People differ in their social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills: their capacities to maintain social relationships, regulate emotions, and manage goal- and learning-directed behaviors. In five studies using data from seven independent samples (N = 6,309), we address three key questions about the nature, structure, assessment, and outcomes of SEB skills. First, how can SEB skills be defined and distinguished from other kinds of psychological constructs, such as personality traits? We propose that SEB skills represent how someone is capable of thinking, feeling, and behaving when the situation calls for it, whereas traits represent how someone tends to think, feel, and behave averaged across situations. Second, how can specific SEB skills be organized within broader domains? We find that many skill facets can be organized within five major domains representing Social Engagement, Cooperation, Self-Management, Emotional Resilience, and Innovation Skills. Third, how should SEB skills be measured? We develop and validate the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI) to measure individuals’ capacity to enact specific behaviors representing 32 skill facets. We then use the BESSI to investigate the nomological network of SEB skills. We show that both skill domains and facets converge in conceptually meaningful ways with socioemotional competencies, character and developmental strengths, and personality traits, and predict consequential outcomes including academic achievement and engagement, occupational interests, social relationships, and well-being. We believe that this work provides the most comprehensive model currently available for conceptualizing SEB skills, as well as the most psychometrically robust tool available for assessing them.

Personality psychology, which seeks to study individual differences in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that persist over time and place, has experienced a renaissance in the last few decades. It has also not been reviewed as a field in the Annual Review since 2001 (Funder, 2001). In this chapter, we seek to provide an update, while also providing a meta-organizational structure to the field. In particular, personality psychology has a prescribed set of four responsibilities that it implicitly or explicitly tackles as a field: (a) describe what personality is—the units of analysis in the field; (b) document how it develops; (c) explain the processes of personality and why they affect functioning; and (d) provide a framework for understanding individuals and explaining their actions, feelings, and motivations. We review progress made over the last 20 years to address these four agendas and finish with a section highlighting future directions and ongoing challenges to the field.

Personality and social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills are closely related and independently predict life outcomes. This implies that although tightly connected, what a person tends to do (personality traits) and what they are capable of doing (skills) are not always perfectly aligned. In this study, we investigated whether matches and mismatches between traits and skills predict important life outcomes. We studied a diverse sample of high school students (N = 897) who self-reported their Big Five personality traits, five SEB skill domains, and an array of academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Using response surface analysis, we found that youth with matching, high levels of corresponding traits and skills, as well as those with higher skill levels relative to their traits reported better outcomes. By contrast, youth with matching, low levels of traits and skills, as well as those with higher trait levels relative to skills, were more anxious and depressed. Our findings provide insights into functioning that are missed by solely focusing on direct effects, and also show that SEB skills can enhance people’s personality strengths and buffer against shortcomings.

Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills matter for individuals’ well-being and success. The Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI) uses 192 items to assess 32 specific SEB skills across five broad skill domains (Soto et al., 2022). The present research developed three short forms of BESSI-192 and explored their measurement properties, predictive validity, and cross-cultural comparability. We found that BESSI-96, BESSI-45, and BESSI-20 largely captured the psychological content of the full BESSI-192 measure, retained a robust multidimensional structure, and demonstrated adequate reliability. At the domain and facet level, the BESSI short forms showed patterns of associations with external criteria that were similar to BESSI-192 and preserved most of BESSI-192’s predictive power. The BESSI short forms also demonstrated measurement invariance between the primarily US-based and German adult samples. We conclude by discussing contexts in which the short forms may be useful for researchers and practitioners.

The present research addresses three key questions about social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills. First, how do SEB skills relate with the Big Five traits and CASEL core competencies? Second, how do SEB skills relate with consequential outcomes in adolescence? Third, do SEB skills provide incremental validity beyond personality traits? Results from a diverse sample of high school students (N = 897) indicate that SEB skills converge with the Big Five traits and CASEL competencies in expected and conceptually meaningful ways. Analyses of self-reported and school-reported outcomes extend SEB skills’ nomological network by showing that they predict academic achievement and engagement, occupational interests, social relationships, civic engagement, and well-being. Finally, tests of incremental validity indicate that SEB skills provide unique information beyond personality traits, and that this information matters for predicting outcomes during adolescence. These findings advance our understanding of the nature, correlates, and consequences of SEB skills.