Category: Personality

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).

There are two types of extroverts, each with distinct brain anatomies.

There are two different types of extroverts — ‘agentic’ and ‘affiliative’ — each with distinct brain structures, research finds.

Agentic extroverts are ‘go-getters’: the kind of outgoing people who are persistent, assertive and focused on achievement.

The other kind of extroverts have a softer side.

Affiliative extroverts tend to be more affectionate, friendly and sociable.

Both types of extroverts share distinct brain anatomy as well as displaying distinct differences, the new research finds.

Dr Tara White, the study’s first author, said that extroverts in general are keen to share:

“These are people just sharing with you how they tend to experience the world and what’s important to them.

The fact that that’s validated in the brain is really exciting. There’s a deep reality there.

This is the first glimpse of a benchmark of what the healthy adult brain looks like with these traits.”

Scanning for types of extrovert

For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 83 people to look for similarities and differences in key areas of the brain.

They found that both types of extroverts had more gray matter in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

This area of the brain has been linked to making decisions based on rewards.

Agentic extroverts, though, had larger volumes in some other areas as well.

These were related to learning and memory for reward, cognitive control of behaviours and planning and execution.

The study can’t tell us whether these areas are the cause of the personality differences or the result of them, or perhaps some combination of the two.

The study’s authors concluded:

“[The] findings provide a developmental benchmark from which to better understand the etiology of problems in agentic extroversion and affiliative extroversion, such as can occur in normal aging and neurodegenerative disease.”

The study is published in the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience (Grodin & White, 2015).