Personality - Page 11 of 31

8 Personality Studies Every Psychologist Should Know

People’s behaviour is explained by a mix of their personalities and the situations in which they find themselves.

Personality is the pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that characterise a person.

People’s personalities can partly explain their behaviour.

However, the situations in which people find themselves also have a considerable influence.

Here are eight studies on personality that every psychologist should know.

Click the link in each section for a longer description of each of the eight studies on which this article is based.

1. Most people want to change their personality

Most people want to change their personality.

The most desirable changes for people are to be more extraverted, more conscientious and more emotionally stable.

It is easy to see why:

Extraverts are generally self-confident and cheerful and can also be impulsive, sensation-seekers.
Conscientious people tend to be more self-disciplined and they aim for achievement.
The emotionally stable are less likely to experience mental health problems.

2. Perfectionist personality

The personality trait of perfectionism is strongly linked to developing obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Young children who have excessive self-control and perfectionist tendencies have double the chance of developing obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), psychologists have found.

It is important to catch OCD as early as possible in life so treatment can help to reduce compulsions and obsessions.

3. Neurotics are susceptible to stress

People who are higher in the personality trait of neuroticism are more susceptible to stress, a large review of the research finds.

Neuroticism is one of the five major aspects of personality — it runs on a continuum from very stable to very neurotic, with most people in the middle of the range.

People higher in neuroticism are at greater risk of depression as they have a stronger response to frustration, threat and loss.

4. Neuroticism doubles Alzheimer’s risk

Anxiety, jealousy and moodiness in middle age are associated with doubling the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

The study followed 800 women for 38 years and looked at the effects of their neuroticism on the chance of developing dementia.

Neuroticism is a personality trait that includes moodiness, worrying and anxiety.

In general, people who are neurotic are more likely to be anxious, depressed, jealous or envious.

5. How to spot a toxic personality

People with toxic personalities have a mixture of arrogance and deceitfulness.

People with toxic personalities:

are willing to flatter others to obtain favours,
to take advantage of others by cheating,
enjoy showing off their higher status to others,
act in an entitled way,
and want to have things others do not.

However, toxic personalities can survive and even prosper in the workplace, and elsewhere, if they have one critical ingredient: social skills.

6. Acting like an extravert

Acting like an extravert makes people feel happier — even natural introverts, research finds.

Both extraverts and introverts report greater well-being after a week spent being more talkative, assertive and spontaneous.

It is the first study to report the benefits of acting like an extravert over such an extended period.

The study also demonstrates that people who are naturally introverted can enjoy this exercise as much as extraverts.

7. Healthy personality traits

Being optimistic, feeling positive emotions and controlling negative emotions are all linked to better mental health, psychologists have found.

The good news is that all three traits can be trained and improved.

Practicing these positive traits can actually change vital brain structures.

Indeed, new research reveals that people with these resilient personality factors have greater brain volume in critical areas of their prefrontal cortex.

8. Agreeableness linked to empathy

People with the personality trait of agreeableness are more likely to be highly empathic.

Agreeable people tend to be friendly, warm and tactful — always taking into account other people’s feelings.

Agreeable people also tend to be trusting, modest, straightforward and compliant.

Psychologists have found that agreeable people are more likely to help others out — and this is partly down to empathy.

For more scientific research on personality, visit the personality archives here on PsyBlog.

3 Personality Traits That Indicate High IQ

Many people do not predict that these traits are linked to being smart.

Many people do not predict that these traits are linked to being smart.

Highly intelligent people are more likely to be trusting, straightforward and altruistic, research finds.

However, many people find this surprising as they do not predict that being agreeable is linked to being smart.

It may be because people guess that being ‘too nice’ is not necessarily linked with being successful in life.

The traits that people do correctly guess are linked to intelligence are:

Openness to experience: being more open to experience is linked to higher IQ.
Extraversion: being outgoing is linked to a higher IQ.
Neuroticism: being neurotic is linked to lower IQ.

This shows that many of people’s beliefs about the links between personality and intelligence are correct.

People do, however, exaggerate the link — personality does not tell you as much about intelligence as people assume.

The study’s authors write that there is…

“…a general belief that intelligent people can be distinguished from less intelligent not only by their mental capacities but also by their personality dispositions.
For example, when people have been asked to name famous examples of an intelligent person, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Theresa have regularly been suggested, indicating that spiritual strength is considered an indicator of intelligence.
When lay judges are asked what they mean by the term intelligence or mental abilities, besides cognitive aptitude, they usually propose competencies related to social and interpersonal skills.”

