Heather A. Haas
Associate Professor of Psychology

Any college professor can tell you: Every classroom holds as many personalities as there are students. But it takes someone like Dr. Heather Haas - a psychology professor at LaGrange College and a trained "personality psychologist" - to fully recognize and appreciate them.

One main goal of personality psychologists is to identify all the most important personality traits.  For years, one very influential model of personality has been a model called the "Big Five," which emphasizes the traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.  In her research, Dr. Haas is working to extend that model. 

The work leading to the development of the Big Five model relied largely on describing people in terms of individual personality terms listed in standard dictionaries.  Researchers asked people, "Are you nice?"  "Are you neat?"  "Are you often anxious?"  To extend this approach, Dr. Haas asks people to describe their personalities in terms of the proverbs they live by.  For example, do you "forgive and forget?"  Are you a person who believes that it is "better to have loved and lost than never loved at all?"  Do you believe that "practice makes perfect" and act accordingly?  Studying people's responses to hundreds of well-known proverbs, Dr. Haas finds some personality dimensions that resemble the Big Five, and other dimensions that may ultimately give psychologists an even more detailed picture of the idiosyncrasies of personality.

Because proverbs encode people's perceptions of "good" ways to live, this research also links to another area Dr. Haas finds interesting, the emerging "positive psychology" movement.  Positive psychologists study positive emotions (e.g., happiness and flow), positive traits and characteristics (e.g., love of learning, creativity, and perseverance), and positive institutions (e.g., families, schools, and businesses that work well for their individual members as well as for the good of the larger community).

Are you a person who believes that "anything worth doing is worth doing well?"  Then "carpe diem;" it's time to get involved in psychology.

Pioneering research opportunities.
Heather Haas is doing pioneering research that pushes the boundaries of her field, looking for answers to questions that no one has asked before. (She's also looking for research assistants.) Every year, several LaGrange College psychology students assist her with a variety of research tasks including data collection, data entry, and proposal writing.  If you're interested in joining the research team, contact Dr. Haas for more information.

Professional Memberships: 
    Association for Psychological Science
    Society for the Teaching of Psychology
    Association for Research in Personality
    Society for Personality & Social Psychology

Selected Publications
Note: The names of LaGrange College students who have co-authored some of these works appear in red.

Haas, H. A.  (2008).  Proverb familiarity in the United States: Cross-regional comparisons of the  paremiological minimum.  Journal of American Folklore, 121, 319-347.

Hendricker, H. J., Priest, B., Kafrouni, J. B, Spavone, S. J., McCullough, J. K., & Haas, H.  (2007, Winter). 
Senioritis: A (tongue-in-cheek) proposal for an addition to the DSM-V.  Eye on Psi Chi, 11, 18-20.
http://psichi.net/pubs/articles/article_599.asp

Haas, H. A., Bassett, S., Behrens, L., Hendley, J. K., & Harrington, S.  (2005, Fall).  SPSP conference poster presentations: Who, why, and then what?  Dialogue: The Official Newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 20, pp. 18, 35.

Haas, H. A.  (2004, Spring).  Nicholas Claus: Big Five for the big guy.  Dialogue: The Official Newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 19, pp. 21, 24-25.

Haas, H. A.  (2004, March 12).  Teaching and the butterfly effect.  The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. C2-C3.
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2004/03/2004031001c/printable.html

Rouse, S. V., & Haas, H. A.  (2003).  Exploring the accuracies and inaccuracies of personality perception following Internet-mediated communication.  Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 446-467.

Haas, H. A.  (2002).  Extending the search for folk personality constructs: The dimensionality of the personality-relevant proverb domain.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 594-609.