Читать книгу SNAP! - Gary Small - Страница 11

Our individuality is determined by where we fall on the spectrum within each of these five personality categories. For example, if you are an extremely popular person, you would probably score high on a measure of extraversion. If you tend to ruminate and neurotically obsess over things, you would likely score low on an emotional stability scale.

Consider Emma at the wedding. If we describe her personality based solely on her experience on that particular day, she would score pretty low on an extraversion rating. She also didn’t seem very open to new experiences, so she would score low on openness. She kept second-guessing herself and putting herself down for her choices, indicating that she would rank fairly low on the emotional stability scale. Emma was curt to the man who asked her to dance, which would lower her score on the agreeableness scale. She did, however, show up at her friend’s wedding instead of skipping it, which raised her conscientiousness rating.

If we were to rate Emma’s Big Five personality traits on a scale from one to five, her scores might chart like this:

Keep in mind that we are basing this assessment on one brief vignette from Emma’s life. If we got to know her better, we might learn that she volunteers regularly at the women’s shelter. That compassionate characteristic would raise her agreeableness rating. And although she was emotionally closed off at the wedding, at other times she may enjoy creative pursuits like dancing or studying art history, which raises her openness rating. Clearly, the better we get to know people, the more accurately we can describe their personalities. This holds true for ourselves as well. The better we understand our own personalities, the easier it will be to focus on what we want to change and how to do it.

Our brain structure actually varies depending on our personality style. At the University of Minnesota, Colin DeYoung and his coworkers assessed the personalities of 116 volunteers ages 18 to 40 (22 years old on average) and performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans to determine the relative sizes of their different brain regions. The scientists’ findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, indicated that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region just behind and above the eyes, was significantly larger in extroverts compared with introverts. This is not surprising since this region controls the brain’s reward system—extroverts seek more positive experiences through social interactions and the pursuit of excitement and adventure. Volunteers who were more conscientious showed larger volumes in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which controls a person’s ability to plan ahead. In neurotic study subjects, brain volume was larger in a nearby region, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and in an area under the temples that controls emotional reactions, the medial temporal lobe.