Tag Archives: Trait theory

The ABCD of Personality Structure

Regular readers of The Mouse Trap would be aware of my ABCD model of psychology whereby all psychological phenomena are explained in terms of Affective, Behavioral, Cognitive and Dynamic/Desire dimensions.

Personality Traits from SignalPatterns.com

Personality Traits from SignalPatterns.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The affective dimensions is also related to sensory processes; the behavioral dimension to motor processes; the cognitive dimension to associative processes and the desire/dynamic/motives dimension to social processes.

We are increasingly focusing on brain as a means to study psychological phenomena and thus four major divisions of neurosciences are affective neurosciences, behavioral neurosciences, social neurosciences and cognitive neurosciences.

Now, I have written extensively about personality, especially in relation to emotions, and have written a series of posts about the structure of personality traits and the underlying basic emotions. I have also tangentially touched upon or used ABCD and the fundamental four model while coming up with those previous posts; but today’s post is exclusively focused on the ABCD model and its utility for delineating personality traits.

Before we move onto personality traits, lets refresh our knowledge of brain structure. As per a controversial theory of brain structure, by Paul McLean, brain can be divided into a reptilian brain,a paleomammalian brain/ limbic brain and a neomammilain brain/neocortex; for our purpose the details of the model need not be true. However, one thing that McLean postulated was that older brain regions are in control of newer regions and if newer brain regions malfunction/ do not exercise control the behavior due to older system may get activated. Hughlings Jackson had surmised the same earlier and this is the part I will be focusing on.

Consider an earlier brain part that controls movement; (this may be mostly instinctual responding or impulsive initiation) ; a later brain part may inhibit and lead to better response/ proactive action that is well considered/ planned. I will call these two instances bottom-up effects and top-down effects on movement respectively.

With this in mind lets start a deeper look at the ABCD.

  1. Affective/sensory: This would be related to detecting unexpected stimuli or looking out for expected stimuli.
    1. The bottom up process of detecting incoming stimuli is enhanced by level of arousal. High arousal leads to better detection and low arousal to lesser detection; people may differ in their natural arousal levels and I guess you know where I am going with this-the introversion- eXtraversion dimension.
    2. The top down process of looking out for (potentially harmful) stimuli may lead to worry or anxiety. High Anxiety may help in vigilant detection, while lower anxiety to lapses in detecting harmful stimuli; the natural variation in this may be the trait Emotionally stable-Neuroticism( Emotionality). Anxiety remember was one of the dimensions discovered by Gray as relevant to personality.
  2. Behavioral/Motor:   This would be related to initiating action or responding to stimuli.
    1. The bottom up process here would lead to Impulsivity , another dimension elaborated on by Gray. The personality trait relevant here would be Impulsive Sensation Seeking as defined by Zuckerman.
    2. The top down process here would lead to Inhibition; when that process does not work, the low pole would be disinhibition (which is distinct from impulsivity). In FFM/HEXACO , this trait may be labeled as Conscientiousness and is related to strength of self-regulation.
  3. Drives/Social:  This would be related to interactions with others and the motives behind them – either to help others or the reciprocate a previous help.
    1. The bottom up process here is reactive reciprocation; or aggression in case of deception/defection by the other. The one end of this pole will be characterized by Aggression and hostility while the other pole by nice and reciprocal behavior and this leads us right on to Agreeableness dimension.
    2. The top down or expectation driven process here would be trusting and helping others on the one pole (in hope of reciprocation) and manipulating, hurting or exploiting people on the other. this naturally leads us to Honesty-humility dimension of HEXACO and the opposite pole that I believe is the dark tetrad of sadism, Machiavellianism, narcissism and sadism.
  4. Cognitive/ associative : This would be related to the tendency to make and use broad vis–vis narrow associations while doing information processing.
    1. The bottom up process here could be related to distractibility vis-a-vis focus. Some people may be easily distracted/ form loose associations and this may lead to Openness to experience in them; others may be more closed to new information. I think of this as the encoding process.
    2. The top down process here could be related to imagining novel associations between concepts etc. I would say this is a new dimension called Imagination dimension (Scott Barry Kaufman would be happy to hear:-)) .  At one end would be daydreamers and creative folks , at the other end more pragmatic/ reality oriented folks. I relate this to retrieval process. As this trait may still be evolving, we see psychosis related to this- imaginations/ top down processes overpowering reality orientation. this may also explain the association of creativity and mental illness.

