Personality Trait

A Personality Trait is a psychological trait associated with habitual patterns of human behavior, human thought, and human emotion.

• Context:
  • It can range from being a Positive Personality Trait to being a Negative Personality Trait.
  • It can range from being a Non-Cognitive Personality Trait to being a Cognitive Personality Trait.
  • It can be measured with a Personality Trait Measure using a Personality Test.
• Example(s):
  • Openness to Experience / Rigidity / Disinhibition.
  • Conscientiousness / Impulsivity.
  • Extraversion.
  • Agreeableness.
  • Neuroticism / Obsessionality.
  • Self-esteem (low).
  • Harm Avoidance.
  • Novelty Seeking.
  • Perfectionism.
  • Grit.
  • Alexithymia.
  • Psychoticism.
  • Victim Mentality.
  • People Pleaser (parent pleaser).
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Intelligence Type, such as linguistic intelligence, spatial intelligence, ...
• See: Trait Theory, Continuum (Theory), Trait Theory, Worker Characteristic, Emotional Intelligence.

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References

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait_theory Retrieved:2017-9-12.
  • In psychology, trait theory (also called dispositional theory) is an approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of traits, which can be defined as habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. According to this perspective, traits are relatively stable over time, differ across individuals (e.g. some people are outgoing whereas others are not), and influence behavior. Traits are in contrast to states which are more transitory dispositions.

    In some theories and systems, traits are something a person either has or does not have, but in many others traits are dimensions such as extraversion vs. introversion, with each person rating somewhere along this spectrum.

2015a

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/personality_type Retrieved:2015-11-7.
  • Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences between people, whereas traits might be construed as quantitative differences. According to type theories, for example, introverts and extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle.

2015b

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait_theory#List_of_personality_traits

Personality Traits

Openness to experience	Composed of two related but separable traits, Openness to Experience and Intellect. Behavioral aspects include having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful, correlated with activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Considered primarily a cognitive trait.
Conscientiousness	Scrupulous, meticulous, principled behavior guided or conforming to one's own conscience. Associated with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Anorexics are noted to have higher levels of conscientiousness.
Extraversion	Gregarious, outgoing, sociable, projecting one's personality outward. The opposite of extraversion is introversion. Extraversion has shown to share certain genetic markers with substance abuse. Extraversion is associated with various regions of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
Agreeableness	Refers to a compliant, trusting, empathic, sympathetic, friendly and cooperative nature.
Neuroticism	"Refers to an individual's tendency to become upset or emotional" (Hans Eysenck) "Neuroticism is the major factor of personality pathology" (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1969). Neuroticism has been linked to serotonin transporter (5-HTT) binding sites in the thalamus: as well as activity in the insular cortex. Neuroticism also predicts the occurrence of more negative life experiences.
Self-esteem (low)	A "favorable or unfavorable attitude toward the self" (Rosenberg, 1965). An individual's sense of his or her value or worth, or the extent to which a person values, approves of, appreciates, prizes, or likes him or herself" (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1991).
Harm avoidance	A tendency towards shyness, being fearful and uncertain, tendency to worry. Neonatal complications such as preterm birth have been shown to affect harm avoidance. People affected by eating disorders exhibit high levels of harm avoidance. The volume of the left amygdala in girls was correlated to levels of HA, in separate studies HA was correlated with reduced grey matter volume in the orbito-frontal, occipital and parietal regions.
Novelty seeking	Impulsive, exploratory, fickle, excitable, quick-tempered, and extravagant. Associated with addictive behavior.
Perfectionism	"I don't think needing to be perfect is in any way adaptive" (Paul Hewitt, PhD) Socially prescribed perfectionism – "believing that others will value you only if you are perfect." Self-oriented perfectionism – "an internally motivated desire to be perfect. Perfectionism is one of the traits associated with obsessional behavior and like obsessionality is also believed to be regulated by the basal ganglia.
Alexithymia	The inability to express emotions. "To have no words for one's inner experience" (Rený J. Muller PhD). In studies done with stroke patients, alexithymia was found to be more prevalent in those who developed lesions in the right hemisphere following a cerebral infarction. There is a positive association with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), childhood abuse and neglect and alexithymia. Utilizing psychometric testing and fMRI, studies showed positive response in the insula, posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and thalamus.
Rigidity	Inflexibility, difficulty making transitions, adherence to set patterns. Mental rigidity arises out of a deficit of the executive functions. Originally termed frontal lobe syndrome it is also referred to as dysexecutive syndrome and usually occurs as a result of damage to the frontal lobe. This may be due to physical damage, disease (such as Huntington's disease) or a hypoxic or anoxic insult.
Impulsivity	Risk taking, lack of planning, and making up one's mind quickly (Eysenck and Eysenck). A component of disinhibition. Abnormal patterns of impulsivity have been linked to lesions in the right inferior frontal gyrus and in studies done by Antonio Damasio author of Descartes Error, damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been shown to cause a defect in real-life decision making in individuals with otherwise normal intellect. Those who sustain this type of damage are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions and live in the here and now.
Disinhibition	Behavioral dis-inhibition is an inability or unwillingness to constrain impulses, it is a key component of executive functioning. Researchers have emphasized poor behavioral inhibition as the central impairment of ADHD. It may be symptomatic of orbitofrontal lobe syndrome, a subtype of frontal lobe syndrome which may be an acquired disorder as a result of traumatic brain injury, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), anoxic encephalopathy, degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, bacterial or viral infections such as Lyme disease and neurosyphilis. Disinhibition has been consistently associated with substance abuse disorders, obesity, higher BMI, excessive eating, an increased rate of eating, and perceived hunger.
Psychoticism	Psychoticism is a personality pattern typified by aggressiveness and interpersonal hostility, one of four traits in Hans Eysenck's model of personality. High levels of this trait were believed by Eysenck to be linked to increased vulnerability to psychosis such as schizophrenia. He also believed that blood relatives of psychotics would show high levels of this trait, suggesting a genetic basis to the trait.
Obsessionality	Persistent, often unwelcome, and frequently disturbing ideas, thoughts, images or emotions, rumination, often inducing an anxious state. Obsessionality may result as a dysfunction of the basal ganglia.

2013

• (Kosinski et al., 2013) ⇒ Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. (2013). “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.” In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15).
  • QUOTE: We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic linear regression to [[predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait “Openness," prediction accuracy is close to the test-retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implication]]s for online personalization and privacy.

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