{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030462579917262127, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01241068070703272, 'mean_word_length': 5.600496277915632, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 1, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Personality, implicit self‐concept and automaticity

The original idea of this special issue was to include a range of contributions on the indirect assessment of personality and automaticity. During the last decades, implicit social cognition research has caused a renaissance of interest in processes that operate outside of awareness (e.g. Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Recent developments within cognitive psychology and social cognition have also provided an opportunity to develop new assessment methods that can be applied also to personality research (e.g. Asendorpf, Banse, & Mücke, 2002). The field of personality research traditionally has been primarily relying on self-report methods that, when well conceived, have a number of advantages, including high face-validity, content validity, reliability and predictive validity. However, they often suffer from limitations such as introspective accuracy, social desirability and the limited range of behaviours they can predict. Response time tasks have been developed to assess individual differences in implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem and many aspects of the self-concept of personality including the Big Five, shyness, anxiety and aggressiveness. Methods like the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) have sparked a lot of interest, but also vivid controversy about their meaning and legitimate use. Implicit measures or indirect measurement paradigms are not expected to offer a panacea solution to all these problems, but may overcome some of them and provide also new theoretical insights in the mechanisms underlying personality and behaviour. In fact, besides the focus on the assessment methodology, the substantial body of research on automaticity has created a gap between traditional personality research and the types of questions that currently dominate the social cognitive field. How individual differences affect the processes that underlie automatic behaviour is an area which is under-researched, given that contributions within personality research that deal with these issues are still relatively rare. This special issue was also conceived as an opportunity to reduce the gap between the thriving research on automaticity and implicit constructs within social cognition research and personality/individual differences. The present EJP special issue includes articles featuring applications of indirect methods (IAT, EAST, GNAT, TAT) to both traditional personality themes (e.g. Big Five, European Journal of Personality Eur. J. Pers. 21: 257–261 (2007) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.637