In other words, people assume that social and interpersonal skills indicate a high IQ, but this is not necessarily true.

Agreeable

The results come from a study of hundreds of people in Estonia who were surveyed about the perceived links between personality and intelligence.

The most fascinating finding was that people missed the fact that intelligent people tend to be more agreeable.

The study’s authors write:

“By attributing neutral agreeableness to high-IQ individuals, respondents may express the idea that it is not always advantageous to be kind to other people.
In fact, being unselfish and sincere may sometimes work against doing well in life.
Empirical data, too, suggests that being agreeable is not always adaptive or conducive to, for example, occupational career success.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Mõttus et al., 2008).

This Personality Trait Leads To A Longer Life

People live longer in countries where this trait is more common.

Being generous leads to a longer life, new research finds.

People who share more of their resources with others enjoy higher life expectancy.

Scientists analysing people’s generosity across different societies found a linear relationship with average life expectancy.

In other words, the more people shared, the longer they lived.

People in France and Japan, for example, share over two-thirds of their lifetime income with others and both countries have the lowest mortality rates.

In comparison, people in China and Turkey share less than half their income and their risk of dying in the coming year is doubled.

Some countries, though, did not follow the overall pattern.

People in the US and the UK also shared less than half of their annual income, but their risk of dying is closer to more generous countries, like France and Japan.

Australia is another outlier, with people being even less generous than the US and the UK, but living longer.

The data come from 34 countries on six continents.

The amount that people earned was compared with the amount that they gave to others.

Dr Fanny Kluge, study co-author, said:

“What is new about our study is that for the first time we have combined transfer payments from state and family and evaluated the effect.”

The results showed that societies in Western Europe tend to share a lot of their resources and they also live longer.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa like Senegal had the lowest rates of sharing and the highest mortality rates.

Despite being richer than other African nations, South Africans share little of their resources and also die earlier.

Dr Kluge said:

“Our analyses suggest that redistribution influences the mortality rate of a country, regardless of the per capita gross domestic product.”

Generosity can be individual or societal — both are linked to a boost in longevity, said Dr Kluge:

“What I find particularly interesting is that the relationship between generosity and lifetime income that we described does not depend on whether the benefits come from the state or from the wider family.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Vogt et al., 2020).

This Is The Most Stressful Personality Trait

The personality trait strongly linked to stress and 11 ways to reduce the toxic emotion.

People who are higher in the personality trait of neuroticism are more susceptible to stress, a large review of the research finds.

Neuroticism is one of the five major aspects of personality — it runs on a continuum from very stable to very neurotic, with most people in the middle of the range.

People higher in neuroticism are at greater risk of depression as they have a stronger response to frustration, threat and loss.

The other four aspects of personality were all negatively related to stress.

In other words, people who are more agreeable, conscientious, extraverted and open to experience are less likely to have a ‘stressful personality’.

Dr Bo Zhang, the study’s first author, said:

“Stress is a significant mental and physical health issue that affects many people and many important domains of life, and some individuals are more likely to experience or perceive stress disproportionately or more intensely than others, which can then play a role in mental and physical health problems such as anxiety or depression.
We found that individuals high in neuroticism demonstrated a relationship with both stressor exposure and perceived stress that was stronger than the other four personality traits.”

The conclusions come from a review of around 300 separate studies on the link between stress and personality.

Neuroticism was the personality trait most strongly linked to stress, explained Dr Zhang:

“The other main personality factors have a link to stress, but it’s not as pronounced as in someone who’s neurotic.
With agreeableness and conscientiousness, for example, it is possible that agreeable people are less likely to encounter stressful situations such as interpersonal conflict because of the tendency to be caring, understanding and forgiving.
Similarly, conscientious people are less likely to experience stress because their good self-regulation abilities can protect them from the encounters of stressful experiences, as well as the negative psychological impacts of stressors.”

Neurotics, though, are more likely to find themselves in stressful situations, said Dr Zhang:

“Neuroticism and stress share common components, so individuals high in neuroticism are likely to play an instrumental role in generating stressors and reacting to a wide variety of events in negative ways, leading to an increased likelihood or chronicity of negative experiences.”

