We are happy to announce that the Swiss National Science Foundation has just accepted our interdisciplinary project proposal entitled Changing Personality Traits: Testing the Efficacy of a Mobile Technology-Based Intervention. The technical foundation will be our open source behavioral intervention platform MobileCoach.

This proposed research is the first testing the efficacy of a MobileCoach-based intervention for intended personality change. Given that this novel intervention approach proves effective, it could be easily implemented in various non-clinical settings and could reach large numbers of people due to its low-threshold character and technical scalability. The project is innovative from a personality psychology point of view as it examines the short-term changeability of personality traits, from a psychological intervention perspective as it applies a new generic intervention model, and from an information systems perspective as it investigates how mobile sensor services and anthropomorphic conversational agents must be designed to effectively deliver individualised interventions in real life and real time.

Our partners in this research project are …

• Dr. Mathias Allemand, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich
• Prof. Dr. Mike Martin, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich
• PD Dr. Christoph Flückiger, Department of Psychology, University of Bern