Middle children, rejoice: A new study finds that you're more agreeable, honest and humble than your older and younger siblings.

But don't crow too loudly at your holiday meal (not that you would, being so humble). The research contradicts previous large studies on birth order and personality and will likely need more research to replicate the findings.

Stereotypes abound

There are plenty of pop-psychology stereotypes about how one's birth order affects personality, from the overachieving first born to the peacekeeping middle children to spoiled babies of the family. But most research has not supported these stereotypes. A 2015 commentary in the journal PNAS noted that studies over two decades found wildly contradictory results, with some showing very strong correlations between personality traits and birth order and others finding none at all. Many of these studies were small, non-representative samples.

In 2015, two studies with large samples were published. One looked at 20,000 people in the U.S., U.K. and Germany and tried to find relationships between birth order and personality traits as measured by the Big Five – five standard psychological categories of personality that are well-supported by research. (They are extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism and conscientiousness.) The other study did something similar with a sample of 272,000 U.S. adults who attended high school in 1960 and are part of a long-running study called Project Talent.

Neither study made much of a case for birth order influencing personality. The three-country study found no relationship, while the Project Talent study found a very small relationship between intelligence and being an older sibling, perhaps suggesting that older siblings benefit from teaching their younger siblings. Still, despite this statistically detectable difference, a younger sibling will still score higher on an IQ test than their older sibling in four out of ten cases, the researchers wrote, meaning the finding has limited power to predict intelligence in the real world.

Related: Are these 4 personality types for real?

New dataset

Now, a new study argues that there are differences – and that crucially, they depend on family size. This study, published Monday (Dec. 23) in the journal PNAS, used a different personality measure called HEXACO, which was developed by Michael Ashtona and Kibeom Lee, the two authors of the new study. HEXACO overlaps with the Big Five personality dimensions, but with some differences. Its categories are honesty/humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. Agreeableness in HEXACO means a tendency toward flexibility, grace, and forgiveness, whereas agreeableness in the Big Five is defined by warmth and cooperation.

The researchers used data from hexaco.org, where anyone can take a personality test to find out where they fall on this scale. For 710,797 individuals, they had information about birth order. For another 74,920 individuals, they had information about both birth order and number of siblings. (These studies do not differentiate between step-siblings, half siblings or other biological relationships, instead defining siblings as any other children in the household.)

In this dataset, the researchers found that middle children had the highest scores for honesty/humility and for agreeableness, followed by youngest siblings, then oldest, then only children. They also found that the more siblings a person had, the higher they scored in these same traits.

Because religious families tend to have more children, the researchers controlled for religiosity and found that religion explained about 25% of these differences, but that still left birth order and family size responsible for the rest. The differences between siblings are small, but the authors speculate that they could be due to the forced cooperation that occurs in large families.

"A commonsense possibility is that when one has more siblings, one must more frequently cooperate rather than act on selfish preferences," Lee and Ashtona wrote. "This ongoing situation might then promote the development of cooperative tendencies generally."

These findings are not likely to be the last word in birth order research, however. In 2020, for example, another study searching for differences between only children and children with siblings turned up no differences in narcissism. And a 2019 study comparing only children and people with siblings using HEXACO found only vanishingly small differences.

Have you ever taken a personality test? If you're like me, you've consulted BuzzFeed and you know exactly which Taylor Swift song "perfectly matches your vibe."

It might be obvious that internet quizzes are not scientific, but many of the seemingly serious personality tests used to guide educational and career choices are also not supported by research. Despite being a billion-dollar industry, commercial personality testing used by schools and corporations to funnel people into their ideal roles do not predict career success.

Beyond their lack of scientific support, the most popular approaches to understanding personality are problematic because they assume your traits are static – that is, you're stuck with the personality you're born with. But modern personality science studies find that traits can and do change over time.

In addition to watching my own personality change over time from messy and lazy to off the charts in conscientiousness, I'm also a personality change researcher and clinical psychologist. My research confirms what I saw in my own development and in my patients: People can intentionally shape the traits they need to be successful in the lives they want. That's contrary to the popular belief that your personality type places you in a box, dictating that you choose partners, activities and careers according to your traits.

What personality is and isn't

According to psychologists, personality is your characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Are you a person who tends to think about situations in your life more pessimistically, or are you a glass-half-full kind of person?

Do you tend to get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic, or are you more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe they're rushing to the hospital?

Do you wait until the last minute to complete tasks, or do you plan ahead?

You can think of personality as a collection of labels that summarize your responses to questions like these. Depending on your answers, you might be labeled as optimistic, empathetic or dependable.

Research suggests that all these descriptive labels can be summarized into five overarching traits – what psychologists creatively refer to as the "Big Five."

As early as the 1930s, psychologists literally combed through a dictionary to pull out all the words that describe human nature and sorted them in categories with similar themes. For example, they grouped words like "kind," "thoughtful" and "friendly" together. They found that thousands of words could be accounted for by sorting them between five traits: neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness.

What personality is not: People often feel protective about their personality — you may view it as the core of who you are. According to scientific definitions, however, personality is not your likes, dislikes or preferences. It's not your sense of humor. It's not your values or what you think is important in life.

In other words, shifting your Big Five traits does not change the core of who you are. It simply means learning to respond to situations in life with different thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Can you change your personality?

Can personality change? Remember, personality is a person's characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving. And while it might sound hard to change personality, people change how they think, feel and behave all the time.

Suppose you're not super dependable. If you start to think "being on time shows others that I respect them," begin to feel pride when you arrive to brunch before your friends, and engage in new behaviors that increase your timeliness — such as getting up with an alarm, setting appointment reminders and so on — you are embodying the characteristics of a reliable person. If you maintain these changes to your thinking, emotions and behaviors over time — voila! — you are reliable. Personality: changed.

Data confirms this idea. In general, personality changes across a person's life span. As people age, they tend to experience fewer negative emotions and more positive ones, are more conscientious, place greater emphasis on positive relationships and are less judgmental of others.

There is variability here, though. Some people change a lot and some people hold pretty steady. Moreover, studies, including my own, that test whether personality interventions change traits over time find that people can speed up the process of personality change by making intentional tweaks to their thinking and behavior. These tweaks can lead to meaningful change in less than 20 weeks, instead of 20 years.

Cultivating personality traits that serve you best

The good news is that these cognitive-behavioral techniques are relatively simple, and you don't need to visit a therapist if that's not something you're into.

The first component involves changing your thinking patterns — this is the cognitive piece. You need to become aware of your thoughts to determine whether they're keeping you stuck acting in line with a particular trait. For example, if you find yourself thinking "people are only looking out for themselves," you are likely to act defensively around others.

The behavioral component involves becoming aware of your current action tendencies and testing out new responses. If you are defensive around other people, they will probably respond negatively to you. When they withdraw or snap at you, for example, it then confirms your belief that you can't trust others. By contrast, if you try behaving more openly — perhaps sharing with a co-worker that you're struggling with a task – you have the opportunity to see whether that changes the way others act toward you.

These cognitive-behavioral strategies are so effective for nudging personality because personality is simply your characteristic way of thinking and behaving. Consistently making changes to your perspective and actions can lead to lasting habits that ultimately result in crafting the personality you desire.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Visit any dog park, and you're bound to see matching pairs of dogs and humans. But do dogs really tend to look like their owners? And, if so, what's responsible for this resemblance? 

"Whilst not a universal phenomenon amongst all owners and dogs, there is some evidence that purebred dogs and owners tend to resemble each other at some level," Katrina Holland, a research officer on the human behavior team at Dogs Trust, an animal welfare charity in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. 

Several studies have found that people can successfully match pictures of purebred dogs with pictures of their owners at levels above random chance. In one study, participants were able to match dogs with their owners regardless of whether they were told to choose the real dog-owner pairs or just choose pairs that looked alike. This finding suggests that it's physical appearance, and not some other element, that people are using to make these judgments.

Certain aspects of physical appearance are more important than others. Facial features, especially the eyes, are more integral to the perception of resemblance than qualities such as size, hairstyle and physical fitness, a different 2015 study found. When a researcher showed participants real and fake dog-owner pairs while masking different parts of the dogs' and owners' facial features, the participants were equally successful at matching when they saw only the eye region as when they saw the full face or the face with the mouth covered. But when they masked the eye region, the participants' success rate dropped to 50-50.

So if it's true that dogs tend to look like their owners, why is this? Do we choose dogs that look like us, or do our dogs start to look more like us over time?

Related: Could dogs survive without humans?

Research suggests it's probably the former, Holland said.

For example, a 2004 study found that how long a person had owned their dog wasn't correlated with their resemblance; participants were just as successful at picking out the dog-owner pairs regardless of how long those pairs had been together. That suggests that people are choosing dogs that look like them at the outset.

One hypothesis is that people tend to seek out people, including mates, who look like them, Holland said. Researchers have suggested that the same thing happens when people choose their pets. 

"Alternatively, it may be that we prefer dogs who look somewhat similar to us due to the 'mere exposure effect,' in which people prefer familiar items (i.e., their own faces, seen frequently through mirror exposure) over those they have not seen before or seen less often," Holland said. 

A familiar example of the mere exposure effect happens with music: A song that you didn't like much the first time you heard it becomes irresistible after it's on the radio all summer. People see their own face constantly, so that repeated exposure leads them to prefer faces that look like their own, including in dogs.

It's not just appearance, either. "Findings from a recent study indicate that dogs and their owners resemble each other in the 'Big Five' personality dimensions": extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism, Holland said. These findings also support the idea that we select pets that are similar to us, she said — not just those that look like us, but those that act like us, too. 

Of course, a dog's similarity to us isn't the only thing to think about when choosing a pet. "Taking your time to fully consider all aspects of dog ownership and being prepared will help set you up for a lifelong, successful relationship with your new dog, Holland said." But after those considerations, there's nothing wrong with picking out a cute canine twin to hit the dog park with.

We all know someone who never seems to be on time, whether it's to a lunch date or a work meeting. But is there a good explanation for why some people are always late?

The habit of being tardy probably results from a number of factors, including time perception, time management and personality, experts say.

"It is likely that there's a mechanism in the brain that causes some people to be late for meetings because they underestimate the time it will take them to get there," Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and the co-author of a 2017 study in the journal Hippocampus, told Live Science.

The hippocampus is a region of the brain which processes some aspects of time, such as remembering when to do something and how long it takes, Spiers said. Research published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience suggests that neurons in the hippocampus acting as "time cells" contribute to our perception and memory of events, but why exactly some people perpetually underestimate time is unclear.

One factor may be how familiar we are with a space. For the 2017 study, Spiers asked 20 students who had newly moved to London to sketch a map of their college district and estimate travel times to different destinations. While the students' space estimates expanded if they knew an area well, their gauge of travel time contracted with familiarity. "If you're very familiar with a space, you start to discount the hassle it will take," Spiers said.

