Category: Personality

Wisdom can protect us from loneliness, anxiety and depression.

Wisdom — a modifiable personality trait — is linked to greater happiness, resilience, and mental well-being.

It is also linked to less depression, anxiety and loneliness.

Here are seven signs that you are a wise person:

1. You remain calm under pressure.
2. You do not postpone making major decisions.
3. You engage in self-reflection to understand myself.
4. You approach situations where your help may be needed.
5. You find it easy to give helpful advice to others.
6. You enjoy being exposed to diverse viewpoints.
7. Your spiritual beliefs give you inner strength.

Professor Dilip V. Jeste, study co-author, said:

“There are evidence-based interventions to increase levels of specific components of wisdom, which would help reduce loneliness and promote overall well-being.

Like the COVID-19 vaccine protects us from the novel coronavirus, wisdom can aid in protecting us from loneliness.

Thus, we can potentially help end a behavioral pandemic of loneliness, suicides and opioid abuse that has been going on for the last 20 years.”

The results come from a survey of over 2,000 people who were asked about seven major aspects of wisdom.

These are:

• self-reflection,
• pro-social behaviors (such as empathy, compassion and altruism),
• emotional regulation (understanding and controlling your emotions),
• acceptance of diverse perspectives,
• decisiveness,
• social advising (such as giving rational and helpful advice to others)
• and spirituality.

Increase your wisdom

Like many other personality traits, wisdom can be difficult to change, but not impossible.

Here are two examples of ways to increase components of wisdom.

1. Increase emotional control

One method that has been tested scientifically is to practice referring to yourself in the third-person (Weng et al., 2013).

Instead of saying “I feel hurt and angry,” a person might say to themselves, “He feels hurt and angry.”

The simple technique helps people distance themselves from the strong emotions they are feeling in the moment.

2. Increase compassion

Compassion, another component of wisdom, is also not something you either have or you don’t — it can (and should) be learned and nurtured.

Participants a one study took part in one-day course in loving kindness meditation to improve their self-compassion.

This helps foster benevolent and loving feelings towards the self and others.

After the self-compassion training, people felt better in themselves, were more compassionate towards others and there was more activation in the areas of the brain associated with love, affiliation and positive emotion.

→ Related: Decision-Making Skills: 16 Ways To Improve

The study was published in the journal International Psychogeriatrics (Thomas et al., 2021).

This personality trait is linked to living almost 8 years longer on average.

Optimists are most likely to hold positive beliefs about aging, researchers finds.

Critically, optimists believe they can control their lives and make improvements.

This means that believing in a healthy, engaged old age is a self-fulfilling prophecy — people with these views tend to experience better health and are more active and social.

Ms Shelbie Turner, the study’s first author, said:

“How we think about who we’re going to be in old age is very predictive of exactly how we will be.”

People who imagine themselves more positively at 50-years-old tend to have better health 40 years later, studies have found.

They are less likely to suffer a heart attack, have better memory, greater will to live and are less likely to die prematurely.

Professor Karen Hooker, study co-author, said:

“Previous research has shown that people who have positive views of aging at 50 live 7.5 years longer, on average, than people who don’t.”

For the study, 244 people were tested for their optimistic traits and for how they saw themselves in the future.

Each person listed two ‘hoped-for’ future selves and two ‘feared’ future selves.

For example, people feared being chronically sick and in pain and hoped to be healthy and active.

The results revealed that optimistic people were more positive about aging.

Overcoming ageist stereotypes

Older people are often stereotyped as suffering memory problems, having difficulty exercising and being poor drivers.

Professor Hooker said:

“Kids as young as 4 years old already have negative stereotypes about old people.

Then, of course, if you’re lucky enough to live to old age, they eventually apply to you.”

Even older people sometimes reinforce these stereotypes themselves in the way they behave and think about aging.

Professor Hooker said:

“People need to realize that some of the negative health consequences in later life might not be biologically driven.

The mind and the body are all interwoven.

If you believe these bad things are going to happen, over time that can erode people’s willingness or maybe even eventually their ability to engage in those health behaviors that are going to keep them as healthy as they can be.”

The social mixing of young and old would help generate positive views of aging, says Professor Hooker:

“The more you’re around older people, the more you realize that it’s not all bad.

Older people can do some things better than young people do. Increasing opportunities for intergenerational relationships is one way we can make people more optimistic about aging.”

Increase your optimism

People naturally become more optimistic with age, studies have found.

However, exercises such as visualising your ‘best possible self‘ have been shown to increase optimism in the short-term.

Visualising your best possible self may sound like an exercise in fantasy but, crucially, it does have to be realistic.

Carrying out this exercise typically involves imagining your life in the future, but a future where everything that could go well, has gone well.

You have reached those realistic goals that you have set for yourself.

Then, to help cement your visualisation, you commit your best possible self to paper.

The study was published in the The International Journal of Aging and Human Development (Turner & Hooker, 2020).

When a perfectionist slips up, they criticise themselves too much and can experience burnout and depression.

Being self-compassionate is one of the best remedies for a perfectionist personality, research finds.

Learning self-acceptance helps protect the type of perfectionists who are highly self-critical from depression.

Some perfectionists are very worried about making mistakes and push themselves too hard to succeed.

When a perfectionist slips up, they criticise themselves too much and can experience burnout and depression.

However, perfectionists who are self-compassionate and self-accepting are less likely to get depressed.

The conclusion comes from a study of 541 adolescents and 515 adults.

All were given tests of perfectionism, depression and self-compassion.

Dr Madeleine Ferrari, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Self-compassion, the practice of self-kindness, consistently reduces the strength of the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression for both adolescents and adults.”

