Discover which Big Five traits drive people to give or volunteer.
Acting out this personality trait makes people feel happier.
Acting out this personality trait makes people feel happier.
Acting like an extravert makes people feel happier — even natural introverts.
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.
‘Faux’ extraverts (people who are really introverts) reported no problems acting as extraverts.
Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, the study’s first author, said:
“The findings suggest that changing one’s social behavior is a realizable goal for many people, and that behaving in an extraverted way improves well-being.”
For the study, 123 people were asked to act like extraverts for one week and introverts for another week.
During the extravert week, participants were told to be talkative, assertive and spontaneous.
During the introvert week, they were told to be more deliberate, quiet and reserved.
People were informed that acting like an introvert and like an extravert is beneficial.
This was to try and dampen the effects of participants’ expectations.
The results showed that people felt better after a week acting as an extravert and worse after the week as an introvert.
The positive effect on well-being is the largest known among happiness interventions.
Surprisingly, acting like an extravert seems to cause people’s personality to shift in that direction.
Professor Lyubomirsky said:
“It showed that a manipulation to increase extraverted behavior substantially improved well-being.
Manipulating personality-relevant behavior over as long as a week may be easier than previously thought, and the effects can be surprisingly powerful.”
The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2019).
Research uncovers when perfectionism is a strength and when it is a liability.
One personality trait is linked to understanding other people’s feelings.
This personality trait increases the odds of reaching 85-years-old by up to 70 percent.
Around one-in-five people are thought to have this personality type.
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.
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).
This character trait is linked to a high IQ.
This character trait is linked to a high IQ.
Being conscientious is linked to having a high IQ, but only among females.
People who are conscientious are more careful, efficient and self-disciplined — and they aim for achievement.
Among males, however, those who are more careless and indifferent have higher IQs.
The study of school children also found that introverts who are conscientious get the best grades.
Fear may also be a factor in driving up grades, the Swedish research found, since neurotic pupils got better grades.
Neurotic people tend to worry more, which may motivate them to work harder if their worries are stoked by the system.
Ms Pia Rosander, the study’s first author, said:
“We have a school system in Sweden that favours conscientious and fear-driven pupils.
It is not good for psychological well-being in the long term if fear is a driving force.
It also prevents in-depth learning, which happens best among the open personality types who are driven by curiosity.”
The study included 200 pupils entering secondary school at 16 who were followed for three years.
The results revealed that girls who were eager to please got better grades.
On the other hand, boys were more likely to be curious, but the system tended not to feed their curiosity.
Ms Rosander said:
“Greater conscientiousness, i.e. getting things done, arriving on time, etc. may be a way for boys to compensate for a lower IQ.”
The study also found that introverts get better grades, probably because extraverts have so much to distract them.
Ms Rosander said:
“My studies clearly show that the school system needs to be more individualised.
How else can we support talented pupils with the ‘wrong’ personality type, those we call under-performers, who are capable but lack the ability to plan their school work, for example?”
The study was published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences (Rosander et al., 2011).
The study underlines the surprising resilience of the human mind in the face of life’s tragedies.
The study underlines the surprising resilience of the human mind in the face of life’s tragedies.
People get more optimistic as they get older.
From the age of 15 until mid-life, people’s optimism tends to increase and remains at a high until they reach their 60s or 70s, when it starts to drop again.
Even health problems, divorce and bereavement fail to dent people’s fundamental optimism.
The study underlines the surprising resilience of the human mind in the face of life’s tragedies.
Dr William Chopik, the study’s first author, said:
“We found that optimism continued to increase throughout young adulthood, seemed to steadily plateau and then decline into older adulthood.
Even people with fairly bad circumstances, who have had tough things happen in their lives, look to their futures and life ahead and felt optimistic.”
The study included 75,000 people in the US, Germany and the Netherlands.
They were asked about their levels of optimism, along with life events such as new jobs, marriage, divorce and bereavements.
Dr Chopik was surprised by how the most serious life events affected people’s optimism:
“Counterintuitively — and most surprising — we found that really hard things like deaths and divorce really didn’t change a person’s outlook to the future.
This shows that a lot of people likely subscribe to the ‘life is short’ mantra and realize they should focus on things that make them happy and maintain emotional balance.”