Related: Why does time fly when you're having fun?

In some cases, people who are late may not factor enough time to complete tasks unrelated to travel, such as getting ready in the morning. Research published in the journal Memory & Cognition suggests that we make time estimates based on how long we think tasks have taken us in the past, but our memories and perceptions aren't always accurate.

"If we have a lot of experience performing a task, we are more likely to underestimate how long it will take," Emily Waldum, an adjunct professor at Campbell University in North Carolina and the lead author of a 2016 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, told Live Science in an email. In the study, Waldum found that environmental factors, such as music, can distort your sense of time. 

Specifically, Waldum showed that when doing a general knowledge questions task, some people incorrectly estimated the task's length based on the number of songs they heard playing in the background. Younger adults tended to inflate their time estimates if they heard four short songs compared with two longer songs, something that didn't seem to influence older adults' perception of time.

Another environmental factor may be crowdedness. In a 2022 study in the journal Virtual Reality, researchers asked participants to estimate the length of more or less crowded simulated subway trips. They found that crowded commutes felt like they took 10% longer than less busy rides, which was linked to it being an unpleasant experience.

Personality also plays a role in running late. Certain personality traits, such as reduced conscientiousness, can cause some people to forget tasks that they had planned ahead of time, Waldum said. "Another factor that may influence a person's timeliness is how prone to multitasking they are," she added.

Research published in the journal Advances in Cognitive Psychology has shown that people juggling several tasks at once are less likely to remember and complete other scheduled tasks on time. "The best laid plans can fail simply because we don't have enough attentional resources left to carry them out successfully," Waldum said.

Latecomers sometimes don't perceive themselves as such, Grace Pacie, author of "Late! A Timebender's guide to why we are late and how we can change" (Punchline Publications, 2020), told Live Science. That's because people who run behind schedule tell themselves and others that they can be punctual. "We can be on time when it matters, when there will be negative consequences for our lateness, like missing a flight," Pacie said. 

In the absence of a deadline, however, these people often lose track of time. A 2019 review published in the journal Medical Science Monitor found that individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can find it hard to process and estimate the passing of time.

Some people struggle to be on time because they deliberately delay tasks. "Lateness can be a symptom of procrastination," Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at Durham University in England, told Live Science. Procrastination is usually rooted in a difficult emotional relationship to the task, Sirois said. 

The difference between procrastination and lateness is that the latter affects our relationship with others, Pacie said. "The same people who perceive us as always being late are the people who matter to us the most, so we can be very hurtful when we say we can be on time when it matters."

So what can perpetually late people do to be punctual for meetings and avoid disappointing friends and loved ones? A self-proclaimed "timebender," Pacie suggested setting alarms and reminders on your phone. Another of her tried and tested tactics is to set pre-event deadlines. "My favorite ruse is to offer somebody a lift," Pacie said. "It means that you arrange to meet them at a sensible time."

Narcissists often rub their friends and family the wrong way by bragging about their exploits, seemingly a symptom of an overinflated sense of self-esteem. 

But new research finds that in some cases, narcissists actually have low self-esteem, but they're not chasing a self-esteem boost with their self-aggrandizing behavior. Instead, they're seeking status. 

The research is a new piece of evidence that runs counter to the idea that self-esteem issues drive narcissism, said study leader Virgil Zeigler-Hill, a psychology professor at Oakland University in Michigan. 

"What they really care about is navigating status hierarchies," Zeigler-Hill told Live Science. "They care about being better than other people, they care about other people respecting and admiring them, they care about the benefits you get from being high status." 

While self-esteem is how a person feels about themself, status perception is how they feel about how others see them, Zeigler-Hill says. Almost everyone cares, at some level, how they're perceived by others. But for people with narcissism, status-seeking takes on an outsized role in how they feel about themselves.

Related: Why do people have different personalities?

Understanding narcissism

People with narcissistic personality disorder express extreme levels of grandiosity about themselves and show a lack of empathy for others. But even people who don't qualify for a diagnosis of the disorder can display certain narcissistic traits, such as arrogant behavior, a need for external validation and the expectation that they should be recognized as superior by others.

Psychologists once saw all of this as driven by the need to boost and protect self-esteem, Zeigler-Hill said. But in recent years, a more nuanced view has emerged. There are different types of narcissism, and some types do have inflated self-esteem, while others tend to actually have low self-esteem. Zeigler-Hill's work has also focused on the notion that self-esteem isn't a narcissist's main problem; instead, he said, narcissists are desperate for status, and their inflated self-esteem tends to be a consequence of feeling like they are admired and exalted, rather than the other way around. 

To test this idea, Zeigler-Hill and his study co-author Jennifer Vonk, a cognitive psychologist at Oakland University, recruited undergraduate psychology students to take surveys on their levels of narcissistic traits. These standardized surveys ask respondents to rate their agreement or disagreement with statements like, "I will someday be famous," and "I want my rivals to fail." The prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder in the U.S. is estimated at around 6 percent, according to 2008 research, so researchers expected to find few, if any, participants with the disorder. But people vary in their levels of narcissistic traits, so the researchers were able to compare individuals with more narcissistic tendencies with those with fewer. They then had the students make a daily report for up to seven days about their feelings of inclusion, social status and self-esteem. 

Highs and lows

The researchers found that students' level of self-esteem differed by the kinds of narcissistic traits they reported. Students higher in a subtype of narcissism called "narcissistic admiration" did indeed have high self-esteem. In narcissistic admiration, Zeigler-Hill said, people tend to want to be on top of the social strata, but they tend to be charming and engaging to get there.

"There is a lot of self-promotion and bragging that goes on with these folks, but at least in small doses they get along well with other people," Zeigler-Hill said. 

On the other hand, people high in "narcissistic rivalry" see the world as a zero-sum game and experience a lot of envy and jealousy if other people get respect or admiration, because they think that praise detracts from their own status. They tend to be harder to get along with. And the research found that people high in narcissistic rivalry actually have low self-esteem. 

Whether their self-esteem was high or low, however, narcissistic individuals' daily reports of self-esteem were driven by how much status and inclusion they felt other people were granting them. The reason that people high in narcissistic admiration had high self-esteem was that they felt admired and included, the researchers reported in the January issue of the journal Identity. The reason people high in narcissistic rivalry had low self-esteem was that they felt disrespected and left out of the social hierarchy.  

"It's another piece of evidence suggesting that the ways in which narcissistic people are experiencing their social world are probably more important than their self-esteem," Zeigler-Hill said. 

While the study included data from 808 students, most were young, female and white, limiting the generalizability of the research. For instance, previous research finds that women are lower in some types of narcissism compared with men, and 694 of the participants were female, Zeigler-Hill says. The field needs more cross-cultural research to better pin down the ways that culture, gender and social status interact to give rise to narcissistic traits, he says. 

"There are some differences in terms of some of the consequences for narcissism that I don't think we understand fully yet," said Zeigler-Hill, who is collaborating with researchers in Iran and Israel. "So cross-cultural research would be exceptionally helpful." 

What personality traits makes someone who they are? Each person has an idea of their own personality type — if they are bubbly or reserved, sensitive or thick-skinned. Psychologists who try to tease out the science of who we are define personality as individual differences in the way people tend to think, feel and behave.

Measuring personality traits 

You'll find many quizzes and tests online that claim to measure what personality type you have. Most of these are supported by very little evidence, and if you run across a system that claims to break all of humanity into just a handful of categories, it's safe to say it's probably oversimplified. Instead of trying to break people into "types," psychologists focus on personality traits. Each trait occurs along a spectrum and traits are independent of one another, making for an infinite constellation of human personality.

The traits with the strongest research backing them are the Big Five:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Conveniently, you can remember these traits with the handy OCEAN mnemonic (or, if you prefer, CANOE works, too).

The Big Five were developed in the 1970s by two research teams. These teams were led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon, according to Scientific American.

How universal are the Big Five? The evidence suggest that these traits translate well across cultures. A 2005 study led by McCrae and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that structure of the Big Five was similar across 50 countries, and a 2017 study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that among 22 countries, breakdowns of personality traits were quite similar. In fact, a person's nationality contributed only 2% to their personality. And a 2021 study of Mexican-origin adults "showed few associations with sociodemographic factors (sex, education level, and IQ) and cultural factors," according to the study abstract on the National Library of Medicine.

Still, there may be some cultures that don't conceive of human traits in the terms of the Big Five. For example, a 2013 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that among the Tsimane tribe of forager-horticulturists in Bolivia, personality was conceived of along only two traits, prosociality and industriousness. This suggests that the Big Five personality traits could be a byproduct of living in a large, complex society, while people in small, traditional societies differ along other sets of traits. One possibility is that societies that offer more social niches for people allow more types of personality traits to arise, University of California Merced psychologist Paul Smaldino and UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Michael Gurven, have suggested in their 2019 study.

If you live in a large, industrialized society, though, chances are the Big Five will do a pretty good job of summing you up. You might have a dash of openness, a lot of conscientiousness, an average amount of extraversion, plenty of agreeableness and almost no neuroticism at all. Or you might be highly conscientious, a bit introverted, disagreeable, neurotic and barely open. Here's what each trait entails.

Openness

Openness is shorthand for "openness to experience." People who are high in openness enjoy adventure. They're curious and appreciate art, imagination and new things. The motto of the open individual might be, "variety is the spice of life."

People low in openness are just the opposite: they prefer to stick to their habits, avoid new experiences and probably aren't the most adventurous eaters.

Openness might correlate with verbal intelligence and knowledge acquisition over the lifespan, according to a 2021 study in the American Psychological Association. People high in openness enjoy novelty and "predicted humor production ability above and beyond intelligence," the team wrote in their research. 

In other words, they tend to be funnier than people who are just smart. 

Conscientiousness

People who are conscientious are organized and have a strong sense of duty. They're dependable, disciplined and achievement-focused. You won't find conscientious types jetting off on round-the-world journeys without an itinerary; they're planners.

People low in conscientiousness are more spontaneous and freewheeling. At the extreme, they may tend toward carelessness. Conscientiousness is a helpful trait to have, as it has been linked to achievement in school and on the job, researchers reported in 2019 in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Extraversion

Extraversion versus introversion is possibly the most recognizable personality trait of the Big Five. The more of an extravert someone is, the more of a social butterfly they are. Extraverts are chatty, sociable and draw energy from crowds. They tend to be assertive and cheerful in their social interactions.

Introverts, on the other hand, need plenty of alone time. Introversion is often confused with shyness, but the two aren't the same. Shyness implies a fear of social interactions or an inability to function socially. Introverts can be perfectly charming at parties — they just prefer solo or small-group activities.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness measures the extent of a person's warmth and kindness. The more agreeable someone is, the more likely they are to be trusting, helpful and compassionate. Disagreeable people are cold and suspicious of others, and they're less likely to cooperate.

