Three personality facets can relate to increased academic output

Abstract

We studied how personality traits relate to academic output indicators. Three-hundred Russian academic authors agreed to participate in the study. They completed the Big Five Inventory-2 online; we gathered their h-index, publication counts, and citation counts using the core Russian Science Citation Index database. Three personality facets-Creative Imagination, Productiveness, and Emotional Volatility- showed persistent incremental effects across the academic indicators. Moreover, Emotional Volatility interacted with either Creative Imagination or Productiveness meaning that the authors showed greater academic performance when their creativity or persistence in pursuing goals were accompanied by larger mood swings. Based on these findings and extant literature, we propose an emotional volatility hypothesis, which complements tenets of the normative theory of increased academic output.