The study’s authors explain how self-compassion is helpful:

“…self-compassion is ‘a useful emotion regulation strategy, in which painful or distressing feelings are not avoided but are instead held in awareness with kindness, understanding, and a sense of shared humanity’.

Thus, instead of avoiding social comparisons or overcompensating for negative feelings about the self through futile attempts to attain a higher social rank, the cultivation of self-compassion might help individuals to unconditionally accept ones’ failings.”

The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Ferrari et al., 2018).

Facts about personality include that people can smell your personality, helpful people have more sex and what underlies personality disorders.

The psychological study of personality reveals patterns in how we behave and interact with other people and experience the world ourselves.

Many of the facts from personality psychology are surprising.

Here are a few fun facts that psychological research has uncovered:

1. People can smell your personality

People can guess your personality by simply smelling your t-shirt.

The study showed that people were as accurate at guessing personality when smelling their clothes as when watching a video of them.

Not all personality traits were easy to spot, though.

The researchers found that people were good at identifying these three personality traits:

• neuroticism,
• extraversion,
• and dominance.

2. Helpful people have more sex

People who help others out have more sex.

The more altruistic people are, the more sexual partners they have and the more frequently they have sex.

Could it be, then, that being nice to other people is the ultimate aphrodisiac?

Who would have thought this was a fact about personality?

Professor Steven Arnocky, the study’s first author, said:

“It appears that altruism evolved in our species, in part, because it serves as a signal of other underlying desirable qualities, which helps individuals reproduce.”

3. Fact: optimists report higher quality of life

Optimists report higher levels of mental and physical functioning than pessimists, research reveals.

Dr Toshihiko Maruta, the study’s first author, said:

“The wellness of being is not just physical, but attitudinal.

How you perceive what goes on around you and how you interpret it may have an impact on your longevity, and it could affect the quality of your later years.”

Researchers studied 447 people who were followed over 30 years.

Their personality was assessed, along with their physical and mental functioning.

It turned out that pessimists had a lower quality of life, on average.

4. People read personality in your movement

The way people move could provide a unique insight into their personality.

People who move in similar ways display better collective behaviour.

The researchers think this means that people who move the same way will be able to interact more effectively as well.

This interesting study suggests that each person has an ‘individual motor signature’ which defines how they move.

5. Being in love reduces neuroticism

Falling in love helps to stabilise the personalities of people who are neurotic.

Love helps people who think pessimistically to approach life with more confidence and see events in a more positive light.

Neuroticism is explained by Dr Christine Finn, the study’s first author:

“Neurotic people are rather anxious, insecure, and easily annoyed.

They have a tendency towards depression, often show low self-esteem and tend to be generally dissatisfied with their lives.

However, we were able to show that they become more stable in a love relationship, and that their personality stabilizes.”

6. Feeling entitled leads to disappointment

The personality trait of entitlement can lead to chronic disappointment.

Entitlement is believing you are better than others and deserve more than them.

Unfortunately, people who feel entitled often enter a spiral of habitual behaviour that is toxic.

From anger they tend to lash out at others, blaming them.

At the same time they continue to tell themselves that they are special.

7. People get nicer as they get older

People get nicer as they get older, in contrast to the stereotype of the grumpy senior.

The fact may be a surprise to those that believe people never change.

They do — even if only a little.

The three main changes to personality that occur, on average, with age are that people get:

• more conscientious,
• more agreeable,
• and less neurotic (moody).

8. Fear of the unknown related to anxiety disorders

Fear of the unknown is the personality trait that underlies many anxiety disorders.

Social anxiety, panic disorder and specific phobias all have fear of the unknown at their heart.

Someone who is sensitive to uncertainty may spend a lot of time worrying what is going to happen to them.

For example, people with panic disorder are constantly worrying that they are going to panic.

9. People read our personalities with one glance

People read a surprising amount into our faces, just from one glance.

Men who have large noses, square jaws and small eyes, are apparently telling the world they prefer short-term relationships, research finds.

Women with larger lips and wide eyes are sending the same short-term relationship signal — whether they like it or not.

10. Narcissists like bitter foods

Having a preference for bitter tastes is linked to psychopathy, narcissism and everyday sadism.

This fun fact about personality suggest that a predilection for tonic water or coffee, therefore, could indicated some psychopathic tendencies in a person’s personality.

In contrast, people who dislike bitter tastes tend to be more agreeable, the researchers discovered.

11. Optimists live longer

Being positive has been linked to living longer by research.

People lived longer if they were more:

• optimistic about the future,
• closer to other people,
• decisive,
• and felt more useful and relaxed.

Those who scored in the top sixth for being positive were 18 percent less likely to die over the next four years.

Other facts about a person linked to living longer included getting married and having a degree.

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Around one-in-five people are thought to have this personality type.

People who experience a lot of negative emotions and do not express them have more mental and physical health problems, research finds.

This is known to psychologists as a ‘type D’ personality: the ‘D’ stands for distressed.

People with a type D personality are likely to agree with statements like, “I am often down in the dumps”.

They are also likely to demonstrate social inhibition by agreeing with statements like, “I am a closed kind of person”.

Type D people are fearful of rejection if they express their negative emotions.

Around one-in-five people is thought to have a type D personality.

The study found that people who were type D tended not to report their health problems to a physician or nurse.

The study’s authors write:

“Type D patients were shown to report lower levels of health status, more cardiac symptoms, and more feelings of disability, when compared with non-Type D patients high on positive affect.”

The study involved 276 heart failure patients.

The results showed that heart failure patients who also had a type D personality were six times more likely to be in a worse state of health.

The study was published in the journal Quality of Life Research (Pelle et al., 2009).