As you might imagine, agreeableness has its benefits. In a 25-year study published in Developmental Psychology in 2002, agreeable kids had fewer behavioral problems than kids low in agreeableness, and agreeable adults had less depression and greater job stability than adults who were low in agreeableness.

But being agreeable isn't always rewarded. A 2018 article in Harvard Business Review by Miriam Gensowski, an assistant professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Copenhagen, stated that, "more agreeable men, who tend to be friendly and helpful to others, have significantly lower earnings than less agreeable men. The man who is very agreeable (in the top 20%) will earn about $270,000 less over a lifetime than the average man." 

A 2018 study published in Personnel Psychology suggested that disagreeable men may pitch in less at home, allowing them to devote more time and energy to their work and thus make more than agreeable guys.

Neuroticism

To understand neuroticism, look no further than George Costanza of the long-running sitcom "Seinfeld." George is famous for his neuroses, which the show blames on his dysfunctional parents. He worries about everything, obsesses over germs and disease and once quits a job because his anxiety over not having access to a private bathroom is too overwhelming.

People high in neuroticism worry frequently and easily slip into anxiety and depression. If all is going well, neurotic people tend to find things to worry about. A 2021 study found negative association with neuroticism and earnings. Although, even when neurotic people with good salaries earned raises, the extra income actually made them less happy. Because people high in neuroticism tend to experience a lot of negative emotion, neuroticism plays a role in the development of emotional disorders, according to a paper published in Clinical Psychological Science.

In contrast, people who are low in neuroticism tend to be emotionally stable and even-keeled.

Can personality change?

Personality was once thought to be very difficult to alter, but evidence is accumulating that personality can change in adulthood. In a 2011 study, people who took psilocybin, or hallucinogenic "magic mushrooms", became more open after the experience. More recently and in a paper published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2017, the hallucinogen MDMA has been found to increase openness when used therapeutically, which could be helpful for treating post-traumatic stress.

And you don't necessarily have to go on a hallucinogenic trip to make real change. A study published in the January 2017 journal Psychological Bulletin synthesized 207 published research papers and found that personality may be altered through therapy, Live Science reported previously. "For the people who want to change their spouse tomorrow, which a lot of people want to do, I don't hold out much hope for them," said study researcher Brent Roberts, a social and personality psychologist at the University of Illinois. However, he continued, "if you're willing to focus on one aspect of yourself, and you're willing to go at it systematically, there's now increased optimism that you can affect change in that domain."

Because neuroticism is linked to mental health challenges, researchers have recently become interested in trying to reduce neuroticism through therapy. The hope of the study — published in the National Library of Medicine — is that targeting neuroticism will prevent the development of disorders like depression.

Personality also seems to change — slowly but naturally — over the course of a person's life. As people age, they become more extraverted, less neurotic, more agreeable and more conscientious, Live Science reported.

What personality type am I?

Though the Big Five are by far the most research-backed, scientifically based personality traits that have been identified, there are other schemas for measuring personality. These don't always tend to correlate with life outcomes the way the Big Five do, but people find them entertaining and sometimes helpful for thinking about their own attributes and goals. (Pro tip: If a system claims to describe your personality based on your zodiac sign, blood type or Hogwarts house, it's just for fun).

Among the most popular is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which breaks people into 16 "types" based on how their level of introversion or extraversion, their information-gathering style (sensing for those who stick to the bare facts or intuition for those who prefer to find patterns), their decision-making preferences (thinking for those who like objectivity and fact or feeling for those who prefer to weigh personal concerns) and their tolerance of ambiguity in dealing with the outside world (judging for those who prefer to get things settled, perceiving for those open to new information).

You're likely to run into versions of the Myers-Briggs online or at work retreats – they're very popular in corporate America. But research on the Myers-Briggs has found that it's not very reliable (meaning people get different answers if they take the test several times) and that it's not particularly valid (meaning that people's answers don't match their real-world behavior or job outcomes very well), Live Science reported in 2019.

Another popular personality test is the Enneagram Type Indicator, which divides people into nine personality types with additional "wing" types that cover other traits that people might sometimes display. The Enneagram doesn't have much scientific theory behind it, though, and there's very little research showing that it's valid or reliable, according to Inverse.

Finally, you're likely to run across the 16Personalities test online. This test is based on Myers-Briggs but instead of identifying people by four-letter strings, it divides people into 16 social-media-friendly categories like "diplomats" and "explorers."

If you'd like to delve into personality inventories beyond the Big Five, you might have more luck with the HEXACO Personality Inventory, which aims to be more internationally relevant than the Big Five. In studies of personality, researchers found that outside the United States, a sixth trait kept popping up. This trait is along the honesty-humility spectrum. People who are high in honesty-humility are modest, fair and sincere; people who are low in the trait as boastful, greedy and pompous. The HEXACO inventory otherwise overlaps with the Big Five, measuring openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and emotionality (which is similar to neuroticism).

Another personality inventory based in scientific theory is the Hogan Personality Inventory, which draws from the Big Five but focuses on interpersonal interactions specifically. This inventory measures people on traits such as ambition, sociability, sensitivity and prudence.

Additional resources

• Business Insider: The Big Five Personality Traits and What They Mean  
• U.S. National Library of Medicine: Long-term Stability in the Big Five Personality Traits in Adulthood
• Encyclopedia Britannica: Culture-and-Personality Studies

Lobotomy, also known as leucotomy, is a neurosurgical operation that involves permanently damaging parts of the brain's prefrontal lobe, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Introduced in the mid-20th century, lobotomies have always been controversial, but were widely performed for more than two decades as treatment for schizophrenia, manic depression and bipolar disorder, among other mental illnesses.

Lobotomy was an umbrella term for a series of different operations that purposely damaged brain tissue in order to treat mental illness, said Dr. Barron Lerner, a medical historian and professor at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York.

"The behaviors [doctors] were trying to fix, they thought, were set down in neurological connections," Lerner told Live Science. "The idea was, if you could damage those connections, you could stop the bad behaviors."

When lobotomy was invented, there were no good ways to treat mental illness, and people were "pretty desperate" for any kind of intervention, Lerner said. Even so, there were always critics of the procedure, he added.

When was the first lobotomy?

Even before the first lobotomy, doctors were manipulating the brain to change behavior. Beginning in the late 1880s, the Swiss physician Gottlieb Burkhardt removed parts of the cortex of the brains of patients with manic agitation, auditory hallucinations and symptoms of schizophrenia. Burkhardt noted in an 1891 paper that the surgery calmed his patients, though some suffered complications such as motor weakness, sensory aphasia (inability to understand speech, writing or tactile symbols) and epilepsy, and one patient died five days after the procedure, researchers reported in 2008 in the Journal of Neurosurgery.

Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz is credited with officially inventing the lobotomy in 1935, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1949 (later, a movement was started to revoke the prize, unsuccessfully).

Moniz's breakthrough was inspired by lobotomy-like procedures that Yale neuroscientist John Fulton and his colleague Carlyle Jacobsen performed on chimpanzees. They removed both frontal lobes in a female chimpanzee who had previously displayed anger and frustration if she made a mistake while performing tasks in experiments; after the surgery, the chimp became more cooperative and did not show signs of frustration, scientists wrote in 2014 in the Singapore Medical Journal.

Later that year, Moniz and his colleague Almeida Lima performed the first human lobotomy experiments, operating on 20 people. The doctors targeted the patients' frontal lobes because that brain region is associated with behavior and personality.

Moniz reported the surgeries as a success in treating patients with conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, panic disorder and mania, according to an article published in 2011 in the Journal of Neurosurgery. But the operations had severe side effects, including increased body temperature, vomiting, bladder and bowel incontinence and eye problems, as well as apathy, lethargy and abnormal sensations of hunger, among others. The medical community was initially critical of the procedure, but nevertheless, physicians started using it in countries around the world. 

How is a lobotomy performed?

Moniz's first lobotomy procedures involved cutting a hole in the skull and injecting ethanol into the brain to destroy the fibers that connected the frontal lobe to other parts of the brain. Later, Moniz developed a surgical instrument called a leucotome, which contains a retractable loop of wire that, when rotated, cuts a circular lesion in brain tissue.

Italian and American doctors were early adopters of the lobotomy. American neurosurgeons Walter Freeman and James Watts were the first to perform the procedure in the United States in 1937, making "nine cores in the white matter of each frontal lobe" of a 59-year-old patient, according to a 2015 report in the journal The Lancet. They adapted Moniz's technique to create the "Freeman-Watts technique" or the "Freeman-Watts standard prefrontal lobotomy," in which a surgeon drilled holes in the patient's skull, then inserted and rotated a knife to destroy brain cells, targeting connections between part of the prefrontal lobes and a region in the thalamus, which is a grey-matter structure toward the center of the brain, The New York Times wrote in 1994 in Dr. Watts' obituary.

"Freeman thought psychosis was the result of excessive self-reflection — thoughts that circled back on themselves over and over again," Miriam Posner, assistant professor in the information studies department at UCLA, said in 2019 in the National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine Lecture Series at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. 

"He was being literal when he said lobotomy was a way of cutting those endlessly circling thoughts off within the brain," Posner said.

The Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti developed a procedure that involved accessing the frontal lobes through the eye sockets; that procedure would inspire Freeman to develop the transorbital lobotomy in 1945, a method that would not require a traditional surgeon or operating room, researchers reported in 2019 in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. The technique involved using an instrument called an orbitoclast — a long, slender instrument modeled after an ice pick — which the physician would insert through the patient's eye socket using a hammer. They would then move the instrument side-to-side to separate the frontal lobes from the thalamus, the part of the brain that receives and relays sensory input. 

Transorbital lobotomies did not require anesthesia and were quicker to perform than standard lobotomies; consequently, surgeons across Europe and America performed tens of thousands of these procedures over the next two decades, according to the 2019 study. Freeman himself performed at least 3,000, and possibly as many as 5,000 lobotomies, according to the obituary in the Times.

"He traveled around the country, doing multiple lobotomies in a day," Lerner said. "He absolutely did this for way too long." Freeman performed his last lobotomy in 1967; it was his third such procedure on the patient, a woman named Helen Mortensen, NPR reported. She died of a brain hemorrhage soon after, and Freeman was banned from performing surgery, according to NPR.

What happens after a lobotomy?

While a small percentage of people supposedly showed improved mental conditions or no change at all, for many patients, lobotomy had negative effects on their personality, initiative, inhibitions, empathy and ability to function on their own, according to Lerner.

"The main long-term side effect was mental dullness," Lerner said. People could no longer live independently, and they lost their personalities, he added.

