Research interests of Lisa Di Blas and her collaborators are mainly focused on personality development and on personality assessment from between-people and within-person approaches.

1) Personality development in elementary-school years
More and more attention has been focused on how personality develops from childhood to old age. Different quantitative indices coherently suggest that personality traits tend to be rather stable across years, though there is significant room for change as well at all ages. Longitudinal designs have also revealed how person and environment actively work and interact to favor stability or change of personality. As to childhood, most research is based on parents’ reports on their children personality, whereas less in known on personality development when children’s self- and peer view are analysed.
Our research is aimed at investigating how children’s personality develops across elementary school years. In our longitudinal studies, we adopt a multi-rater perspective and analyze how children’s self-views change in function of the perceptions that peers and adults have of the children. Specifically, we examine to what extent others’ perceptions represent antecedents of changes in children’s self-views and to what extent change levels in personality ratings of different informants on the target child are associated. Our findings reveal that children’s ratings of their characteristics are rather stable in younger as well as older children; they also show that children are sensitive to others’ perceptions and their changes in self-views are correlated to peers’ as well as adults ratings, at different extents across different domains of their personality. Our research contributes towards revealing which personality domains are more susceptible to change and possible interpersonal mechanisms underlying the development of children’s self-perceptions.

2) Personality development in adolescence and eating disorders
Adolescence represents an age of important changes and leads to adulthood. In these years, personality traits development has been largely investigated by adopting personality domains emerged in adulthood. Bottom-up studies on self-concept in adolescence have however demonstrated coherently that specific domains characterize this age; moreover, adolescents are concerned with peculiar developmental tasks and risk-taking behaviours are salient to them.
Our research project is aimed at exploring personality development in adolescence by using an “age-emic” approach, that is, by first defining and then adopting personality domains that are relevant for adolescents. Via psycholexical studies, we are mapping personality dimensions and their sub-components from the perspective of adolescents. Our current findings show that the way domains and sub-domains are organized in adolescence only partially reflects personality taxonomies in adulthood. Control of cognitive and behavioural impulses are of special relevance in adolescence, together with physical appearance. In addition, attention is focused on how personality domains are associated across time with risky attitudes and behaviors towards body and food consumption.  

3) Personality assessment via within-person and between-person approaches
In the last years, social-cognitive theories have openly challenged between-people trait approaches on their theoretical assumptions as well as on their utility in empirical advances in personality research. Strong emphasis has been given to within-person approaches for understanding mechanisms which underlay personality functioning and coherence. Our findings have evidenced the tenability of the KAPA assessment procedure across different personality domains, including actual/ideal self-discrepancies, by demonstrating intra-individual co-variability between schematic knowledge structures and self-appraisals. Moreover, we evidenced how a traditional inter-individual assessment procedure can account for additional variability in people’s self-appraisals, beyond unique self-relevant representations.