Welcome to PSY 255

Welcome to class! This website is designed to accompany Mason Garrison’s Introduction to Personality Psychology. This class is a undergraduate-level psychology course at Wake Forest University. I encourage anyone who is personality-curious to work their way through these course notes. The course notes include lectures, worked examples, readings, activities, and labs. You can find the current version of the course syllabus along with all of the other syllabi for my classes here. All the embedded lecture videos can be found on a youtube playlist.

Mason Notes

This website is constantly changing. This new course is in active development, and approximately 99.9% done. I have made this process explicitly transparent because I want you to see how you can use R to produce some pretty neat things. Indeed, I’ve included the source code for this website in the class github. I encourage you to contribute to the course code. If you catch typos, errors, please issue a pull request with the fixes. If you find cool / useful resources, please add them.

How to use these notes

This document is broken down into multiple chapters. Use the table of contents on the left side of the screen to navigate, and use the hamburger icon (horizontal bars) at the top of the document to open or close the table of contents. At the top of the document, you’ll see additional icons which you can click to search the document, change the size, font or color scheme of the page. The document will be updated (unpredictably) throughout the semester.

Every module corresponds to a weeks worth of material. Most modules are dedicated to a specific theme. Within each module, there are embedded videos, slides, activities, labs, and tutorials. The skills developed in each module build upon skills you’ve developed in previous modules.

Although these notes share some of the features of a textbook, they are neither comprehensive nor completely original. The main purpose is to give you all a set of common materials on which to draw during the course. In class, we will sometimes do things outside the notes. The idea here is that you will read the materials and try to learn from them, just as you will attend classes and try to learn from them.

Status of course

In terms of timing, I will have each module completed by the start of the week. The start of the “week” will be Monday at 12 p.m. EST. It is possible that I will get ahead of this deadline. You can see the current status of the course below. Although you are welcome to work ahead, be aware that I will be making changes to modules that haven’t officially started yet. In addition, I may add optional materials to previous modules that might be helpful.

This table provides the current status of the course. It lists proportions of specific components by module. Overall it is 99.894% complete.