Amber Gayle Thalmayer
Amber Gayle Thalmayer
University of Zürich
Amber Gayle Thalmayer is Professor for Personality, Mental Health, and Culture in the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich and a 2026 European Research Council Consolidator Grant recipient. She is the principal investigator of the Africa Long Life Study, a longitudinal study of personality and mental health development among emerging adults in Namibia, Kenya, South Africa, soon expanding to Nigeria and Ghana. She has led lexical studies of personality trait structure in African languages, and developed a first culturally de-centred personality model and inventory, the Cross Cultural Big Two. Her work has been funded by a 5-year professorial fellowship, a 4-year project grant, and an AGORA science communication grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. To share this research with broader audiences, she co-created an award-winning documentary film, “Namibia Up: Being 18 in Africa Today” and writes for Psychology Today at her blog “One World Many Minds”.
Psycholoy needs Africa! Results from other world regions increasingly share theory in psychology. But sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains the source of less than 1% of the samples in international journals, despite being home to 18% of the world’s population and enormous cultural diversity. Better inclusion of SSA would have many benefits, as African scholarship is rich in theory and ideas which could inspire and renew global psychology, and African samples provide a contrast to Western ones in many respects, facilitating strong tests of universality. In this talk, I address (1) The diversity of SSA, and how we might increase representation of African participants and scholars with bi-directional collaboration and the integration of approaches, taking the Africa Long Life Study (ALLS) as an example; (2) Culturally de-centered personality assessment in Africa and beyond, using the Cross-Cultural Big Two inventory; (3) Personality development and the reciprocal impact of traits with life experiences in the first five years of ALLS, a cohort of young adults in Namibia, Kenya, and South Africa; (4) Cultural mindset and logic in ALLS, locating African samples into global frameworks; and (5) Questions that will shape the next five years of ALLS, including our expansion to Ghana and Nigeria, thanks to a European Research Council Consolidator Grant.