Mental institutions played a critical role in the prevalence of lobotomy. At the time, there were hundreds of thousands of mental institutions, which were overcrowded and chaotic. By giving unruly patients lobotomies, doctors could maintain control over the institution, Lerner said.

That's exactly what unfolds in the 1962 novel and 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," in which Randle Patrick McMurphy, a violent but sane man who declares himself insane to avoid a prison sentence, is sent to mental hospital and given a lobotomy that leaves him mute, unresponsive and vacant-eyed.

"Usually things in movies are exaggerated," Lerner said. But in this case, it was "disturbingly real," he said.

Are lobotomies performed today?

Lobotomies declined in popularity in the 1950s, as their undesirable side effects became more well-known. Criticism of the procedures also grew among medical professionals who said the doctors who performed lobotomies were not neurosurgeons, neglected to report negative outcomes for many of their patients, and overall had "a lack of scientific rigor," according to the Frontiers in Neuroscience study. 

"It also became apparent that some institutionalized or incapacitated patients were lobotomized without informed consent, and procedures may have been performed on prisoners to address dysfunctional behavior as opposed to mental illness," the study authors reported. 

By the mid-1950s, scientists had developed psychotherapeutic medications such as the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, which was much more effective and safer for treating mental disorders than lobotomy. Nowadays, mental illness is primarily treated with drugs and psychotherapies. In cases where drugs or talk therapy are not effective, people may be treated with electroconvulsive therapy, a procedure that involves passing electrical currents through the brain to trigger a brief seizure, according to the Mayo Clinic. 

Lobotomy is rarely, if ever, performed today, and if it is, "it's a much more elegant procedure," Lerner said. "You're not going in with an ice pick and monkeying around." The removal of specific brain areas (psychosurgery) is reserved for treating patients for whom all other treatments have failed.

Additional lobotomy resources

• Nobelprize.org: Controversial Psychosurgery Resulted in a Nobel Prize
• PsychCentral: The Surprising History of the Lobotomy
• NPR: "My Lobotomy": Howard Dully's Journey

This article was updated on Oct. 13, 2021 by Live Science senior writer Mindy Weisberger.

Between adolescence and adulthood, you go through a host of changes — jobs, regrettable haircuts and relationships that come and go. But what about who you are at your core? As you grow older, does your personality change?

Personality is the pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors unique to a person. People tend to think of personality as fixed. But according to psychologists, that's not how it works. "Personality is a developmental phenomenon. It's not just a static thing that you're stuck with and can't get over," said Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

That's not to say that you're a different person each day you wake up. In the short term, change can be nearly imperceptible, Roberts told Live Science. Longitudinal studies, in which researchers survey the personalities of participants regularly over many years, suggest that our personality is actually stable on shorter time scales. 

Related: Why do people have different personalities?

In one study, published in 2000 in the journal Psychological Bulletin, researchers analyzed the results of 152 longitudinal studies on personality, which followed participants ranging in age from childhood to their early 70s. Each of these studies measured trends in the Big Five personality traits. This cluster of traits, which include extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism, are a mainstay of personality research. The researchers found that individuals' levels of each personality trait, relative to other participants, tended to stay consistent within each decade of life. 

That pattern of consistency begins around age 3, and perhaps even earlier, said Brent Donnellan, professor and chair of psychology at Michigan State University. When psychologists study children, they don't measure personality traits in the same way they do for adults. Instead, they look at temperament — the intensity of a person's reactions to the world. We come into the world with unique temperaments, and research suggests that our temperaments as children — for example, whether we're easy going or prone to temper tantrums, eager or more reluctant to approach strangers — correspond to adult personality traits. "A shy 3-year-old acts a lot different from a shy 20-something. But there's an underlying core," Donnellan told Live Science. 

Earlier temperament seems to affect later life experience. For example, one 1995 study published in the journal Child Development followed children from the age of 3 until the age of 18. The researchers found, for instance, that children who were shyer and more withdrawn tended to grow into unhappier teenagers. 

But those decades add up. Throughout all those years, our personality is still changing, but slowly, Roberts said. "It's something that's subtle," he added. You don't notice it on that five-to-10-year time scale, but in the long term, it becomes pronounced. In 1960, psychologists surveyed over 440,000 high school students — around 5% of all students in the country at that time. The students answered questions about everything from how they reacted to emotional situations to how efficiently they got work done. Fifty years later, researchers tracked down 1,952 of these former students and gave them the same survey. The results, published in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that in their 60s, participants scored much higher than they had as teenagers on questions measuring calmness, self-confidence, leadership and social sensitivity. 

Again and again, longitudinal studies have found similar results. Personality tends to get "better" over time. Psychologists call it "the maturity principle." People become more extraverted, emotionally stable, agreeable and conscientious as they grow older. Over the long haul, these changes are often pronounced. 

Some individuals might change less than others, but in general, the maturity principle applies to everyone. That makes personality change even harder to recognize in ourselves — how your personality compares with that of your peers doesn't change as much as our overall change in personality, because everyone else is changing right along with you. "There's good evidence that the average self-control of a 30-year-old is higher than a 20-year-old," Donnellan said. "At the same time, people who are relatively self-controlled at 18 also tend to be relatively self-controlled at age 30."

So why do we change so much? Evidence suggests it's not dramatic life events, such as marriage, the birth of a child or loss of a loved one. Some psychologists actually suggest these events reinforce your personality as you bring your characteristics with you to that particular situation, Donnellan said. 

Related: How accurate is the Myers-Briggs personality test?

Instead, changing expectations placed on us — as we adjust to university, the work force, starting a family — slowly wears us in, almost like a pair of shoes, Roberts said. "Over time you are asked in many contexts across life to do things a bit differently," he said. "There's not a user manual for how to act, but there's very clear implicit norms for how we should behave in these situations." So we adapt.

Depending on how you look at it, it's a revelation that's either unsettling or hopeful. Over time, personality does change, progressively and consistently — like tectonic plates shifting rather than an earthquake. "That opens up the question: Over the life course, how much of a different person do we become?" Roberts said.

Originally published on Live Science.

If you don't quite fit in among the morning people or night owls, well, you might soon have your own, more relatable, sleep category.

Now, researchers propose two more so-called chronotypes: the "afternoon" person and the "napper." A chronotype is defined by the time of day a person is most alert and sleepiest. [Top 11 Spooky Sleep Disorders]

A group of researchers in Belgium created and distributed a short online survey to over 1,300 people, ages 12 to 90, asking them questions about their sleep habits and tiredness levels throughout the day. They then analyzed the results in collaboration with a group in Russia.

They found that indeed there were 631 people who fit into one of the two well-known night and morning categories. While larks are wide awake in the morning and sleepier as the day progresses, owls are just the opposite.

But they also found, based on the wakefulness-sleepiness answers, that there were 550 participants (some of them repeats from the other two groups) that fell into one of two other groups, the nappers and the afternoon people.

Of all the chronotypes, afternoon people wake up the sleepiest and then they become alert around 11 a.m., staying that way until about 5 p.m., after which they get tired again. The "nappers" (so-called because they're prone to taking naps) wake up alert and stay alert until about 11 a.m., after which they get really tired until about 3 p.m. After 3 p.m. until about 10 p.m., they are alert and productive again, as was first reported by Psychology Today.

Still, the remaining 30% of participants didn't fall into any group.

Recognizing these categories is "important because some people can benefit from [an] afternoon nap and, you know, the conditions for an afternoon nap are not very good in the modern society," said lead author Arcady Putilov, a neurobiologist at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Maybe if the nappers, for example, took a quick 10-15 minute snooze during the day, their performance would increase, he told Live Science.

The authors also found that the results, for the most part, held true in men and women, in both day- and night-shift workers and in all ages. There were some slight differences in age, such as older people tended to fall more into the "nappers" group. What's more, one limitation might be that most of the people who took the survey were younger-aged people in Belgium (half of the participants were under the age of 25). But still, Putilov thinks the findings would hold true in a broader sample.

The scientists reported their findings May 27 in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

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Originally published on Live Science.

For most modern societies, cannibalism is an unthinkable act of violence and is strictly taboo. Recently, researchers investigated how mental illness might, in very rare and extreme cases, lead a person to break that grave prohibition.

Scientists recently reviewed five medical case studies of male patients ages 18 to 36 who had practiced pathological cannibalism — or cannibalism as a result of mental disease. All of the patients were residents at a psychiatric facility in Villejuif, France, over a period of 20 years, the researchers reported in a new study.

By examining the patients' histories and details of their diagnoses, the scientists hoped to discover behavioral patterns that could explain what triggered the cannibalistic acts. [Zombie Diet: 10 Real-Life Examples of Humans Eating Humans]

Evidence of cannibalism in humans dates back to our relatives that lived 900,000 years ago; it has been documented in our extinct cousins, the Neanderthals, about 100,000 years ago, and the act is preserved in Ice Age bones dating back more than 17,000 years ago. The practice has persisted in some human societies, linked to rituals and social practices; it has also been documented under circumstances of severe starvation — several incidents were reported in 2013 in impoverished regions of North Korea.

But pathological cannibalism is extremely rare and is thought to occur in two types of individuals: those suffering from severe psychotic mental illness and those experiencing extreme forms of significant paraphilia — sexual desires gratified by dangerous activities, according to the researchers. Their findings were reported in a study published online June 3 in the Journal of Forensic Science

Based on existing records, the study authors divided the patients into two groups: those with severe schizophrenia and those suffering from mixed personality disorder "with sadistic and psychopathic features associated with paraphilia." All of the patients had dysfunctional childhoods that exposed them to sexual abuse, violence at home or emotional neglect, according to the study.

Fantasized for "many years"

The two patients in the mixed personality disorder group were unconcerned about social taboos; in fact, they admitted to cannibalistic fantasies or plans "going back many years," the researchers wrote. What led them to attack and eat their victims? "Feelings of humiliation seem to be the trigger, and both patients assaulted their victims at a time when they suffered a loss of self-esteem," the scientists said. The cannibalism was also accompanied by sexual acts involving the victims.

By comparison, cannibalism in the three patients who suffered from schizophrenia followed an outburst of sudden violence. All of these patients attacked and ate parts of their parents’ bodies. The researchers discovered that there was a history of emotional friction and hostility in these parent-child relationships.

The authors concluded that the schizophrenia group performed cannibalism as a very extreme reaction of self-defense to a threat of destruction — physical or psychological. For the patients with mixed personality disorder, cannibalism boosted their self-esteem and relieved tension; "ego and narcissism are the central issue, with a desire to overcome deep-rooted frustrations by means of an extraordinary act," according to the study.

Because only five cases were reviewed for the study and all of the subjects were males, the findings are not meant to be broadly applied to other cannibalism cases, the researchers wrote.

