In the development of science, there are sometimes critical junctures from which new developments arise. It seems to me that personality psychology is now at such a stage. One important development is that the disputes among factor analytically oriented researchers about the right number of dimensions for the classification of individual differences seem to be resolved. The Big Five are now consensually acknowledged. Furthermore, the trait approach has been revived after the attack by Mischel and others. Of course, new conceptualizations such as goal-directed, life-style, or motivationally oriented approaches have been introduced or reinvented. And personality psychologists have turned their attention to more process-orientated approaches, such as how people exhibit behaviours and what the functions of these behaviours are. A rich body of research in this direction is being generated by social psychologists who seem to have especially strong interests in the self domain. Temperament, as a broad reference category for early developing, biologically based personality traits, is also attracting more and more researchers. To underpin trends and developments, I have counted the journal articles cited in Psychological Abstracts (Psychinfo database) for the following three time intervals: 1975-1979, 1980-1984, and 1985-1989. The total number of publications for these three periods rose steadily from 133 238 in the first period to 142 199 in the second, and 167 869 in the third. The publication rates for selected topics in personality are given in Table 1. To allow a more detailed evaluation of the publication rates in special topics in personality, I calculated the percentages of these rates taking the overall publications per time interval as the baseline. This calculation allows us to see if some topics show a larger or a smaller increase. Figure 1 may inform us about the attractiveness of special topics in our field. The serf is the leading domain, followed by the personality and the assessment domains. I will now try to give an overview on trends and developments, some comments, and personal evaluations. Furthermore, I will try to point out possible sidetracks,