The results showed that, on average, people become more optimistic between 15 and 60 or 70 years old.
Dr Chopik said:
“There’s a massive stretch of life during which you keep consistently looking forward to things and the future.
Part of that has to do with experiencing success both in work and life.
You find a job, you meet your significant other, you achieve your goals and so on.
You become more autonomous and you are somewhat in control of your future; so, you tend to expect things to turn out well.”
Old age brings a decline in optimism as people face health concerns and their own death.
Nevertheless, people do not become fully fledged pessimists, said Dr Chopik:
“Retirement age is when people can stop working, have time to travel and to pursue their hobbies.
But very surprisingly, people didn’t really think that it would change the outlook of their lives for the better.”
People’s resilience is remarkable, Dr Chopik said:
“We oftentimes think that the really sad or tragic things that happen in life completely alter us as people, but that’s not really the case.
You don’t fundamentally change as a result of terrible things; people diagnosed with an illness or those who go through another crisis still felt positive about the future and what life had ahead for them on the other side.”
The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Chopik et al., 2020).
Grit is the determination to put in the months or even years of effort to succeed at a goal.
Grit is the determination to put in the months or even years of effort to succeed at a goal.
Grit is more about passion than personality.
It is not just about being born or brought up with a ‘gritty’ personality.
Everyone can find the determination in themselves to succeed if they have passion for their goal.
Developing a passion for a goal is linked to a kind of adaptive perfectionism.
Adaptive perfectionism means perfectionism with some level of obsession, but not so much that it is ultimately destructive.
Setting oneself attainable goals is one of the keys to avoiding destructive perfectionism.
The conclusions come from a study of 251 students who completed a series of questions about grit.
People with high levels of grit tend to agree with statements like:
Ms Danielle Cormier, the study’s first author, said:
“We wanted to know whether people bring grit to every aspect of their life, or if they are gritty athletes or gritty students, or even a gritty parent or a gritty hobbyist.”
It emerged that people were more gritty in specific areas of their life, rather than being gritty overall.
In other words, some students were passionate about their academic studies and they did better at those.
Others were more passionate about sports, so they did better at those.
Ms Cormier said:
“It seems grit is best conceptualized as a domain-specific trait, and not in general, which is how the field has been measuring grit since it was conceptualized.”
A growth mindset is key to success, Ms Cormier said:
“Instead of thinking talents are fixed, like believing your intelligence is just the way it is, a growth mindset allows you to believe that intelligence, or other character traits and talents, can be grown.
In order to do that you must embrace failures and setbacks, because without any of those learning opportunities, you’re not going to get better.
Everyone has an element of grit in them, it is just finding that passion.”
The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Cormier et al., 2019).
This personality trait is linked to mental health problems.
This personality trait is linked to mental health problems.
Being impulsive can be a sign of poor mental health.
People who are impulsive tend to prefer a small immediate reward over a larger reward later on.
Impulsive people tend to act on their immediate thoughts and emotions without thinking about the consequences.
In other words, impulsive people want to have fun now, not later — even if waiting is more sensible.
People who are depressed, have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or some eating disorders are more likely to be impulsive.
Psychologists can measure this type of impulsivity with a test of ‘delay discounting’.
Delay discounting is the idea that people tend to discount a reward more, the longer the delay until they receive it.
So, psychologically, $5 right now is worth more than $10 in three weeks time.
Or, as the proverb has it: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
People who can delay their gratification find it easier to wait for their rewards.
However, people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder find it particularly hard to delay gratification.
The conclusions come from a review of 43 separate studies.
Dr Michael Amlung, the study’s first author, said:
“The revelation that delay discounting is one of these ‘trans-diagnostic’ processes will have a significant effect on the future of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment.”
Among people with mental health problems, though, anorexia was the exception.
People with anorexia tend to make excessively self-controlling decisions.
This makes sense given that anorexia is a disorder characterised by a very high level of self-control over eating behaviours.
Professor Randi McCabe, study co-author, said:
“Examining factors that cut across psychiatric disorders, such as delay discounting, helps to illuminate commonalities and distinguishing characteristics amongst disorders that then guide further research on treatment and prevention.”
The study was published in JAMA Psychiatry (Amlung et al., 2019).
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