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This article considers how leaders' personality traits change over time. I focus on how leaders become more authoritarian, overconfident and more mistake-prone; how, when and why do leaders 'break bad'? Temporal evolution of leaders is an important topic given the long tenure of many political leaders and the influence these leaders have over policies, including foreign policies. There is very little work on how leaders' personalities develop and how they interact with changing constraints and opportunities. This article is an agenda-setting review, designed to push foreign policy analysis in new directions. This is especially important given the resurgence in research on personalities and the renewed interest in leaders. Drawing on diverse and multi-disciplinary scholarship on the psychological effects of aging, experience, learning and power-holding, this article develops expectations about leader personality change. I discuss challenges for research in this area, focusing on how 'bad' can be conceptualized, and offer specific avenues for future investigations.

This paper presents Pavlov's contribution to the development of biological-oriented personality theories. Taking a short description of Pavlov's typology of central nervous system (CNS) properties as a point of departure, it shows how, and to what extent, this typology influenced further research in the former Soviet Union as well as in the West. Of special significance for the development of biologically oriented personality dimensions was the conditioned reflex paradigm introduced by Pavlov for studying individual differences in dogs. This paradigm was used by Russian psychologists in research on types of nervous systems conducted in different animal species as well as for assessing temperament in children and adults. Also, personality psychologists in the West, such as Eysenck, Spence, and Gray, incorporated the CR paradigm into their theories. Among the basic properties of excitation and inhibition on which Pavlov's typology was based, strength of excitation and the basic indicator of this property, protective inhibition, gained the highest popularity in arousaloriented personality theories. Many studies have been conducted in which the Pavlovian constructs of CNS properties have been related to different personality dimensions. In current research the behavioral expressions of the Pavlovian constructs of strength of excitation, strength of inhibition, and mobility of nervous processes as measured by the Pavlovian Temperament Survey (PTS) have been related to over a dozen of personality dimensions, mostly referring to temperament.

In recent decades, the number of large-scale surveys that have included measures of the Big Five personality traits in their standard questionnaires has grown sharply both in Germany and internationally. Consequently, a vast, heterogeneous, high-quality data base is now readily available to personality psychologists for secondary analyses. In this paper, we provide an overview of 25 public large-scale surveys assessing the Big Five. Our aim is to increase researchers' awareness of the availability and analytical potential of these data, and ultimately to increase their reuse. We restricted our selection to surveys of the adult population, conducted in Germany, based on probabilistic samples with a minimum sample size of 1,500 respondents, and assessing all Big Five dimensions with a validated Big Five instrument. We describe the study designs, the measures used to assess the Big Five, and the research potential of these valuable data.