A study of the development of psychology of individual differences

Abstract

The changes that have occurred in psychology of individual differences in the last two decades are associated with 1) a significant expansion of the object of study (appearance of new traits that belong to different domains of effective functioning); 2) interdisciplinary-oriented studies of the nature of individual differences (behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology). Consequently, changes of the approaches to studies of development have taken place. Besides the traditional descriptions of developmental trajectories and age-to-age changes in variability, studies of interaction (trait-trait, trait-situation, genotype-environment) have been conducted. New quasi-experimental methods that allow to evaluate the role of genotype and environment in interpersonal variation and intergenerational transmission are proposed.