6 Personality
Lucy Ginsburg
People have unique personalities made up of a complex combination of different traits. Personality traits affect how people understand and relate to the world around them, as well as how they see themselves.
Ideally, people's personality traits allow them to flexibly adapt to their changing environment in ways that lead to more healthy relationships with others and better coping strategies. When people have personality traits that are less adaptive, this leads to inflexibility and unhealthy coping. For example, they may manage stress by drinking or misusing drugs, have a hard time managing their anger, and find it hard to trust and connect with others.
A personality disorder is a mental health condition where people have a lifelong pattern of seeing themselves and reacting to others in ways that cause problems. People with personality disorders often have a hard time understanding emotions and tolerating distress. And they act impulsively. This makes it hard for them to relate to others, causing serious issues, and affecting their family life, social activities, work and school performance, and overall quality of life.
If you have any symptoms of a personality disorder, see your doctor or a mental health professional. When personality disorders are not treated, they can cause serious issues in relationships and mood. Also, the ability to function and pursue personal goals may get worse without treatment.
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It's believed that personality disorders are caused by a blend of how genetics and your environment affect you. Your genes may make it more likely that you develop a personality disorder, and what happens to you in life may set a personality disorder into motion.
Personality disorders can seriously disrupt your life and the lives of those who care about you. They may cause issues in relationships, work or school. And they can lead to social isolation, other mental health issues with addictions, as well as occupational and legal issues.
From eccentric and introverted to boisterous and bold, the human personality is a complex and colorful thing. Personality refers to a person's distinctive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It derives from a mix of innate dispositions and inclinations along with environmental factors and experiences. Although personality can change over a lifetime, one's core personality traits tend to remain relatively consistent during adulthood.
While there are countless characteristics that combine in an almost infinite number of ways, people have been trying to find a way to classify personalities ever since Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks proposed four basic temperaments. Today, psychologists often describe personality in terms of five basic traits. The so-called Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. A newer model, called HEXACO, incorporates honesty-humility as a sixth key trait.
The tendencies in thinking and behaving that concepts like the Big Five represent are related to a variety of other characteristics and outcomes on which people compare to one another. These include differences in personal success, health and well-being, and how people get along with others. Even the risk of dying appears to be associated to some degree with differences in personality traits.
Although there is no consensus definition of personality, most theories focus on motivation and psychological interactions with one's environment.[4] Trait-based personality theories, such as those defined by Raymond Cattell, define personality as traits that predict an individual's behavior. On the other hand, more behaviorally-based approaches define personality through learning and habits. Nevertheless, most theories view personality as relatively stable.[2]
The study of the psychology of personality, called personality psychology, attempts to explain the tendencies that underlie differences in behavior. Psychologists have taken many different approaches to the study of personality, including biological, cognitive, learning, and trait-based theories, as well as psychodynamic, and humanistic approaches. The various approaches used to study personality today reflect the influence of the first theorists in the field, a group that includes Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers.
Personality can be determined through a variety of tests. Due to the fact that personality is a complex idea, the dimensions of personality and scales of such tests vary and often are poorly defined. Two main tools to measure personality are objective tests and projective measures. Examples of such tests are the: Big Five Inventory (BFI), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2), Rorschach Inkblot test, Neurotic Personality Questionnaire KON-2006,[5] or Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R). All of these tests are beneficial because they have both reliability and validity, two factors that make a test accurate. "Each item should be influenced to a degree by the underlying trait construct, giving rise to a pattern of positive intercorrelations so long as all items are oriented (worded) in the same direction."[6] A recent, but not well-known, measuring tool that psychologists use is the 16PF. It measures personality based on Cattell's 16-factor theory of personality. Psychologists also use it as a clinical measuring tool to diagnose psychiatric disorders and help with prognosis and therapy planning.[7]
Personality is frequently broken into factors or dimensions, statistically extracted from large questionnaires through factor analysis. When brought back to two dimensions, often the dimensions of introvert-extrovert and neuroticism (emotionally unstable-stable) are used as first proposed by Eysenck in the 1960s.[8]
Many factor analyses found what is called the Big Five, which are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (or emotional stability), known as "OCEAN". These components are generally stable over time, and about half of the variance appears to be attributable to a person's genetics rather than the effects of one's environment.[9][10] These five factors are made up of two aspects each as well as many facets (e.g., openness splits into experiencing and intellect, which each further split into facets like fantasy and ideas).[11] These five factors also show correlations with each other that suggest higher order meta-traits (e.g., factor beta, which combines openness and extraversion to form a meta-trait associated with mental and physical exploration).[12] There are several personality frameworks that recognize the Big Five factors and there are thousands of measures of personality that can be used to measure specific facets as well as general traits.[13]
Some research has investigated whether the relationship between happiness and extraversion seen in adults also can be seen in children. The implications of these findings can help identify children who are more likely to experience episodes of depression and develop types of treatment that such children are likely to respond to. In both children and adults, research shows that genetics, as opposed to environmental factors, exert a greater influence on happiness levels. Personality is not stable over the course of a lifetime, but it changes much more quickly during childhood, so personality constructs in children are referred to as temperament. Temperament is regarded as the precursor to personality.[14]
Another interesting finding has been the link found between acting extraverted and positive affect. Extraverted behaviors include acting talkative, assertive, adventurous, and outgoing. For the purposes of this study, positive affect is defined as experiences of happy and enjoyable emotions.[15] This study investigated the effects of acting in a way that is counter to a person's dispositional nature. In other words, the study focused on the benefits and drawbacks of introverts (people who are shy, socially inhibited, and non-aggressive) acting extraverted, and of extraverts acting introverted. After acting extraverted, introverts' experience of positive affect increased[15] whereas extraverts seemed to experience lower levels of positive affect and suffered from the phenomenon of ego depletion. Ego depletion, or cognitive fatigue, is the use of one's energy to overtly act in a way that is contrary to one's inner disposition. When people act in a contrary fashion, they divert most, if not all, (cognitive) energy toward regulating this foreign style of behavior and attitudes. Because all available energy is being used to maintain this contrary behavior, the result is an inability to use any energy to make important or difficult decisions, plan for the future, control or regulate emotions, or perform effectively on other cognitive tasks.[15]
One question that has been posed is why extraverts tend to be happier than introverts. The two types of explanations that attempt to account for this difference are instrumental theories and temperamental theories.[9] The instrumental theory suggests that extraverts end up making choices that place them in more positive situations and they also react more strongly than introverts to positive situations. The temperamental theory suggests that extroverts have a disposition that generally leads them to experience a higher degree of positive affect. In their study of extraversion, Lucas and Baird[9] found no statistically significant support for the instrumental theory but did, however, find that extraverts generally experience a higher level of positive affect.
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