Do you have a healthy personality? The researchers think that they can tell you

What are the most psychologically healthy personality traits? Scholars have been interested in characterizing healthy personality as long as they have tried to understand how people differ from each other. Researchers at the University of California at Davis have identified a prototype of healthy personality in a recent study using a contemporary trait perspective.

They found that the healthy personality could be described, with a high degree of agreement, in terms of 30 facets of the model of the "big five" personality trait models. This model organizes personality into five main factors: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, pleasure and awareness. Scientists have also identified facets for each of these factors that describe more specific types of behavior. In this study, experts and non-specialists agreed that a healthy personality was characterized by a low neuroticism, a great openness to feelings, warmth, positive emotions and a pleasing frankness.

Their conclusions have just been published in the Journal of Personality and Societal Psychology.

"We believe that our findings have both practical implications for the assessment and functioning of personality functioning in health, as well as deeper implications for theories of adaptation and functioning. psychological, "said 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. "

The purpose of the research was to answer the question of healthy personality by generating a consensus model of experts from the healthy person, by interviewing hundreds of professional personality psychologists as well as hundreds of individuals. 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.

Five big traits associated with the results of life

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.

The researchers first tried to generate a basic traits profile of a prototypical healthy individual using the big five as a framework and an expert consensus approach. 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 tended to be better adjusted, as indicated by 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.

Overall, these results provide a first evidence of the convergent and divergent validity of the healthy personality index, the researchers said.

Evaluate your own personality here.

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More information:
The personality in health from the point of view of basic characteristics (pre-printing)