What's more, each case is clinically complex and so requires further analysis to untangle the web of environmental and individual factors that may lead to cannibalistic acts.

"While the biography, the diagnosis or the relational mode of these patients may highlight the reasons behind their assault, the nature of the act remains a mystery," the study authors reported.

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Originally published on Live Science.

There are two types of people in the world: those who believe in the Myers-Briggs personality test and those who don't.

Except that's not true. Grouping people into two, three or 16 categories, which is the aim of a lot of personality tests, has never quite worked. And even in the case of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is simultaneously the most popular personality test in the world and the most frequently debunked, non-experts and psychologists alike take varying positions about the value of the tool.

About 1.5 million people take the test online each year, and more than 88% of Fortune 500 companies, as well as hundreds of universities, use it in hiring and training, according to The Myers Briggs Company, a California-based firm that administers the MBTI. Even fictional characters, from Disney princesses, to Harry Potter and Darth Vader have been assigned an MBTI type. [Which Personality Types Are Most Likely to Be Happy?]

Despite the popularity of the test, many psychologists criticize it — hardly a few months go by without a harsh take-down of the MBTI in the media, where a psychologist will say that the Myers-Brigg is unscientific, meaningless or bogus. But there are others who take a milder view of the test. "Many personality psychologists consider the MBTI to be a somewhat valid measure of some important personality characteristics but one that has some important limitations," said Michael Ashton, professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario.

What is the MBTI?

The MBTI was invented in 1942 by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Cook, always a keen observer of people and their differences, was inspired by the work of psychologist Carl Jung and his theories; for example, the concepts of introversion and extroversion. The mother and daughter devoted their lives to developing the type indicator, hoping to help people understand their tendencies and choose appropriate jobs. The test uses 93 questions to assess the following traits:

• Introvert (I) versus Extrovert (E)
• Intuitive (N) versus Sensory (S)
• Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) versus Perceiving (P)

Based on the combination of traits people fall into, the test ultimately assigns them one of the 16 labels, such as INTJ, ENFP, and so on.

Why do psychologists doubt it?

Psychologists' main problem with the MBTI is the science behind it, or lack thereof. In 1991, a National Academy of Sciences committee reviewed data from MBTI research and noted "the troublesome discrepancy between research results (a lack of proven worth) and popularity."

The MBTI was born of ideas proposed before psychology was an empirical science; those ideas were not tested before the tool became a commercial product. But modern psychologists demand that a personality test pass certain criteria to be trusted. "In social science, we use four standards: Are the categories reliable, valid, independent and comprehensive?" Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology, wrote on LinkedIn. "For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, no, and not really."

Some research suggests the MBTI is unreliable because the same person can get different results when retaking the test. Other studies have questioned the validity of the MBTI, which is the ability of the test to accurately link the "types" to outcomes in the real world — for example, how well people classified as a certain type will perform in a given job. [Why Do People Ghost?]

The Myers-Briggs Company says the studies discrediting the MBTI are old, but their results are still being perpetuated in the media. Since those early criticisms, the company says it has done its own research to refine the test and assess its validity. "When you look at validity of the instrument [the MTBI], it is just as valid as any other personality assessment," Suresh Balasubramanian, the company's general manager, told USA Today.

Some of the test's limitations, however, are inherent in its conceptual design. One limitation is the MBTI's black-and-white categories: You are either an extrovert or introvert, a judger or a feeler. "This is a shortcoming, because people don't fall neatly into two categories on any personality dimension; instead, people have many different degrees of the dimension," Ashton told Live Science. And, in fact, most people are close to the average, and relatively few people are at either extreme. By placing people into tidy boxes, we are separating people who are in reality more similar to each other than they are different.

The MBTI may be missing even more nuances by assessing only four aspects of personality differences. "Several decades ago, personality researchers had determined that there were at least five major personality dimensions, and more recent evidence has shown that there are six," Ashton said. "One of those dimensions involves how honest and humble versus deceitful and conceited someone is, and the other dimension involves how patient and agreeable versus quick-tempered and argumentative someone is."

Not entirely useless

Some of the shortcomings of the MBTI stem from the complex, messy nature of human personality. Neat categories of MBTI make personality look clearer and more stable than it really is, according to David Pincus, a professor of psychology at Chapman University in California. Psychologists prefer other tools, namely the Big Five, which assesses personality based on where an individual lies on the spectrums of five traits: agreeableness; conscientiousness; extraversion; openness to experience; and neuroticism. The Big Five model has a better record of scientific validation than the MBTI, experts say.

Still, the MBTI is not entirely useless.

People are drawn to tests like MBTI out of a desire to understand themselves and others. "The four dimensions from which the MBTI types are derived are all useful ones for describing people's personalities," Ashton said. [Can You Learn Anything While You Sleep?]

And even when the MBTI's results don't quite match your intuition about yourself or are just wrong, they can still provide insight. Many people who've taken the MBTI have noticed this effect. As a former employee at Bridgewater Associates (a hedge fund almost as famous for having employees take personality tests as it is for its $120 billion in assets) wrote in Quartz, the MBTI labels never seemed to fully describe a person. Instead, the real value of the test seemed to be in the push "to reconcile the gaps between what the test results tell us, and what we know to be true about ourselves."

In this sense, the MBTI can serve as a starting point for self-exploration by giving people a tool and a language to reflect on themselves and others. The test is "a portal to an elaborate practice of talking and thinking about who you are," Merve Emre, an associate professor of English at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, wrote in "The Personality Brokers," a review of the MBTI's history.

Ultimately, it's not the MBTI label, but the power of introspection that drives the insights and sometimes fuels the motivation to take steps to change one's condition.

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Originally published on Live Science.

February 14th, the day of chocolates, roses and heart-festooned greeting cards, is upon us once again.

If that sentence made you groan, you're not alone. Almost half of Americans describe Valentine's Day as "overrated," according to a 2017 survey. Still, another 43 percent called it "romantic," indicating some serious polarization surrounding this day celebrating love.

Valentine's Day itself does not get a lot of love in the scientific literature, but a few scattered studies hint at why it inspires hate. See if any of the reasons to hate Valentine's Day ring true for you.

1. You're a rebel

In marketing, there's a notion called "resistance theory." Basically, if people feel like they're being asked to comply with a prescribed, prepackaged behavior, they're unlikely to do so.

Valentine's Day is ripe for resistance, according to a 2008 study in the Journal of Business Research. It's not a religious holiday, so it's perceived as corporate and consumerist, a way for businesses to stick their money-grubbing noses in your personal romantic business. According to surveys, diaries and e-diaries collected between 2000 and 2006, people feel a strong sense of gift-giving resistance surrounding Valentine's Day, even as they feel obligated to get something for their significant other. The sense of obligation killed any sense of meaning that came with the gift-giving. In response, many participants enacted monetary limits on gift-giving. But 88 percent of men in relationships and 75 percent of women did still gift something, the researchers found, though often the gift was a handmade item or home-cooked dinner. [13 Scientifically Proven Signs You're in Love]

Valentine's seemed to bum out those in new relationships and single people the most. Eight-one percent of men and 50 percent of women in brand-new partnerships reported feeling obligated to give gifts. Meanwhile, some singles became particularly incensed with the marketing surrounding Valentine's Day.

"I would like to extend a warm thanks to Hallmark, the official sponsor of Valentine's Day, for reminding me that without a significant other, how truly worthless my life is," one single participant wrote, as the researchers recorded in their study.

Notably, Valentine's Day isn't the only holiday that fills people with angst over obligatory gift-giving. A 2013 Pew Research survey about Christmas found that the top things Americans dislike about Christmas all have to do with consumerism: A third (33 percent) hate the materialism; 22 percent hate the expense; and 10 percent loathe the crowded stores.

2. You're not comfortable in relationships

Regardless of relationship status, Valentine's Day may be particularly cringe-worthy for those who avoid intimacy. A 2014 study surveyed coupled-up individuals online about how Valentine's Day impacted their assessments of their own relationships. The researchers focused on a concept called "attachment," which is rooted in research on parent-child interactions. People who are attachment-avoidant try not to become too intimate with their partners and tend not to offer much emotional support.

Attachment avoidance turned out to be key for how people experience their relationships in the context of Valentine's Day. The researchers had people take online surveys on Valentine's Day and on a random day in April about their relationships. Some of the surveys were accompanied by banner ads with romantic (though not explicitly Valentine-y) themes. The people who were both low in attachment avoidance and reminded of romance with a banner ad reported a boost in relationship satisfaction and investment in their relationships on Valentine's Day.

Without all of those ingredients, meh.

"One of the main messages from the paper is that Valentine's Day actually doesn't make a difference" for most people, study author William Chopik, a social scientist at Michigan State University, told Live Science.

And for people high in attachment avoidance, even throwing Valentine's Day and reminders of romance at them didn't make them feel more into their relationships.

For the researchers, these findings explained some previous conundrums surrounding Valentine's Day. Some previous research had found that anniversaries, holidays and birthdays helped glue couples together, they wrote. However, other studies had suggested that, on the contrary, weak relationships are especially prone to go down in flames around Valentine's Day, Chopik said. A person's individual attachment style could determine whether V-Day casts a rosy light on a relationship or sinks the whole thing. [The 6 Most Tragic Love Stories in History]

"For better or for worse, recurring relationship events provide opportunities for people to think about their relationships," the researchers concluded.

3. You're being a little melodramatic right now

Then again, maybe Valentine's isn't such a big deal after all. Whatever you're feeling about it right now might simply evaporate come Feb. 14.

A 2010 study of emotional anticipation asked participants to report how they were likely to feel about Valentine's Day in mid-January. On Feb. 16, the same participants were again asked about Valentine's Day, this time reporting how they actually felt about the holiday.

Across the board, participants overestimated how intensely they'd feel about the holiday. Daters believed they'd feel more positive about Valentine's than they actually did. Non-daters thought they'd feel more negative. In fact, after the day passed, it turned out that both daters and singles felt about the same on Valentine's.

Your personality might clue you in about whether your pre-V-Day emotions are likely to track with how you'll really feel. The researchers found that extroverts tended to view their future emotions through a rosier light, while people with anxious, neurotic tendencies tended to expect to feel particularly bad about Valentine's (especially if they were single). It turned out to be true that extroverts did report feeling better about Valentine's after the fact than neurotic individuals did, but both groups still overestimated their emotional response.

So the next time you pass a display of roses or see a commercial hawking diamond rings, take a deep breath and remember: This Valentine's Day, too, shall pass.

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Originally published on Live Science.

There's a new way of looking at insomnia.

Rather than just considering sleep-related symptoms, a new study from the Netherlands branches out to look at personality traits and emotions, and finds there are five types of insomnia.