11 ways to reduce stress

Scientifically supported ways of reducing stress include:

eating a diet higher in fruits and vegetables,
seeking out ‘flow states’, as they help reduce the effects of stress,
strolling in nature, which reduces activity in the amygdala, also try adding a little mindfulness to the walk,
thinking about your romantic partner,
hug someone,
sing,
try mindfulness with hypnosis,
petting a cat or dog,
give yourself a foot massage,
look at trees,
and listen to birdsong,

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review (Luo et al., 2022).

10 Personality Traits Linked To Better Mental Health

These are the healthiest personality traits, as rated by psychologists.

The healthiest personality traits include stable emotions, openness to feelings, the experience of positive emotions and being agreeable, research finds.

People with these traits tend to have higher self-esteem, be more optimistic and find it easier to regulate their emotions.

The conclusions come from a survey of both professional psychologists and college students, totalling in the thousands.

Both gave surprisingly similar answers to what constitutes a healthy personality, said Dr Wiebke Bleidorn, the study’s first author:

“People in general, no matter whether they are experts or not, seem to have quite a clear idea of what a healthy personality looks like.”

The study revealed that people with the healthiest personalities have the following traits:

Straightforwardness
Competence
Openness to feelings
Warmth
Positive emotions
Low depression
Low anxiety
Low impulsivity
Low stress vulnerability
Low anger hostility

Naturally, those with healthy personalities also scored lower in narcissism and exploitativeness.

However, they scored higher in more healthy aspects of narcissism, such as self-sufficiency and grandiosity.

Similarly, on tests of psychopathy, healthy people scored lower on negative traits like disinhibition, but higher on positive traits like boldness.

The study’s authors concluded:

“Individuals with high scores on the healthy personality index were psychologically well-adjusted, had high self-esteem, good self-regulatory skills, an optimistic outlook on the world, and a clear and stable self-view.
These individuals were low in aggression and meanness, unlikely to exploit others, and were relatively immune to stress and self-sufficient.”

The study was published in PsyArXiv (Bleidorn et al., 2018).

These Two Personality Traits Indicate A Strong Immune System

A stronger immune system helps fight off disease and is linked to living longer.

Both being extraverted and conscientious are linked to having a stronger immune system, two studies have found.

Conscientious people tend to be self-disciplined and they aim for achievement.

People who are conscientious have, among other things, a preference for order, responsibility and self-control.

Meanwhile, people who are extraverted tend to be focused on the world around them and are most happy when surrounded by people and when active.

Extraverts have much lower levels of an inflammatory chemical called interleukin-6 in their blood stream than introverts.

Low levels of interleukin-6 are often a marker that the immune system is functioning better.

In the first of the two studies, 100 people’s interleukin-6 levels were compared with their score on the five major personality traits: openness to experience, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Dr Benjamin Chapman, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Our study took the important first step of finding a strong association between one part of extroversion and a specific, stress-related, inflammatory chemical.
The next step is to determine if one causes the other.”

In the second study, 957 adults were tracked over 14 years.

Dr Páraic Ó Súilleabháin, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“We found that part of the reason why people who score higher on the personality trait of conscientiousness live longer is as a result of their immune system, specifically due to lower levels of a biological marker called interleukin-6.
There are likely further biological mechanisms that are yet to be discovered which will give a clearer picture of all the different ways that our personalities are so critical to our long-term health.”

The studies were both published in the journal Brain Behavior and Immunity (Chapman et al., 2009; O’Súilleabháin et al., 2021).

What Your Musical Taste Says About Your Personality

A 15 second clip was enough to reveal aspects of personality.

People who like more sophisticated music, like opera and jazz are higher in openness to experience, research finds.

People who are open to experience are more likely to be imaginative, sensitive to their feelings, intellectually curious and seekers of variety.

Openness to experience, one of the five major facets of personality, is also linked to higher intelligence.

The study also found that those who like music that is unpretentious, relaxing and acoustic, like folk and country, tend to be more extraverted.

Extraverts are outgoing and energetic.

The final personality trait linked to musical taste was agreeableness.

Agreeable people tended to like all types of music more.

The study based its findings on putting music into one of five categories:

Mellow – romantic and relaxing, like R&B, soft rock and adult contemporary.
Unpretentious – relaxing country, folk and acoustic.
Sophisticated – complex and dynamic, like opera, classical, jazz and world.
Intense – loud, distorted and aggressive music, like rock, punk and heavy metal.
Contemporary – includes electronic, dance, rap and Euro-pop.

