Читать книгу SNAP! - Gary Small - Страница 14

If you’ve known someone for a long time, you may have noticed that certain aspects of his personality have gotten mellower with age. Real-life experiences and milestones—like becoming a first-time parent—may have altered his perspective and made him more conscientious in order to meet his new responsibilities. Perhaps with age he began to worry less about peer pressure or future events going wrong. Studies have shown that these gradual and modest changes happen throughout life. Whether they occur in young adulthood, middle age, or even late in life, they tend to soften us. Over time, we do gradually become more agreeable, confident, conscientious, and stable. And although this can be an upside of aging, the degree of change is very modest and it takes decades to occur.

How Do You Perceive Your Own Personality?

Place a number between 1 (strongly disagree) and 10 (strongly agree) for each of the following statements to quickly see how you rate your own personality on the Big Five Inventory. The higher your score, the stronger your personality trait.

Personality Domain	Statement	Your Score
Extraversion	I am outgoing and assertive.
Openness	I am creative and adventurous.
Emotional stability	I am self-confident and easygoing.
Agreeableness	I am supportive and cooperative.
Conscientiousness	I am organized and focused.

In a 40-year study, investigators assessed personality traits in elementary school students and then reassessed those volunteers four decades later. They found remarkable consistency in the volunteers’ personalities: impulsive kids remained impetuous as adults, and agreeable youngsters were still cooperative decades later. A limitation of this and many other studies was that researchers were tracking personality traits in people who never received any psychological treatment or used any self-help strategies.

Based on all available research to date, most psychiatrists, including myself, have been trained to operate under the assumption that true core personality traits are fundamentally set by early childhood. In therapy, we could help patients change specific behaviors but not necessarily the basics of their personalities.

But now, startling new research contradicts that long-held tenet. The latest science points to a new conclusion that has literally reversed our assumptions about how—and how rapidly—personality can change. To explore whether it’s possible for personality traits to change quickly through interventions like therapy and just how rapidly such change could occur, psychologist Brent Roberts and his coworkers at the University of Illinois did an in-depth assessment of hundreds of studies looking at assorted types of treatments.

This approach to answering a scientific question is called meta-analysis, which uses statistical methods to combine the results of multiple scientific studies. The statistical methods pool estimates from the various studies to reach a conclusion that is valid. Many investigators consider meta-analysis to be one of the most robust forms of scientific evidence, but it is essential for the investigators to choose the right studies to include.

Did You Know?

 • Although firstborn children tend to score higher on intelligence tests, birth order has no influence on self-reported personality traits.

 • People who identify themselves as dog lovers tend to be more extroverted, while those who consider themselves cat people tend to be more introverted.

Plenty of psychological and mental health studies have demonstrated that certain forms of psychotherapy or medication treatment can benefit a range of mental states such as depressive episodes, panic attacks, or psychotic breaks. However, relatively few studies have targeted stable personality traits like conscientiousness or agreeableness. The researchers at the University of Illinois included only well-controlled investigations that specifically focused on measures of personality as outcomes of the interventions.

They systematically searched for the best-controlled studies that asked whether different interventions changed personality. The scientists searched for not only studies of therapies involving mental health professionals but self-help strategies as well. They wanted to include investigations and interventions that used control groups (i.e., volunteers who received no interventions at all) because patients often respond well to an inactive placebo treatment or by simply getting on a waiting list to receive a treatment. Those nonspecific influences on personality change needed to be factored out of the equation.

After an extensive search, they identified more than 200 studies that were of high enough quality to include in the meta-analysis. Each of the studies contained enough subjects to draw meaningful conclusions. And they all assessed one or more of the Big Five personality categories as outcome measures.

The number of volunteers totaled more than 20,000. Study subjects were mostly women (63 percent) and ranged in age from 19 to 73 years (on average, 36 years). Although personality change was the focus of the new meta-analysis, many of the research subjects were being treated for other mental conditions such as anxiety, depression, or substance abuse, while others had no specific mental disorder during the course of the study. Interventions also varied from medication treatments to various forms of psychotherapy and self-help approaches. Many of the interventions consisted of one-on-one therapies, while others involved group treatments or do-it-yourself methods.

Types of Interventions That Can Change Personality

 • Cognitive behavioral therapy

 • Mindfulness intervention

 • Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapy

 • Psychopharmacological treatment

 • Relaxation training

 • Social skill training

 • Supportive psychotherapy

Because the various studies and types of interventions differed, the researchers needed to use a measure that would level the playing field in order to make their comparisons. They employed a statistical calculation known as the effect size to compare the benefits of all the various interventions. The effect size is essentially a number from 0 to 1 that indicates how much more effective a treatment is in a group of subjects when compared to a control group receiving placebo or no treatment at all. An effect size of 0.2 or less is considered small; the 0.3 to 0.5 range is thought of as medium; and anything at 0.6 or above is categorized as a large effect.

When the scientists systematically pooled all the results from this large meta-analysis, they drew a remarkable conclusion: both clinical (involving treatment from a mental health professional) and nonclinical self-help interventions (such as internet-based cognitive therapy or meditation) resulted in positive improvements in personality traits over a relatively brief period of time. Also, for the subjects who were followed a year or more after the treatment was completed, researchers found that the personality benefits resulting from the interventions were sustained.

The type of therapy didn’t seem to matter much when it came to improving personality traits in the subjects. Supportive psychotherapy, psychodynamic therapy, and cognitive behavior therapy demonstrated comparable levels of benefits, while hospitalization and psychopharmacology were only slightly less effective. Whether or not the research volunteers were being treated for depression, anxiety, or no particular disorder at all also had no influence on the results: personality traits consistently improved in the full range of people who were studied.

Some personality traits were more sensitive to treatment than were others. The greatest personality changes were observed for emotional stability followed by extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.