The findings may pave the way for a better understanding of the causes of insomnia, as well as the development of more personalized treatments for the condition, the researchers said. [5 Surprising Sleep Discoveries]

The study, conducted by researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, was published online Jan. 7 in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry.

Five types

Insomnia affects an estimated 10 percent of the population. The main symptoms involve difficulty falling or staying asleep — for example, people with the condition may lie awake for long periods before being able to fall asleep, or they may wake up too early and not be able to fall back to sleep, according to the National Institutes of Health.

But despite having similar symptoms, people with insomnia can vary widely in their response to treatment. In addition, attempts to find "biomarkers" for the condition — like commonalities in people's brain scans — have proved futile, the researchers said. These inconsistencies suggest that there may be more than one type of insomnia.

In an effort to find "subtypes" of insomnia, the researchers analyzed information from more than 4,000 people who filled out online surveys about their sleep habits and other traits as part of a project called the Netherlands Sleep Registry.

Based on their survey responses, about 2,000 of these participants had insomnia. (These participants scored high on an insomnia-related survey, but did not have a confirmed diagnosis.) To identify subtypes, the researchers went beyond looking at sleep-related symptoms and considered other factors, including personality traits, mood, emotions and response to stressful life events.

The study authors found that participants with insomnia tended to fit into one of five categories:

• Type 1: People with type 1 insomnia tended to have high levels of distress (meaning high levels of negative emotions like anxiety and worry) and low levels of happiness.
• Type 2: People with type 2 insomnia had moderate levels of distress, but their levels of happiness and experiences of pleasurable emotions tended to be relatively normal.
• Type 3: People with type 3 insomnia also had moderate levels of distress, but had low levels of happiness and reduced experiences of pleasure.
• Type 4: People with type 4 insomnia typically had low levels of distress, but they tended to experience long-lasting insomnia in response to a stressful life event.
• Type 5: People with type 5 insomnia also had low levels of distress, and their sleep disorder wasn't affected by stressful life events.

These subtypes were consistent over time: When participants were surveyed again five years later, most of them maintained the same subtype.

Personalized treatment?

The researchers also found that people with different insomnia subtypes differed in terms of their response to treatment and their risk of depression. For example, people with subtypes 2 and 4 saw the most improvement in their sleep symptoms after taking a benzodiazepine (a type of tranquilizer), while people with type 3 did not see improvement from this type of drug. In addition, people with subtype 2 responded well to a type of talk therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy, while people with subtype 4 did not. People with subtype 1 had the greatest lifetime risk of depression.

The findings suggest that certain insomnia treatments may work best for certain subtypes, and future research should examine this. In addition, identifying people with insomnia who are at greatest risk of depression may lead to ways to help prevent depression in this group, the researchers said.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Tsuyoshi Kitajima, of the Department of Psychiatry at Fujita Health University School of Medicine in Japan, said the work shows that "robust subtyping is possible" among a group of people with insomnia.

However, Kitajima said some sleep doctors may have concerns about these subtypes because they are largely based on factors that aren't directly related to sleep. But, Kitajima noted that some of the subtypes described in the new study bear similarities to previously accepted (though now abandoned) categories of insomnia. For example, people with subtypes 1 and 2 tended to develop symptoms early in life — in childhood or adolescence. This is similar to symptoms seen in people with so-called "idiopathic insomnia," a traditional category of insomnia in which people develop the condition early in life without an identifiable cause. (However, idiopathic insomnia is no longer listed as a type of insomnia in the diagnostic manual known as the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Third Edition).

Kitajima added that it would be beneficial to confirm the findings in people who have actually been diagnosed with insomnia.

The study authors also noted that participants volunteered to take part in a sleep-related study, and this group may not necessarily be representative of the population as a whole. There could also be additional subtypes that have yet to be identified.

• 5 Things You Must Know About Sleep
• 7 Tips to Sleep Soundly Tonight
• 9 DIY Ways to Improve Your Mental Health

Originally published on Live Science.

If you've ever reveled in the misfortune of another, you've experienced what the Germans call "schadenfreude." But which kind did you experience?

A new paper argues that there are three subtypes of schadenfreude, some of which might seem more defensible morally than others. People can experience glee in others' pain out of a genuine desire for justice, researchers wrote in an upcoming issue of the journal New Ideas in Psychology. Or people can be motivated by us-versus-them dynamics or even by petty personal jealousies.

What ties all these subtypes together, said lead study author Shensheng Wang, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, is a common thread of dehumanization. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

"When we fail to perceive others as humans, when we dehumanize others, we cut off the link between us and the person who experiences a misfortune," Wang told Live Science.

Types of schadenfreude

Wang first became interested in the concept of schadenfreude a few years ago, when he was researching how children experience envy and competition. Schadenfreude had come up in earlier research by other scientists on envy, Wang said, but he found that researchers tended to define it in different ways. Some, for example, saw the emotion as justice-based, as people sometimes report feeling more schadenfreude for high achievers than for average Joes and Janes. Perhaps, these researchers argued, people want to cut others down to size when they think those individuals deserve comeuppance.

But feelings of schadenfreude don't emerge only when someone seemingly deserves it. People also feel the emotion about things like sports, Wang said, gaining pleasure when a rival team hits a losing streak.

Other studies had hinted that people might experience schadenfreude alongside envy or that they might be most prone to schadenfreude when the victim of misfortune was "the other" — someone not like them.

Wang argued that all of these scholars are cuing in on different types of schadenfreude, each with its own motivation. The first motivation, social justice, links to people's desires for fairness and punishment of wrongdoers, Wang said. The second type of motivation, aggression, draws a line between "us" and "them" and solidifies the social identity of the person feeling the schadenfreude as a member of the in-group. The third motivation, rivalry, occurs when the person feeling schadenfreude is motivated by personal envy and spite.

Humanity's dark side

So far, there isn't a lot of research attempting to discern schadenfreude subtypes, Wang said, adding that he hopes the new paper will spur more studies.

There is evidence, however, that feelings of schadenfreude might start young — perhaps as early as 2 years of age. In one 2014 study, researchers set up experiments to elicit schadenfreude in 24-month-olds. In one condition, the scientists asked a mother to read a book to herself while her child and a preschool classmate played. After 2 minutes, the mom would "accidentally" spill water on the pages of her book. In the second condition, the mother would do the same thing but cuddle her child's friend on her lap as she read, making her own child jealous of the attention.

The researchers found that the jealous kids were more gleeful about the spilled water than the kids who hadn't been primed to experience jealousy. This was likely an early expression of schadenfreude, the researchers reported in the journal PLOS One. 

People show individual differences in how they experience schadenfreude, as well, Wang said. The emotion is more common in people who are high in psychopathy (callous and unempathetic), Machiavellian traits (scheming), narcissism (self-obsessed) and sadism. But, Wang said, schadenfreude is pervasive among people in all settings, from political rivalries to sports.

"I think this emotion can shed light on some of the darker sides of our humanity," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Narcissists, psychopaths and sadists all have something in common: An underlying "dark core" of personality.

Recent research suggests that so-called dark personality traits are all a manifestation of an underlying tendency to put oneself first at the expense of others. This underlying tendency, which researchers are calling the "D-factor," can be measured with a new test, available online here.

Previous studies have focused "on the differences [between] dark traits, because of course there is a difference between narcissism and psychopathic behavior in everyday [life]," said lead study author Ingo Zettler, a professor of psychology at the University of Copenhagen. "But we were more interested in similarities and commonalities." [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

The study was published in July in the journal Psychological Review.

General darkness

The D-factor that Zettler and his colleagues describe in the study is similar to the concept of general intelligence, or the "G factor." In intelligence, the G factor is a number that summarizes intelligence as measured across various types of tests. A person who is good at spatial reasoning tends to also do well on tests of verbal ability or math, for example. And a person's G factor has been found to be a predictor of life outcomes like job success, income and even health.

Usually, researchers focus on no more than three or so dark traits at a time, Zettler told Live Science. One of the most common groupings is the "dark triad" of narcissism (grandiose selfishness), Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate people to get one's way) and psychopathy (callousness and antisocial behavior). Zettler and his colleagues expanded the list based on previous research, testing a total of nine dark traits. The other six were egoism (a focus on one's own achievements); moral disengagement (the belief that ethical rules don't apply to oneself); psychological entitlement (the belief that one deserves more than others); sadism (pleasure from hurting others); spitefulness (the desire for revenge, even at one's own expense); and self-interest.

In three separate studies in which several hundred to several thousand participants took online personality questionnaires, the researchers gathered a broad swath of data on each of these traits. They then used statistical modeling to figure out if the traits tended to co-occur at high levels.  

The dark factor

The traits do tend to travel together, the researchers found. In fact, the underlying D-factor is strong enough to account for an overall dark personality, even if the tests drop one of the nine traits altogether. [5 Experts Answer: Can Your IQ Change?]

For example, taking away all questions about Machiavellianism, or even just pulling 75 percent of items off the questionnaire at random, didn't change people's D-scores much, Zettler told Live Science. That indicates that the D-factor is a robust personality measurement.

"[I]nformation about a general tendency to behave in an ethically questionable manner can be obtained by measuring [the D-factor] only," he said.

Underlying all of these traits is a willingness to manipulate, use or hurt others in order to advance one's own best interest, Zettler said.

Next, Zettler said, the researchers plan to study how the D-factor develops over time as well as how this underlying personality factor plays out in different scenarios. They also want to study how the D-factor correlates with specific behaviors. For example, there are already many studies on individual traits like psychopathy and narcissism and how they relate to workplace behavior, Zettler said.

"Antisocial behavior, aggression, cheating," he said. "This should all be related to the dark factor."

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have discovered four main personality types, but put the brakes on your visions of a Harry Potter-style Sorting Hat. Chances are, you're just average.

Psychologists had already discovered that people tend to differ from one another according to five main personality traits, known as the Big Five: extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism. The new study of the traits of more than 1.5 million people suggests that some of these traits tend to cluster together, creating predictable personality types. 

There are four main clusters, researchers reported Monday (Sept. 17) in the journal Nature Human Behavior. People in the "average" cluster are, well, average on all five traits. They don't score very high or very low on any given trait. People in the "role model" cluster are pleasant to be around. They're low in neuroticism, high in conscientiousness, high in agreeableness and particularly extraverted and open to new experiences. [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]

Meanwhile, people in the "self-centered" cluster, the researchers found, are fairly disagreeable, not very conscientious and not very open to new experiences. The final cluster, the "reserved" cluster, is full of people who are low in neuroticism but also low in openness.

You're probably average

The researchers discovered the four clusters by using an algorithm to detect patterns in the data from 145,388 peoples' results on a personality test called the International Personality Item Pool. At first, the algorithm returned downright unbelievable results, including up to 20 different personality clusters. These made no sense to experts in the personality field and represented statistical artifacts, study co-author Martin Gerlach said.

After refining the calculations, the team ended up with the four clusters reported in their new study. To make sure these weren't also errors, the researchers tested the calculations on three other huge data sets from three other personality tests: 410,376 results from the Johnson-120 test; 575,380 results from the myPersonality-100 test; and 386,375 results from the BBC-44 test. All of these tests were taken in the United States and Great Britain, and all focused on the Big Five personality traits. The algorithm turned up the same four clusters in these data sets, too. [Most Neurotic & Creative States Revealed in US Personality Map]

The key thing to understand about the results, Gerlach said, is that people don't actually clearly fall into one cluster or another.

"What we find is not that these clusters are well-separated or that you belong exclusively to one of these four types," Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, told Live Science. "This is not the case. People are located all over."

Metaphorically speaking, Gerlach said, the clusters are like lumps in pancake batter. There are particles of flour everywhere, but they just tend to be a little denser in certain areas. In other words, the personality types really fall along a continuum, he said.

That makes it hard to say how many people fall into one category or another. Almost by definition, most people are average, Gerlach said. They're close to the middle in terms of how outgoing they are, they're agreeable enough and pretty typical on conscientiousness. They're somewhat open to new experiences and right in the middle between laid back and high strung.

The "self-centered," "role model" and "reserved" categories are smaller than the "average" cluster, but otherwise can't really be ranked or quantified, Gerlach said.

Obscured information

This messy reality isn't as fun as things like the Myers-Briggs assessment, which purports to divide people into 16 separate personality types. Those types of tests are widely used, but they're based on fairly arbitrary dividing lines, Gerlach said.

"One problem is actually most people are located in the middle, so they are just average, so what does it mean to put them into [one category]?" he said.

Practically speaking, the new clusters suffer from the same problem, said Michael Ashton, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario who studies personality but was not involved in the current research. Ashton and his colleague Kibeom Lee of the University of Calgary said that even a single cluster contains a wide variety of people.

"Consider two people who both belong to the "role model" type of this study," Ashton and Lee wrote in an email to Live Science. "One of these persons might be extremely self-disciplined and organized but only slightly above average in kindness and generosity, whereas the other person might be extremely kind and generous but only slightly above average in self-discipline and organization. These two people are quite different in personality, but they both get placed into the same type."

Thus, types obscure useful information rather than illuminating personality, Ashton and Lee said.

"Basically, if you classify people into personality types, you lose most of the information that you can get by considering their scores on a few main personality dimensions," they wrote.  

People most likely can be seen to shift between clusters, as well. The researchers found that the "role model" category was weighted more toward people in the 40-plus age group, with relatively few people under the age of 21, indicating that maturity might nudge people into this cluster. Likewise, the "self-centered" cluster had relatively few people age 40 and up, but a relatively high proportion of people under the age of 21.

Gerlach and his colleagues argue that it's intriguing that the Big Five personality traits might, to some extent, move as a group rather than completely independently.

"One could ask the question, 'Why is this the case?'" he said. "So far, we do not have an understanding about that."

He and his team also want to find out whether the personality types have any impact on people's success in life. Personality traits have been shown to predict how well people do in life. A conscientious person, for example, tends to be successful at work, given their high levels of responsibility and organization.

"Now, the question is actually, 'Does a combination of traits perhaps lead to a better view of predicting these life outcomes?'" Gerlach said.

Original article on Live Science.

How well do you know yourself? New research suggests that people are pretty good at knowing how they're acting, with one exception: whether they're being jerks.

According to a study posted on the psychology preprint server PsyArXiv, people are relatively accurate judges, moment to moment, of whether they're acting outgoing or shy. They're also good judges of whether their behavior is conscientious and reliable or a bit more haphazard. But people aren't quite as good at gauging whether they're being rude.

"There might be some biases that prevent people from recognizing their own agreeable behaviors or disagreeable behaviors," said study co-author Jessie Sun, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, Davis. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

Know thyself

Most previous studies on how well people know themselves have been done on long-term personality traits, Sun told Live Science. But Sun and her graduate adviser, Simine Vazire of UC Davis, wanted to probe how well people understand how they're acting from one moment to the next.

Finding out took a Herculean effort and nine years of work. The researchers asked college students to spend time wearing audio recorders that would automatically activate every 9.5 minutes between 7 a.m. and 2 a.m. to record 30 seconds of audio each. These participants would then be emailed or texted surveys four times a day asking them to recall how extraverted, agreeable, conscientious or neurotic (a measurement of their level of worry) they were during a particular hour of the day.

Though the researchers collected data for more than 400 participants over several years, the current study used data from 248 participants, all of whom answered questions about their day-by-day traits for two weeks and wore the audio device for one of those weeks. It took five years just to transcribe audio and get outsider observers to rate behavior for the first year's data, Sun said.

Self-perception's limitations

Six laboratory assistants rated each participant's audio clips to see how their observations compared with people's self-awareness. The six raters were generally in agreement with one another about how the people they were observing acted: 93 percent of the changes in ratings of extraversion, 76 percent of the changes in ratings of conscientiousness, 73 percent of the changes in ratings of neuroticism and 62 percent of the changes in ratings of agreeableness were due to real changes rather than disagreement among raters or other statistical noise. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

Participants' ratings of their own behaviors agreed with outside observers for extraversion, or how outgoing they were being, and for conscientiousness, or how reliable and responsible they were being.

But the agreement between participants and outside observers was much smaller for neuroticism and for agreeableness.

Some of this could be because the outside observers had only audio to go on, and they couldn't read cues like body language, Sun said. But there are probably a couple of other reasons to consider, she said. Neuroticism isn't necessarily an obvious trait — a person can be anxious and worried on the inside without showing it on the outside. Thus, she and Vazire suspect that participants were accurate in rating their own level of neuroticism, but that trait was invisible to outside observers.

Agreeableness, on the other hand, is not so hidden.

"People should be able to hear when a participant is being kind versus being rude," Sun said. The weak agreement between how participants thought they were acting and what observers heard could be because people get defensive about whether they're a jerk and would rather deny it. On the other hand, Sun said, mistakes went both ways: Some participants thought they were being rude when observers rated them as kind and polite. Those people might be particularly agreeable sorts who hold themselves to impossibly high standards in daily interactions, Sun suggested.

Recognize and reflect

It might be interesting in the future to find out what kinds of people make which kinds of mistakes about their self-awareness, Sun said. The findings are also important for psychology researchers, who often rely on self-reports in their studies.

"We can trust these measurements for extraversion and conscientiousness, and probably neuroticism," she said, "but maybe not agreeableness."

Another question, Sun said, is whether people can be prompted to recognize their behavior from moment to moment and hour to hour, and perhaps to reflect upon it. If you act like a jerk, she said, it's usually useful to recognize your mistake quickly so you can make apologies. That's why understanding one's short-term behavior — not just one's overall personality — is important, she said.

"It's a more useful form of self-knowledge than knowing that, in general, you're a jerk," Sun said.

The research is under review in a peer-reviewed journal.

Original article on Live Science.

Whether it's scrolling through Instagram or constantly refreshing your Facebook feed, social media can eat up hours of your day. But if you find it particularly hard to stay away from social media, your personality may be partly to blame.

According to a new study, people with certain personality traits are more likely to develop a social media addiction.

"There has been plenty of research on how the interaction of certain personality traits affects addiction to things like alcohol and drugs," study co-author Isaac Vaghefi, an assistant professor of information systems at Binghamton University in New York state, said in a statement. But relatively few studies have looked at how personality traits may affect tech addiction, including addiction to social media, the researchers said. [7 Signs Your Child Is an iPad Addict]

In the new study, the researchers surveyed about 300 college students to assess their personality and gauge their level of addiction to the social media site each individual used most frequently. (Questions to measure social media addiction included: "I sometimes neglect important things because of my interest in this social networking website"; "When I am not using this social networking website, I often feel agitated"; and "I have made unsuccessful attempts to reduce the time I interact with this social networking website.")

The study found that three personality traits in particular — neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness — were related to social media addiction. Two other personality traits, extraversion and openness to experience, weren't linked with social media addiction.

Specifically, the researchers found that people with high levels of neuroticism, or the tendency to experience negative emotions such as stress and anxiety, were more likely to develop addiction to social media, compared with people who had low levels of neuroticism.

In contrast, people with high levels of conscientiousness, or the tendency to have impulse control and a strong drive to achieve specific goals, were less likely to develop addiction to social media.

However, the researchers noted that even people with high conscientiousness could be prone to social media addiction if they were also high in neuroticism. This may be because high levels of stress and anxiousness could override a person's perceived control over their social media use, the researchers said.

In addition, the trait of agreeableness — or the degree to which someone is friendly, empathetic and helpful — by itself had no effect on social media addiction. But this was not true when the researchers looked at agreeableness in combination with conscientiousness.

They found that people with low levels of both agreeableness and conscientiousness were more likely to develop social media addiction than people with average levels of these personality traits. But surprisingly, people with high levels of both of these personality traits were also more likely to develop social network addiction, compared to people with average levels of the two traits.

It's possible that people who have high levels of both agreeableness and conscientiousness make a conscious decision to use social networks more, in order to help their friendships flourish, the researchers said.

It's important to note that because the study involved a few hundred college students at a single university, more research is needed to confirm the findings, the researchers said. But they added that the findings could have implications for those who treat tech addictions.

"Our findings explain that users with higher levels of IT addictions may not be considered as one homogeneous group of users, as different personality traits can play different roles in users' dispositions toward IT addiction," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was presented in January at the 51st Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science.

Vaghefi added that he hopes the findings will encourage people to look at the "whole picture" of how personality traits affect tech addiction, "rather than just focusing on one personality trait" at a time.

Original article on Live Science.

For women who think that men just don't seem to understand, well, you're right: Men really are less empathetic than women, and a new study from England offers clues about why this might be the case.

Empathy is the ability to recognize and relate to what’s going on in another person’s mind, but scientists still know very little about what makes some people more attuned to someone else’s feelings than others.

In the new study, published yesterday (March 11) in the journal Translational Psychiatry, the researchers turned to genetics for an answer. To do so, they combed through data on nearly 47,000 people who had used 23andMe, an at-home DNA testing kit, for links between how well they performed on an empathy test and genetic variatons. (23andMe's research team was involved with the study.) [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

The researchers found that, although women scored, on average, 10 points higher in the "Emotional Quotient" (EQ) test than men, there doesn’t appear to be a genetic basis for those differences, said lead study author Varun Warrier, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in England.

"Genetically, [men and women] seem identical, but there is a difference in the empathy score, which is quite significant," Warrier told Live Science. "The [highest possible] score in the EQ test is 80. We saw that men score, on average, 40, and women score, on average, 50."

