Emorie D Beck, PhD

Education

• PhD, Washington University in St. Louis, 2020
• MA, Washington University in St. Louis, 2019
• BA, Brown University, 2016

About

Dr. Beck is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department specializing in personality psychology. She received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 and her BA (with honors) from Brown University in 2016. She completed postdoctoral training at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine from 2020-2022.

Dr. Beck is currently recruiting undergraduate students to join the lab at this time for the 2026-2027 academic year. She will also be recruiting 1-2 PhD students during the 2026-2027 cycle for enrollment in fall 2027.

Research Focus

Dr. Beck's research focuses around the question of what personality is. Definitions have big consequences for how we measure personality, what those measures predict both short- and long-term, how personality is thought to change, and more. One way of doing this is to focus on different levels of aggregation. Thus, she studies how to understand the personality of an individual relative to only themself, relative to some others, and relative to all others. To do so, she uses a mix of methods, including experience sampling methods, passive sensing, survey data, panel data, cognitive tests, and more measured across time intervals from moments to years along with an array of statistical approaches, including time series analysis, multilevel / hierarchical modeling, machine learning, network psychometrics, structural equation modeling, and more. For example, Dr. Beck has been working to build personalized machine learning prediction of behaviors, experiences, and more, finding that we can predict behaviors and experiences better when we don't assume that people have the same antecedents of the behaviors and experiences. Instead, people have unique antecedents, which could have consequences for how to change or intervene upon behaviors and experiences. In other work, Dr. Beck uses longitudinal panel data across multiple continents to answer questions about what personality traits predict over time. For example, she recently examined personality trait and well-being predictors of later dementia diagnoses and neuropathology measures after death, finding that personality traits are strong predictors of dementia diagnosis but have a much more complex relationship with neuropathology measures.

Publications

Beck, E. D., Phan, L. V., Modersitzki, N., *Lee, C. J., *Long, E. U., *Nissen, A. T., and Lewis, C. (2026). Personality is a person-specific complex, nonlinear dynamic system. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. [PDF]

Beck, E. D., Cheung, F., Thapa, S., and Jackson, J. J. (2025). A network approach to top down and bottom life satisfaction. Nature Human Behavior. 9, 1391–1404. [PDF]  

*Lee, C. and Beck, E. D. (2026). Momentary structures of personality: Idiographic facet profiles and time-varying networks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 130(1):160–185. [PDF]

*Nissen, A. T., & Beck, E. D. (2025). Linking person-specific network parameters to between-person trait change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 29(5):933–953. [PDF]

Teaching

During the 2026/27 academic year, Dr. Beck will be on sabbatical in Fall 2026. In Winter 2027, she will teach Introduction to Personality (undergraduate-level; PSC 162) and Research in Personality (PSC 182). During prior academic years, Dr. Beck taught has Data Management and Cleaning in R (graduate-level; PSC 203A), Data Visualization in R (graduate-level, PSC 203B), Introduction to Personality (undergraduate-level; PSC 162), and Advanced Topics in Personality (undergraduate, PSC 190).