 

I am happy with this personality structure organization with eight traits, instead of the usual five, that I have come up with. It has a solid theoretical rationale and a lot of thinking has gone into it; of course empirical work will prove whether its true or not and whether it stands the test of time!!

emotions and personality: take 6

Cover of "Personality Disorders in Modern...

Cover of Personality Disorders in Modern Life

 

Today I learned that Theodore Millon died. I started reading ” personality disorders in modern life” as a tribute to him, but the monkey mind that mine is, ended up writing this post instead.

 

To recall, Theodore Millon’s model talked about four fundamental evolutionary problems faced by all humans: 1) existence 2) adaptation 3) replication and 4)  abstraction. There were also two polar ways of approaching each fundamental problem; that of pleasure-pain; activity-passivity; self-other and I added to it the fourth polarity of broad-narrow. Anyway those polarities need not concern us for this post.

 

There is an influential model of emotions – the PAD model which views emotions, not as discrete basic emotions, but as dimensional in nature and thus different emotions differ from each other not as entities in themselves, but as graded multi-dimensional affects.

 

To elaborate, while the lay man may think of emotions as a few basic discrete emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, love, wonder, disgust, fear , interest etc. , as per this theory the emotions are complex graded amalgamations of a few basic fundamental dimensions.

 

As per this PAD theory, the first dimension is valence / pleasure/ pleasantness etc. which tells us whether the emotion colloquially feels ‘good’ or ‘bad’ . As we all know , no emotion by itself is bad; negative emotions have their own benefits, if invoked for a short amount of time and are situation specific; and the benefits of positive emotions is self-evident. BTW, some people consider ‘flow’ which is a sort of neutral emotional condition to be better that either.

 

The second dimension is Arousal/ energy/ vigor etc which tells us how strong the emotion is and how much it arouses us. Some emotions like courage arouse greatly (not just the person displaying courage, but also subtly the people witnessing it) while other emotions can have a calming effect (like love and compassion { depends what sort of love one is talking about 🙂 } )

 

The third dimension is dominance/ potency etc. and to my mind represents the ability of emotion to take control of you (/ others ? ). The immediate example that springs to mind is anger, but then so can be interest/ fascination. In either case, you empower your emotions to rule over you than vice versa.

 

The for-now-final dimension that I (and others) have added to the PAD model is predictiviness/transparency of the emotion:  whether it is hard to predict/ discern in oneself/ others or is consistently and transparently available to self/ others.

 

How does this relate to personality?

 

While reading the first chapter of Millon, I had the insight that one analogous personality dimensional structure we can talk about is as follows:

 

1) Strength/ existence of personality: whether one has ‘a personality’ / quirks in the first place. How (ab) normal one is; where one fits on the normal curve of personality traits distribution. Analogous to emotions, personality quirks have a function; those familiar with evolutionary theory will know why outliers are necessary for survival (of the species).

 

2) Fitness/ adaptability of personality : whether one can fit in with the social norms/ changing landscapes. Lay men think of people in terms of having a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ personality; in reality people are just responding to the environment and adapting. The behavior of some people is flexible, while for many its more rigid.

 

3) Centrality/ hold of personality: whether the quirks that make you unique form the average person, are central to your self-definition or have peripheral value; whether you want to shape/ influence/ mold loved others (like spouse, child etc)  as per your values or are OK with the differences.