Only the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘unpretentious’ types were related to personality, the researchers found.

Liking contemporary, intense or mellow music, therefore, does not tell us anything in particular about your personality.

The conclusions come from a survey of 22,252 people who were played unfamiliar clips of music just 15 seconds long and asked to rate them.

These were then compared with tests of the five personality factors: openness to experience, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

The study’s authors write that…

“…people who have a need for creative and intellectual stimulation prefer unconventional and complex musical styles, and that people who are sociable and enthusiastic prefer musical styles that are energetic and lively.”

The authors conclude:

“These results corroborate that music – a form of self-expression that is ubiquitous across human cultures – communicates meaningful information about basic psychological characteristics.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Nave et al., 2018).

The Personality Traits Linked To Higher Social Status

These personality traits are universally linked to higher social status.

The traits that help a person climb the social ladder include honesty, intelligence and being hard-working, research finds.

Across 14 different countries and societies, researchers found that the traits linked to higher social status were remarkably consistent.

Similarly, being knowledgeable, making sacrifices for others and being kind increased a person’s social status.

Having a long-term mate is also seen as positive for social status for both men and women.

The traits that universally decreased a person’s social status are, unsurprisingly, being unclean, a thief and mean and nasty.

Professor David Buss, the study’s first author, said:

“Humans live in a social world in which relative rank matters for nearly everything — your access to resources, your ability to attract mates, and even how long you live.
From an evolutionary perspective, reproductively relevant resources flow to those high in status and trickle slowly, if at all, to those lower on the social totem pole.”

The researchers surveyed 2,751 people in 14 countries about 240 different factors that might affect a person’s social status.

The results showed that certain factors were widely perceived as positive, said Professor Buss:

“From the Gypsies in Romania to the native islanders of Guam, people displaying intelligence, bravery and leadership rise in rank in the eyes of their peers.
But possessing qualities that inflict costs on others will cause your status to plummet, whether you live in Russia or Eritrea.”

There were some interesting kinks in the results.

Men gain more status from taking risks and being physically brave.

Women gain more status from their appearance and domestic skills.

Apparently, not enough has changed in the gender wars in this respect.

A sense of humour, meanwhile, is generally positive for social status, but less so in East Asian countries like China, South Korea and Japan.

Practising witchcraft is only a problem for your social status if you happen to live in Eritrea or Zimbabwe, the research found.

Finally, catching a sexually transmitted disease, along with being dirty, unclean and nasty decrease a person’s social status, Professor Buss said:

“Although this study was conducted prior to the current pandemic, it’s interesting that being a disease vector is universally detrimental to a person’s status.
Socially transmitted diseases are evolutionarily ancient challenges to human survival, so humans have psychological adaptations to avoid them.
Lowering a person’s social status is an evolutionarily ancient method of social distancing from disease vectors.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Buss et al., 2020).

How To Turn Negative Personality Traits To Advantage (M)

One way to deal with less attractive personality traits.

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This Personality Trait Is A Sign Of High Empathy

Empathic people are likely to have this personality trait.

People with the personality trait of agreeableness are more likely to be highly empathic, research finds.

Agreeable people tend to be friendly, warm and tactful — always taking into account other people’s feelings.

Agreeable people also tend to be trusting, modest, straightforward and compliant.

Psychologists have found that agreeable people are more likely to help others out — and this is partly down to empathy.

In one experiment, participants read stories about someone else having a difficult time.

Afterwards, they rated how likely they would be to help out and how much empathy they would feel for them.

The results showed that people high in agreeableness were more likely to feel empathy for the victim and to be motivated to help them out.

Interestingly, the study also found links between empathy and being neurotic, although neurotic people were more focused on themselves, while agreeable people focused on the other person.

Dr Meara Habashi, the study’s first author, said:

“It is common for persons to experience distress on seeing a victim in need of help.
That distress can lead some people to escape, and to run away from the victim.
But distress does not need to block helping because it may be one first-appearing aspect of empathy.
Distress can actually contribute to helping, but the way it contributes depends on personality.”

Less agreeable people seem to need more reminders that they should help out, said Dr Habashi:

“Personality matters.
It matters in how we structure our request for help, and it matters in how we respond to that request.
Helping is a result of several different processes running in sequence.
Each process contributes something different.
The way we ask for help -perspective taking — can influence our chances for getting it.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Habashi et al., 2016).

Category: Personality