Jennifer Fayard is an assistant professor of psychology at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas. Her research focuses on the relationship between personality and emotions. She is currently involved in mapping the emotional structure of the Big Five personality traits, information which will be useful in understanding the mechanisms behind why people with certain personality traits behave in certain characteristic ways. A major line of research focuses on the relationship between conscientiousness and “self-conscious” emotions such as guilt and shame, with specific attention to how guilt can actually be an adaptive emotion when it causes people to behave in a conscientious manner. Additionally, Dr. Fayard is interested in how accurately we can infer someone else’s personality when we have only limited information about that person. She is currently investigating which personality traits people imply when they refer to someone as having “no personality” or “a lot of personality.”
