The European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP) expert meeting on „Personality and Culture“ will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland on September 29 - October 1, 2010. The meeting is organized by Jérôme Rossier, Koorosh Massoudi (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Anu Realo and Jüri Allik (University of Tartu, Estonia) in collaboration with the EAPP.

In recent years, there have been signs of a renewed interest in the relationship between personality and culture. Systematic, quantitative, and large-scale studies on both personality and culture have opened a new way to link the two constructs. Strong claims have recently been made about the universality of personality traits: the structure of personality traits, particularly the five-factor model of personality, has emerged quite consistently across cultures. Relying on self- and peer-reports to assess individual differences in personality has become a widely used approach to investigating cross-cultural differences. Yet, there are still both theoretical and methodological challenges that need to be addressed and improvements that should be considered for future analyses on comparing personality traits across cultures. The most challenging is the problem of validity of the country mean scores in different personality estimates and their relation to socio-economic and cultural country-level indicators.

The EAPP expert meeting on “Personality and Culture” will bring together about 25 researchers (from 14 different countries in five different continents) in the field of personality psychology who are interested in cultural differences along with experts from other disciplines such as cross-cultural and developmental psychology, and quantitative social sciences. The aim of the meeting is to discuss the state-of-art and the future research directions in the area of personality and culture studies in the context of different models of culture and various multi-level research strategies.