David Watson PhD

Professor Watson is a personality psychologist with expertise in personality and clinical assessment. His work investigates the structure and measurement of personality, affect, and psychopathology, as well as examines how personality traits relate to clinical disorders. He works in a variety of substantive areas within psychopathology, including depression, anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, mania, personality disorders, and dissociation. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop comprehensive taxonomic models that integrate normal-range and pathological processes into a single overarching scheme. Other areas of personality research examine stability versus change across the life span, mate preferences, and accuracy in person perception. He has published more than 240 articles in the top journals in personality and pathology. He served as an Advisor to the DSM-IV Anxiety Disorders Workgroup and to the DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders Workgroup. From 2006-2011, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. In 2015, he was one of three founding members (with Roman Kotov and Robert Krueger) of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium.