Category: Personality

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).

How Facebook updates can reveal narcissism and low self-esteem.

People habitually posting to Facebook about exercise, diets and accomplishments are more likely to be narcissists, a study finds.

And bragging about accomplishments does tend to attract more attention from friends.

The study’s first author, Dr Tara Marshall, said:

“Although our results suggest that narcissists’ bragging pays off because they receive more likes and comments to their status updates, it could be that their Facebook friends politely offer support while secretly disliking such egotistical displays.

Greater awareness of how one’s status updates might be perceived by friends could help people to avoid topics that annoy more than they entertain.”

The study also found that people who post updates about their current romantic partner are more likely to have low self-esteem.

People who are more conscientious tended to write more updates about their children.

Here are some other associations the study found between personality and Facebook use:

“…extraverts more frequently updated about their social activities and everyday life, which was motivated by their use of Facebook to communicate and connect with others.

People high in openness were more likely to update about intellectual topics, consistent with their use of Facebook for sharing information.”  (Marshall et al., 2015).

The conclusions come from surveys of 555 Facebook users.

Dr Marshall continued:

“It might come as little surprise that Facebook status updates reflect people’s personality traits.

However, it is important to understand why people write about certain topics on Facebook because their updates may be differentially rewarded with ‘likes’ and comments.

People who receive more likes and comments tend to experience the benefits of social inclusion, whereas those who receive none feel ostracised.

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Marshall et al., 2015).

Psychopaths, narcissists, egoists, sadists and other nasty people all share one dark personality trait.

A ‘dark core’ personality is shared by every nasty person, research finds.

Whether they are psychopaths, narcissists, egoists, sadists or spiteful people, they all share the same tendency to put themselves before others in the worst possible way.

Nine dark personality types all turned out to have this core of callous selfishness, involving total disregard for the rights of others.

However, psychopaths, narcissist, sadists and the rest express their dark core in slightly different ways.

All, though, justify their amoral behaviours to themselves to avoid feeling guilty about them.

Dr Ingo Zettler, study co-author, explains the D-factor:

“…the dark aspects of human personality have a common denominator, which means that — similar to intelligence — one can say that they are all an expression of the same dispositional tendency.

For example, in a given person, the D-factor can mostly manifest itself as narcissism, psychopathy or one of the other dark traits, or a combination of these.

But with our mapping of the common denominator of the various dark personality traits, one can simply ascertain that the person has a high D-factor.

This is because the D-factor indicates how likely a person is to engage in behaviour associated with one or more of these dark traits.”

The results come from a series of studies of over 2,500 people.

All were asked whether they agreed with statements like:

• “It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to see others receive the punishment they deserve.”
• “I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so.”

The study explored the following nine dark personality factors:

1. Egoism
2. Machiavellianism
3. Moral disengagement
4. Narcissism
5. Psychological entitlement
6. Psychopathy
7. Sadism
8. Self-interest
9. Spitefulness

The results showed that at their core, each of the dark personality factors had much in common.

People who have the dark core factor are also likely to have the behaviours of multiple dark personality types.

People with this dark factor are all around us, said Dr Zettler:

“We see it, for example, in cases of extreme violence, or rule-breaking, lying, and deception in the corporate or public sectors.

Here, knowledge about a person’s D-factor may be a useful tool, for example to assess the likelihood that the person will reoffend or engage in more harmful behaviour.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Review (Moshagen et al., 2018).

People with this personality trait live an average of two to four years longer.

People who are conscientious have stronger immune systems and live the longest lives, research finds.

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

Highly conscientious people live an average of two to four years longer.

They are also less likely to smoke or drink and experience lower levels of stress.

Two aspects of conscientiousness have the strongest link to a long life:

• a preference for order,
• and an orientation towards achievement.

Now, a new study finds that the link is at least partly explained by the immune system.

People higher in conscientiousness have lower levels of a biological marker called interleukin-6, which is linked to inflammation in the body.

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

“Our personality is critically important throughout our lives, from early stages in our development, to the accumulation of the impact of how we think, feel, and behave across our lives, and in the years preceding our death.

It is also becoming increasingly apparent how important personality actually is for our long-term health and resulting longevity.

For instance, it has been shown that people scoring lower on the personality trait of conscientiousness (a tendency to be responsible, organized, and capable of self-control) can be at a 40% increased risk of future death compared to their higher scoring counterparts.

What is not clear is how this could happen, and importantly, what biological pathway might be responsible for this link.”

The study included 957 adults who were tracked over 14 years.

Dr Ó Súilleabháin 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.”

Other personality traits linked to a stronger immune system include extraversion and being emotionally stable.

→ Read on: How to change your personality.

The study was published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity (O’Súilleabháin et al., 2021).