. (2008). Where does personality have its influence? A supermatrix of consistency concepts. Journal of Personality, 76, 1355-1385.
  • Fleeson, W., & Wilt, J. (2010). The relevance of big-five trait content in behavior to subjective authenticity: Do high levels of within-person behavioral variability undermine or enable authenticity achievement. Journal of Personality, 78, 1353-1382.
  • Gallagher, P., Hoyle, R., & Fleeson, W. (2011). A self-regulatory mechanism for personality trait stability: Contra-trait effort. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 333-342.
  • Noftle, E. E., & Fleeson, W. (2010). Age differences in big five behavior averages and variabilities across the adult lifespan: Moving beyond retrospective, global summary accounts of personality. Psychology and Aging, 25, 95-107.
  • Wayne, J. H., Musisca, N., & Fleeson, W. (2004). Considering the role of personality in the work-family experience: Relationships of the big five to work-family conflict and facilitation. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 64, 108-130.

Other Publications:

  • Fleeson, W. (2007). Studying personality processes: Explaining change in between-persons longitudinal and within-person multilevel models. In R. W. Robins, R. C. Fraley, & R. F. Krueger (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in personality psychology (pp. 523-542). New York: Guilford.
  • Fleeson, W. (2004). The quality of American life at the end of the century. In O. G. Brim, C. D. Ryff, & R. C. Kessler (Eds.). How healthy are we?: A national study of well-being at midlife (pp. 252-272). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Fleeson, W., & Jolley, S. (2006). A proposed theory of the adult development of intraindividual variability in trait-manifesting behavior. In D. Mroczek & T. D. Little (Eds.), Handbook of personality development (pp. 41-59). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Courses Taught:

  • Borderline Personality Disorder
  • Contemporary Issues in Psychology
  • Introduction to Psychology
  • Personality and Daily Life
  • Personality Research
  • Research Methods
  • Seminar in Personality
  • Social Psychology

William Fleeson
Department of Psychology
P.O. Box 7778
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109
United States of America

  • Phone: (336) 758-4232

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