 

4) Consistency/ integrity of personality: whether you are consistent in your thoughts, words, actions etc. or are comfortable with contradictions. (as and aside, a philosophical question is whether there is consistency behind contradictions and contradiction behind {apparent} consistency). With the cognitive revolution, much focus has shifted here. Using a information processing metaphor, much of new personality research like Daryl Bem‘s self-perception theory or Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory revolve around the idea of being consistent; either by changing your behavior or your self-image or maybe the language and words you use etc. etc. For eg. my counseling teacher used to say you can either be as comfortable as Gandhi (who he said used to sleep peacefully like a child whenever he got some time) or you can be as uncomfortable as OSHO.

 

So how does this relate to my ABCD model (or even the PAD model outlined above??) ? I’ll leave that as a homework exercise for regular readers. For now, let me just briefly touch upon the terms we use in personality research.

 

1. Temperament : more about what ‘Nature’ has endowed you with. He has an ‘irritable temperament’

 

2. Character : more about how ‘Nurture’ has shaped this character.

 

3. Personality: more about what ‘passions’ drive you.

 

4. Image: more about being ‘prudent’.

 

Let me elaborate. I have previously blogged about false dichotomies. I believe Nature Vs Nurture is a false dichotomy.  Everyone knows that. What about the new dichotomy I am introducing (Passion vs. Prudence) ?  As I mention in my false dichotomy blog post, Passion is about habits- using the power of your sub/ un-conscious mind – choosing for once , by way of habits, rituals etc. what you want to choose in times of crisis (on auto-pilot etc.). Prudence is about trying to reason, using whatever information is available at hand (including your gut reactions)- not necessarily conscious- but using bounded rationality- coming to a decision afresh at each choice point.

 

As I had mentioned in my false dichotomy post, Passion via prudence is more about making meaningful choices and a belief in choice/ free will. Nature via Nurture is all about proving the right environment to people to make their best attributes shine out. Running out of how to phrase ({Passion via Prudence} via {Nature via Nurture}) and what it is all about. Maybe you can help?

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Structure of childhood temperaments

An infant

An infant (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Infants’ and children’s personality structure is studied by studying their ‘temperaments’. To me, personality structure enfolds over time and there are some traits that are more genetic and heritable in nature while the remaining are more self-chosen and under self-control. The former may be named more temperamental in nature,  while the latter may be named more character strengths like.

A model of personality that subsumes but artificially divdes the personality traits into temperaments and character traits is the Cloninger‘s TCI based model of personality. Although popular and theory based, it at times lacks empirical support.

Infant and child psychologists, study personality under the rubric of temperament, as it is assumed that much of the child’s personality is due to genetics and developmental influences are not yet strong/influential enough.

So what are the popular models of childhood temperaments? A synthesis is provided by Zuckerman in his influential book “Psychobiology of personality”. He discusses the models of many influential child theorists and comes to the final list of 6 temperaments that are most relevant/common across schema.

These are (in a developmentally unfolding order (as per me)) :

  1. Negative emotionality – gets upset and cries easily, is easily frightened and/or has a quick temper, and is not easygoing
  2. Approach (sensation seeking) – Approach towards cues of reward or novelty with positive affect 
  3. Activity (energy/vigor)- always on the go from the time of waking, cannot sit still for long, fidgets at meals and similar occasions, prefers active games to quiet ones 
  4. Persistence (perseverance) – The length of time a particular activity is pursued and the continuation in an activity in spite of attempts at interference 
  5. Anger/frustration – Frustration/ anger in response to goal-blocking
  6. Sociability – likes to be with others, makes friends easily, prefers to play with others rather than alone, is not shy.
To this list I would like to add:
  1. Impulsivity (spontaneity)- difficulty in learning self-control and resistance to temptation, gets bored easily, goes from toy to toy quickly.
  2. Sensitivity (sentimentality) – The intensity of stimulation in any sensory modality that is necessary to evoke a response
The reason the above two might not have been noticed by temperamental researchers is because they may unfold/differentiate only at later stage when effort-full control or executive control develops.
This also neatly aligns the temperaments with the eight fold evo-devo theory and the four polarities of Millon.

