Is your personality type healthy?

Investigators believe they have determined the basic characteristics that characterize a psychologically healthy individual. Revelation occurs after decades of scientific interest in personality types and differences between individuals.

In the new study, researchers at the University of California at Davis used a contemporary trait perspective to determine that a healthy personality could be described in terms of the 30 facets of the "Big Five" models of Personality traits.

This model organizes the personality into five main factors: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, amiability and consciousness. Scientists have also identified facets for each of these factors that describe more specific types of behavior.

The researchers found that both experts and non-specialists agreed that a healthy personality is characterized by a low neuroticism, a broad openness to feelings, warmth, positive emotions and a pleasing candor. .

The results of the study are discussed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"We believe that our findings have both practical implications for assessment and health worker work, as well as deeper implications for theories of psychological adjustment and functioning," said Dr. Wiebke Bleidorn. , associate professor of psychology at UC Davis, lead author. of the study.

"In addition to providing a complete description of a psychologically sound individual in terms of basic traits, the generated and tested profile provides a practical assessment tool for research on the functioning of the health personality. "

Methodologically, the purpose of the research was to answer the question of healthy personality by generating an expert consensus model of the healthy person. The investigators accomplished this by interviewing hundreds of professional personality psychologists as well as hundreds of students from Texas and Michigan.

They found a striking agreement between all these groups on what a healthy personality implies.

"People in general, whether they're experts or not, seem to have a clear idea of ​​what a healthy personality looks like," Bleidorn said.

There is also a large body of research showing that the five major traits identified as neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, friendliness, and awareness are stable, heritable, and Predict life outcomes such as health, self-esteem, academic performance, marital quality, and work performance.

Using the Big Five as a framework and as an expert consensus approach, researchers first attempted to generate a basic trait profile of a prototypical healthy individual. In a second step, they used data from seven independent samples of more than 3,000 participants to check whether the generated health profile can be used to assess the healthy functioning of the personality at the individual level.

To do this, they calculated for each participant a healthy personality index indicating the degree of similarity of their individual personality profile with the profile generated by an expert for a healthy personality.

As expected, individuals with healthy personality profiles tend to be better adjusted, as indicate better self-esteem, clarity of self-image and higher optimism. Individuals with healthy personality scores were also more likely to describe themselves as being able to resist impulses, regulate their behavior and focus their attention. They also described themselves as having weak aggressive and antisocial behavior.

Associations with measures of narcissism and psychopathy, however, provided a more complex picture.

Specifically, people with a healthy personality tend to have lower scores in the maladaptive aspects of narcissism such as exploitation, but relatively higher in the potentially adaptive aspects of grandiosity and self-sufficiency .

In the same vein, people with healthier personalities scored poorly on the maladaptive facets of psychopathy, such as blame outsourcing or disinhibition, but relatively higher on the more adaptive facets of these scales, such as stress immunity or daring.

The researchers believe that, overall, these findings provide a first evidence of the convergent and divergent validity of the healthy personality index.

Source: University of California – Davis

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