Reflections on the changing image of psychologists’ personality: Reply to Zhang (2026).

We respond to Zhang's (2026) commentary on our study concerning the 170-year evolution of psychologists' personality portraits (Xu et al., 2026). We acknowledge the effects of the growth of the publishing industry on the composition of the corpus and its linguistic limitations. Furthermore, we discuss how large language models offer a promising avenue for comparing public professional images with actual personality traits. Regarding the rise of therapists, we clarify that the observed increase in openness is likely not a direct consequence of this trend, as agreeableness and extraversion remained stable post-World War II. Separately, while this is an intriguing possibility, how the increasing presence of female psychologists may shape the profession's image remains a question for future inquiry, which we hope will stimulate further discussion in the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).