 

To boot, the first four temperaments are a dynamics between the polarities of approach(pleasure) – withdrawal (pain) vis-a-vis the polarity of arousal (active) and inhibition (passive).

Similarly, the last four temperaments can be conceived of as the dynamics between self/other and being broadly or narrowly focused and engaged.

To elaborate, the first group of temperaments can be associated with avoidance motivation and the last group with approach motivation. In the former, a sensitivity to feel threatening stimuli painfully leads to negative emotionality or Fear; while when derives pleasure from the same one feels Thrill/excitement/surprise and has sensation seeking or approach temperament. Similarly, a sensitivity to approach the desirable stimuli actively by showing Activity or passively by showing interest (from a distance) leads to the other two dimensions.

Similar dynamic exists for e.g. for anger/frustration and sociability – when one is governed by social concerns and is focused on others (con-specifics) , at times of conflicts/stress one may fight/show aggression or utilize the strategy of tend/befriend. The inclination towards former results in aggressive/conduct disorder/anti-social temperaments; while a propensity for latter results in agreeable/sociable temperaments.

Similarly, one can hypothesize that when one is self-focused and in pursuit of solitary activities, one either is very internally driven, impulsive and spontaneous; or one is more externally sensitive to context and is still socially conformant.

Finally, here are the mappings between childhood temperaments and adult personality traits as per me:

  1. -ve emotionality: Neuroticism
  2. Sensation seeking/approach:  Extraversion
  3. Activity : Extraversion
  4. Persistence: Conscientiousness   
  5. Anger/frustration: Non-conformity
  6. Sociability: Agreeableness
  7. Implusivity: Extraversion
  8. Sensitivity: Neurotincism
The above assumes a five factor model of adult personality with non-conformity replacing Openness to experience as the fifth factor in the FFM/OCEAN model. In the next post I’ll address the latest/most reasonable structure of adult personality. 
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Personality and Motivation

ResearchBlogging.org

Agreeableness by state
Image via Wikipedia

I have blogged extensively about personality and how it may be related to emotions. A common theme underlying my discussion of personality and emotion has been these traits/states arising as a result of adaptation to basic evolutionary tasks or problems that each living organism/species has to solve. Where there are problems to be solved or tasks to be accomplished or goals to be achieved,  there is also going to be motivations and drive to achieve them and underlying needs that drive that pursuit. Thus motivation and Personality/ emotion are also intricately linked and associated when one uses the underlying basic adaptive problems paradigm.

In my last post I had mentioned that Personality can be discussed in just descriptive terms as in trait theories, the most famous of which is the five factor model of personality or one could look at the underlying processes and mechanism and come up with theories that are grounded in motivational or cognitive terms as to what actually drives the behavior in consistence with the observable traits and behaviors.

I have recently come across an important paper in my view which tried to bridge this gap by explaining the motivational systems (or reaction norms as they call it) underlying the five factor model of personality.

To recall, the five factor model or OCEAN model posits the following five factors:

  1. Neuroticism or sensitivity to negative affect
  2. Conscientiousness or ability to delay gratification and persist with task at hand
  3. Extraversion: propensity to socialize and be more outgoing
  4. Agreeableness: empathetic and cooperativeness
  5. Openness to Experience: Intellect and curiosity etc.

Now, I have elaborated or tried to explain the OCEAN  traits as per my understanding, but Dennissen and Penke looked at how prominent personality researchers have interpreted the traits to arrive at a common motivational framework that is grounded in theory and then they developed a scale in accordance with theory to measure  these motivational  reaction norms – the important difference from tradition FFM message scales being that all statements referred to underlying motivations/ propensities etc and did not refer to specific behaviors in specific situations.  They then subjected their scale to factor analysis that came with a five factor structure that was consistent with FFM and also had predictive validity of similar sorts. They thus conclude that their theoretical framework is on the right track.

