Personality traits in social interactions: A tutorial on network analysis of personality dynamics

In this chapter, we introduce the current state of the art of network analysis in personality psychology, and we present networks from both a theoretical and a methodological perspective. We focus on the within-person contemporaneous network which allows exploring the interplay of cognitions, emotions, and behaviors across situations. We illustrate how to estimate and compare networks describing different groups of persons, how to compute centrality indices, and how to evaluate their stability. We provide a detailed tutorial in the R statistical language showing how these methods can be applied to Ecological Momentary Assessment data. Finally, we show how the results can be used to shed light on the dynamics of the HEXACO personality traits in interpersonal situations.