There are of course problems with such can interpretation, but I found some of their motivational reaction norms pretty consistent with my basic adaptive problems and basic developmental life tasks paradigm, while some I could find were slightly different or more nuanced interpretations.

Looking at the original data set of 9 personalty researchers from where they derived this framework, some of these I could resolve to my satisfaction.

Neuroticism is interpreted as sensitivity to social rejection/exclusion. I have problems with this interpretation in that focuses too much on social dimension, while to me it is general sensitivity to threat/stress.  In their paper they do discuss this:

As can be seen in Table 1, almost all theorists link neuroticism to individual differences in affect regulation, conceptualizing this factor as differences in the ability to handle stress (Buss, 1991), facilitation of performance under pressure (Hogan, 1996), affect regulation (McAdams, 1992; van Lieshout, 2000), and affect intensity. These conceptualizations all regard neuroticism as the sensitivity of a domain-general system to respond to environmental threats. Various studies have also linked neuroticism to individual differences in general differential reactivity to negative events or stressors.
I like the above interpretation of Neuroticism as it is consistent with the adaptive problem of avoiding Foes. However, the authors  chose this interpretation over the above:

By comparison, other conceptualizations treat neuroticismas a trait that is especially activated in situations in which people’s social relationships are threatened. For example, Matthews (2004) pointed out that ‘‘individual differences in human anxiety revolve primarily around social fears such as being criticized or rejected, rather than physical threats” (p. 260, italics added). Support for this conceptualization comes from research by Bolger and colleagues (1989), who found that interpersonal stressors were more important in causing negative mood than non-social ones, such as transportation problems or work overload. Similarly, Denissen and Penke (in press) found that neuroticism was particularly correlated with the intensity of people’s negative reactions to social threats.

Conscientiousness did not have many interpretations:

All theorists listed in Table 1 agree that conscientiousness is involved in task-related behaviors. Speci?cally, McAdams (1992) conceptualizes this factor as involved in work-related behaviors, MacDonald (1995) as the monitoring of non-attainment of goals, van Lieshout (2000) as executive regulation in the performance domain, Ashton and Lee (2001) as the intensity of engagement in task-related behaviors, Buss (1991) as the capacity for reliable work and enduring commitment, and Hogan (1996) as trustworthiness and dependability. Holmes (2002) and Nettle (2006) are arguably most successful in capturing the positive aspects of both poles of the conscientiousness continuum by describing it as the promotion of immediate vs. distant goal striving. This conceptualization nicely maps onto lifespan-theoretical insights regarding individual differences in the tenacity of goal pursuit  (Brandtstädter,Wentura, & Rothermund, 1999). In the current paper, we adopt the view of these various authors that conscientiousness can be plausibly conceptualized as differences in the tenacity of goal pursuit.

To me the goal pursuit tenacity bodes well for adaptive problem of finding Food or exploring.

Extraversion seems to have multiple interpretations, all to my eyes equally valid.:

In Table 1, three clusters of conceptualizations of extraversion emerge. First, van Lieshout (2000) conceptualizes this factor as re?ecting a person’s activation vs. inhibition of impulses, which is somewhat similar to MacDonald’s (1995, 1998) notion of extraversion as re?ecting individual differences in behavioral approach. Both views are consistent with Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, and Shao (2000), who hypothesized that extraversion is positively associated with the sensitivity of individuals’ reward system. Because these authors view positive affect as a proxy of the activity of the general reward system, this hypothesis can also account for the high correlations between extraversion and individual differences in positive affect (Watson & Clark, 1997), even when controlling for social activity (Watson, Clark, McIntyre, & Hamaker, 1992).
A second cluster of explanations of the extraversion factor is the notion that this trait is involved in people’s hierarchical proclivity (Buss, 1991), leadership potential (Hogan, 1996), or disposition to wield power (McAdams, 1992). In addition, the disposition for dominance vs. submission in accessing resources is one of the two social dimensions that can be mapped onto extraversion in Holmes’ (2002) model. However, a problem with this account is that differences in dominance seem to be confounded by differences in competitive resources such as physical prowess, mental ability, material wealth, and social alliances, which depend not only on extraversion but also on other personality factors, such as general problem-solving ability and persistence in reaching goals.
Third, extraversion has been linked to the motivational predisposition to experience social interactions as rewarding (Ashton & Lee, 2001; McCrae & Costa, 1987). Insofar as this predisposition motivates people to seek out the company of others, this view is consistent with Holmes’ (2002) second possible conceptualization of extraversion as tapping into people’s level of assertiveness vs. passivity in initiating social contacts. In an empirical study, Ashton, Lee, and Paunonen (2002) presented evidence for this position, showing that a ‘‘tendency to engage and enjoy social attention” (p. 246) correlates very highly (.74) with traditional extraversion measures. Ashton et al. (2002) reasoned that extraversion can be adaptive because it is correlated with people’s ‘‘social attention-holding power” (Gilbert, 1989), allowing for the exertion of group in?uence and the attraction of possible mates (Campbell, Simpson, Stewart, & Manning, 2003; Nettle, 2005, 2006). In the current paper, we take this latter explanation as a plausible conceptualization of extraversion, though other explanations (e.g., as differences in general reward sensitivity) might also be consistent with the empirical evidence.

I am most sympathetic to second and third interpretations as they directly relate to the problem of Making Friends and Alliances.

Agreeableness is interpreted in two ways:

In Table 1, two clusters of conceptual interpretations for agreeableness can be discerned (the conceptualization by Ashton & Lee, 2001, is directed at a rotational variant of this factor and will not be considered here). First of all, several theorists regard agreeableness as fostering intimate relationships, conceptualizing it as enjoyment of other people’s company (Hogan, 1996), facilitation of intimate family relationships and parental investment (MacDonald, 1995), or dispositional love (McAdams, 1992). This conceptualization is consistent with the hypothesized social nature of personality traits. However, Hogan’s (1996) notion of enjoyment of other people’s company is dif?cult to differentiate from sociability, a key feature of extraversion. In addition, MacDonald’s (1995) emphasis on the facilitation of intimate family relationships and parental investment is not consistent with ?ndings by Graziano, Jensen-Campbell, and Hair (1996) that the effects of agreeableness on reactions to interpersonal con?ict with non-kin individuals do not consistently differ from reactions to con?icts with kin.
A second cluster of conceptualizations of agreeableness focuses on this factor’s role in human cooperative behavior, with Buss (1991) relating it to people’s willingness to cooperate, Holmes (2002) to acting cooperative vs. competitive, Nettle (2006) to empathy and trust vs. self-interest, and van Lieshout (2000) to the coordination vs. opposition of joint interests. This conceptualization is consistent with game-theoretical research on reputations of cooperation vs. competition in resource dilemma’s (Rasmusen, 2006) and with research by van Lange and colleagues (van Lange, 1999; van Lange, De Bruin, Otten, & Joireman, 1997) regarding the existence of individual differences in social value orientation. Finally, Koole, Jager, van den Berg, Vlek, and Hofstee (2001) showed that agreeableness is related to altruistic behavior when playing a variant of the public goods game. Consistent with this evidence, we propose that agreeableness can be plausibly conceptualized as individual differences in this tendency to display altruistic behavior.

To me the first interpretation of empathy and prenatal investment and intimate family relations is consistent with the adaptive problems of having and caring for Kids. The second interpretation of altruistic behavior and cooperativenes is equally acceptable as presumably this builds on primitive kin-non-kin concerns and parental investment propensities.

The last factor Openness to Experience I have elsewhere reinterpreted as conformity/rebelliousness. The authors find following interpretations:

As can be seen in Table 1, several clusters of conceptualizations exist for the openness to experience factor. All conceptualizations converge in their conceptualization of this trait as involving a high level of cognitive activity, as indicated by having a broad, deep, and permeable consciousness (McCrae & Costa, 1997), a high propensity for innovation and solving problems (Buss, 1991; Hogan, 1996), engagement in the intellectual and creative domain (McAdams & Pals, 2006; Nettle, 2006; van Lieshout, 2000), processing incomplete information (Holmes, 2002), and intrinsically motivated curiosity facilitating the development of cognitive competence (MacDonald, 1995). In trying to make sense of this factor, however, openness should be distinguished from psychometric intelligence, which is correlated with openness but not identical to it (McCrae & Costa, 1987; also see Penke et al., 2007a).
A parallel distinction was made by Ackerman (1996), who noted the difference between maximum and typical levels of intelligence: whereas the former is identical to operationalizations of psychometric intelligence, the latter has been shown to correlate very highly with openness to experience (Goff & Ackerman, 1992). This conceptualization is almost identical to Cacioppo and colleagues’ (1996) construct of need for cognition, which they de?ned as ‘‘a stable individual difference in people’s tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activity” (p. 198). Empirically, this view is supported by Berzonsky and Sullivan (1992), who found a correlation of .78 between need for cognition and the NEO-PI-R openness to ideas scale (though the correlation with other openness facets was lower). Accordingly, we propose that openness can be plausibly conceptualized as differences in the reward value of engaging in cognitive activity.

The need for cognition may be driven by the evolutionary task of identifying kin from non-kin.
To me this looks promising and in the expected direction. I’ll be watching research from this group more keenly henceforth and keep you guys posted.

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DENISSEN, J., & PENKE, L. (2008). Motivational individual reaction norms underlying the Five-Factor model of personality: First steps towards a theory-based conceptual framework Journal of Research in Personality, 42 (5), 1285-1302 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2008.04.002

Personality and Behavioural Ecology

ResearchBlogging.org

Behaving at the library [07/05/07 033]
Image by The Happy Robot via Flickr

I am an avid personality researcher and most recently have posted a series on personality and emotion. I have also talked a bit about life-history theories and thus am aware of  the broad filed of behavioral ecology. A recent paper by Nettle and Penke brings the two fields of human personality psychology research (HPP) and behavioral ecology (BE) together.

They argue that there is much that the HPP researchers can learn from BE researchers especially where it comes to measuring behaviors and situations.

In this review they focus on 5 broad areas and approaches within the HPP and I was reminded of my ABCD model of psychology whereby A stands for Affective or evolutionarily guided explanations/ phenomenon; B stands for behavioral ot situational guided phenomenon; C  stands for Cognitive or information-processing phenomenon, while D stands for dynamics or motivational salient phenomenon.

The five areas they focus on is

1) Descriptive five factor or other trait based models : these focus on describing the enduring personality characteristics that are common across situations and are best though of as behavior reaction norms when one takes into account the BE literature too.  This is clearly related to the B in ABCD with the focus being on describing common behaviors that can be subsumed under traits.

2) Proximate mechanisms: here research is focused on identifying the underlying motivational/cognitive underpinnings of behavior and  is the ‘personality process’ paradigm within HPP. They point to recent research that has tried to relate the five factor model to underlying differences in cognition/motivation for ex Agreeableness as a result of differences in availability of theory-of mind ability.  thisis clearly C or D as per ABCD model.

3) Genetic and environmental etiology: Behavior genetic research trying to nail down genetic and environmental effects and failing to take into account Gene X environment interactions.  This clearly is developmentally oriented dynamics and falls under D of ABCD.

4) Fitness consequences: anew generation of personality psychologists have started focusing on evolutionary explanations and the ultimate explanations of why such and such traits exist. this research is in A part of ABCD  focusing on evolutionarily guided explanations/phenomenon.

5) Comparative personality research: Looking for continuity in personality traits and underlying mechanisms like genes, across species.

Nettle and Penke argue that there is much that BE can inform HPP with regards to definitions of traits, the factor analytic method based on ratings and the importance of traits for long term life outcomes. This is  a good paper worth reading for psychologists studying personality.

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Nettle, D., & Penke, L. (2010). Personality: bridging the literatures from human psychology and behavioural ecology Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365 (1560), 4043-4050 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0061

Emotions and personality

Eight ball...
Image by t3mujin via Flickr

In response to my last post on the eight factor model fitting Jaak Pankspep’s basic emotions model,@vasusrini asked in a tweet my opinions on relationships between the emotions and relationship of emotions to personality.

Image of Vasu from Twitter
Image of Vasu

@sandygautam I love the 8-emotion classification. I am wondering if there are relationship models, a)bet. emotions b) with Personality typesless than a minute ago via web


This post is the response to the second query. Even prior to this I had had a conversation with @brembs on friendfeed regarding whether flies have emotions and in the case of a inconclusive answer the second follow-up question as to whether they have a personality.

Discerning readers will immediately note that I foresee a plausible and meaningful connection between emotions and personality. Basically in a nutshell, I believe all state variables have a affective component and can be labeled as emotions; while all trait components have a enduring and temperamental component and can be labeled as the personality. Given this fact and given my emphasis on the evolutionarily driven eight basic adaptive problems as determining both the states and traits of an organism as it goes about the business of life, the short answer is that I definitely see a relationship and correspondence between 8 basic emotions and 8 factors/traits of personality.

The long answer is that the best correspondence I have found, with respect to eight factor models, to date for emotions is Jaak Panksepps eight basic emotions and the best correspondence I have found for personality is Robert Cloningers seven factored temperament and character traits of personality. Of course I have also elaborated the five factor model of personality to an eight factor model and will like to draw attention to that as well.

Before I proceed I would like to claim that Cloninger has missed one temperament trait and has confounded anger and seeking systems and traits under one rubric of novelty seeking. thus , I propose and predict that factor studies and more robust empirical work should in the end split Novelty seeking factor of Cloninger in two- thus leading to 5 temperament traits and 3 character traits.

Now lets do a rundown of the eights stages and adaptive problems and ‘state’ emotions useful for that situation and enduring personality ‘traits’ where individuals can differ in their habitual responses tendencies to the same give problem of adaptation .

  1. Physical/survival stage. task: Avoiding predators/Foe. emotions useful: FEAR/Anxiety; personality trait : neuroticism (big 8) / Harm Avoidance )(cloninger).
  2. Impulsive/willfulness stage. task: finding food/exploration.  emotions useful: SEEKING; personality trait: conscentiousness (big 8)/ Novelty Seeking -I (relating to impulsiveness) (cloninger)
  3. interpersonal/dominance-hierarchy stage. task: forming friends/alliances. emotions useful: aggression/RAGE. personality trait: extraversion (big 8) / Novelty Seeking II (relating to anger) (cloninger)
  4. social/emotional stage: task:   providing help to kids/children. emotion useful :PANIC/ separation distress (to bond mother-child). personality trait :  agreeableness (big 5) / Reward-dependence (cloninger)
  5. cognitive /self-formation stage: task: helping kins or like minded folks. emotion useful: LUST/sexuality (of adolescence just like self-formation in adolescence). Personality trait: Conformity/rebellion(big 8)/ Persistence (perfectionists) (cloninger)
  6. Intimacy stage: task: reading others minds/ selecting a mate. emotions useful: CARE/love. personality trait: Trust/suspiciousness (big 8) /Cooperativeness (cloninger)
  7. Generativity stage. task: communicating with others/seducing a mate. emotions useful: PLAY/joy. personality trait: Activity (big 8)/ Self-Directedness (cloninger)
  8. integrity stage: task: Securing mate/ coming to terms with death. emotions useful: SELF. Personality trait : masculine-feminine (big 8)/ Self-Transcendence (cloninger)

In all of the above , the emotions capitalized are with respect to Jaak Panksepp’s model. So that is the long answer. what do you think of this? Do read the earlier mouse trap pots too for context and let me know whether the 8 factor model excites you as much as it does me or @vasusrini?

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