The 60 questions that made up the EQ test focused on various aspects of empathy, including cognitive empathy (the ability to understand others’ states of mind) and affective empathy (the ability to react appropriately to others).The former is known to be impaired, for example, in people with autism.

In the study, the researchers looked for variations in a single building block of DNA, the nucleotide. These variations, called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, are the most common type of genetic variation. An example of an SNP would be the nucleotide cytosine (C) randomly replaced with the nucleotide thymine (T) in a certain stretch of DNA, Warrier explained.

"We looked at about 10 million of these variations in the genome," said Warrier. "Then, we ran statistical analysis to see if any of these variations were associated with" how people scored on the empathy test.

Overall, the researchers found that about 11 percent of the differences in empathy levels in the study population can be explained by the SNP genetic variations — in other words, these variations account for about 10 percent of how empathetic you are — but these variations couldn't explain the difference between the sexes in the study.

With genetics out of the equation, it's not clear why men have less empathy than women do, Warrier said.

"We know that there are strong social factors that shape how empathetic we are or how we perceive ourselves to be empathetic," Warrier said, adding that traditionally, society has higher expectations of female children to be understanding of others' feelings. However, non-genetic biological factors could also play a role.

"Biologically, there are differences between men and women — things like hormones and hormone levels," he said. "It could be possible that some of these hormones that are present in greater levels in women can drive some of the higher empathetic scores."

Oxytocin, which is found in higher levels in women, can make people more empathic, while testosterone, present in higher concentrations in men, could do the opposite, Warrier said.

He also noted that the current study only looked at the contribution of SNPs, but there are other types of genetic variations that could also play a role, and more research is needed. Previous studies on identical twins, for example, suggest that genes account for about 30 percent of a person's overall empathy.

Originally published on Live Science.

So, you decided to "turn on, tune in and drop out" — and you didn't like it. Can you ever fully turn off, tune out and drop back in again?

According to a new review of studies published online in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, the answer might be no, dude. Researchers found that individuals who took even a single dose of psychedelic drugs like LSD, "magic" mushrooms and ayahuasca could experience sustained personality changes that lasted several weeks, months or even years — but oftentimes, these changes were for the better. [11 Trippy Facts About 'Magic' Mushrooms]

In the new meta-analysis, researchers from Spain and Brazil looked at the results of 18 previous studies, published between 1985 and 2016, linking psychedelic drug use and personality changes. The researchers focused on papers that looked specifically at serotonergic drugs, or drugs that have structures similar to that of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which helps regulate mood, appetite and various other functions. Such substances bind with serotonin receptors (known as 5-HT receptors), increasing activity in the visual parts of the brain, causing dream-like hallucinations and, for some users, inducing a feeling of transcendence.

The drugs studied in the new meta-analysis primarily included LSD (or lysergic acid diethylamide), psilocybin (a psychedelic compound that occurs naturally in hundreds of species of "magic" mushrooms) and ayahuasca (a psychedelic tea made from plants grown in the Amazon, traditionally consumed for ritual or religious purposes).

Multiple studies of all three drug types found several long-term (perhaps permanent) personality changes in individuals who were administered psychedelic drugs compared to individuals who weren't. In particular, individuals who took small doses of psychedelic drugs in a clinical setting scored higher for a personality trait called openness — the psychological term referring to an appreciation of new experiences — after their drug trip than nonusers did. In some studies, these personality changes resulted in therapeutic, antidepressant effects, and lasted a year or more. (Research for the included studies was conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and German.)

"This type of research may offer new evidence to the classic discussion on whether personality is or isn’t a constant and stable psychological trait," the researchers wrote.

The question of whether taking psychedelic drugs can result in long-term personality changes has been studied since at least the 1950s, when the U.S. government famously (and sometimes illegally) tested LSD's potential for human mind control. Research linking personality and drug use increased dramatically in the mid-1980s, the authors wrote in the new review, and personality-test-taking methodologies became more accurate. (This is why the authors focused their search on studies published after 1985.)

Significantly more research using larger sample sizes is needed before drawing any definitive conclusions about drugs and personality, the researchers wrote. Given that most of the tested substances are still illegal in the U.S., such an analysis is likely many years away.

Originally published on Live Science.

If you regularly feel anxious, you might be the perfect candidate for a dog bite.

According to a new study published today (Feb. 1) in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, dog bites in the United Kingdom may be three times more common than official records indicate. One surprising reason for this? People with an emotionally anxious personality appear to be the likeliest recipients of dog bites (and the least likely people to report them), researchers said.

"The only official statistics collected on dog bites in the U.K. are hospital admissions, not even visits to emergency rooms for treatments," lead study author Carri Westgarth, a research fellow at the University of Liverpool's Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, told Live Science in an email. "We have no idea how many people are actually bitten by dogs and how many bites require medical treatment." [What Your Dog's Breed Says About Your Personality]

To obtain a more accurate snapshot of canine-induced damage, Westgarth and her colleagues surveyed nearly 700 people in 385 households in the small town of Cheshire about their dog-bite experience. Veterinary students went door-to-door, conducting brief interviews with Cheshire residents about dog ownership, and then left more detailed questionnaires with the willing participants.

The questionnaires asked any participants who had been bitten by dogs to elaborate on one biting incident, providing information on how old they were at the time of the bite, their relationship to the dog and whether they sought medical attention afterward. Adult respondents also filled out a 10-item personality test, which helped researchers categorize the participants according to the so-called Big Five personality traits (extroversion, conscientiousness, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and emotional stability).

Right away, the researchers found that the rate of dog-bite incidents reported by Cheshire residents greatly exceeded the national average indicated by official hospital records. "Hospital records show the rate of dog bites is 740 per 100,000 [people] of the population, but the survey responses indicate a rate of 1,873 per 100,000 — nearly three times the official figure," the researchers wrote in the study.

When the team started looking at the common factors behind the respondents' reported dog bites, things got a little more interesting. For one, men were nearly twice as likely as women to have been bitten in their lifetimes. About 44 percent of bites occurred in childhood (when participants were younger than 16 years old), and 55 percent of bites were inflicted by dogs that the victim had never met before the incident. "Other research suggests that most bites are from familiar dogs, but this challenges that," Westgarth said.

Most surprising, though, was an apparent link between dog bites and respondents who scored lowest for emotional stability on the personality test. The more emotionally unstable a person was, the more likely they were to have been bitten by a dog.

"Our findings suggest that the less anxious, irritable and depressed a person is, the less likely they are to have been bitten," Westgarth said.

Related: Dog-mauling death: Why dogs turn on their owners

As conducted, the study cannot confirm whether a person's low emotional stability results in a higher likelihood of being bitten, or whether being bitten results in lower emotional stability. Further research is required, Westgarth said — and for her, it's personal.

"Unfortunately, I have been bitten at least five times that I can remember," she said. "Mostly whilst working in rescue kennels, but sadly, I also suffered a bite to the face as a toddler from one of our family dogs — and I still have the scar on my forehead to prove it!"

Originally published on Live Science.

Individuality isn't just for individuals. Insect colonies, which function as so-called "superorganisms," appear to have personalities, scientists are finding. A new study has uncovered evidence of consistent behavioral differences among the Azteca ant colonies that inhabit tropical Cecropia trees. What's more, a colony's character appears to be connected to the health of the superorganism's tree, which the ants protect from attack.

Each tree-inhabiting colony that the researchers studied showed a distinctive pattern of behavior that the scientists could place on a scale of aggressive to docile. The trees that held the more aggressive colonies suffered less leaf damage. 

However, it's not clear whether the colony personality is a cause or a consequence of the plant's condition, study author Peter Marting, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University, told Live Science. 

It's possible, for example, that a tree in poorer health can't properly nourish its colony, leaving the ants without the energy to aggressively defend it. But Marting said he suspects the relationship goes the other way: the ants are responsible for the difference in tree health. "My money would be that if a tree had a choice in the matter, [it] would certainly want one of those colonies that are really aggressive," he said.

Individuality of the collective

Cecropia trees house the ants within the plants' hollow-segmented, bamboo-like trunks and produce white nubs of carbohydrate-rich food for the insects. In return, the ants offer protection: They fend off marauding leaf-cutter ants, dismember grasshoppers, and bite much larger threats, such as woodpeckers and monkeys. If the foliage is damaged, a chemical cue from the tree calls the ants to investigate. They even trim trespassing vines. It's well-known that trees with ants do better than those without the insect protectors. 

On his first trip to the Panamanian forest, where these partners live, Marting noticed that even among ant-inhabited trees, the leaf condition varied a lot. He said he wondered if the behavior of the resident superorganisms varied in consistent ways, just like that of individual animals.

Scientists have evaluated the personalities of all sorts of animals, from primates to fish, by placing those dispositions on a continuum of boldness to shyness. That is, while some individuals are aggressive and comfortable with risk, others are cautious and shy. 

Although composed of many individuals, insect colonies function much like a single organism, with every member working to benefit the group — hence the term "superorganism." Recent studies with other types of ants have concluded that the insects' colonies do indeed have personalities that can be described in similar terms to those used for individuals. 

Personality test

At sites in Panama, the researchers in the new study set out to identify distinct patterns in each of 14 colonies' behavior under normal circumstances and those simulating a threat to their trees. This meant recording the ants’ movement, punching holes in the leaves, introducing leaf-cutter ants and flicking the tree, much like a woodpecker would, via a homemade robot. 

The colonies' reactions varied. When the robot knocked one tree, 633 ants traveled across the part of the plant that the scientists were watching. In another tree, none of the insects passed by. In four of the five scenarios, the more active and aggressive colonies consistently behaved aggressively, while the more docile colonies consistently behaved less so. The more aggressive the colony, the less damage could be found on the trees' leaves, the analysis showed. 

It's not clear where these personalities come from. The researchers could not connect those traits to the size or age of the colonies. Other possible explanations include the ants' genetics, the environmental conditions and the availability of resources, Marting said. 

The research was described today (Dec. 5) in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

People's personalities may be shaped by the temperatures of the places in which they grew up, a new study suggests. This could mean that as climate change influences temperatures around the globe, shifts in personality may follow.

The idea that someone's personality may be affected by where that person lives is not new: Previous research has suggested that many aspects of human personality vary from one geographical region to another, according to the new study. But the causes of these personality differences have remained unclear.

One potential explanation is temperature, according to senior author Lei Wang, a social and cultural psychologist at Peking University in Beijing, and his colleagues. Because temperatures vary markedly across the world, the study authors reasoned that this factor might shape personality by influencing people's habits. For instance, temperature might have an impact on whether people like exploring their surroundings, interacting with others, trying new activities or engaging in collective outdoor work such as farming. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

But instead of simply looking at whether people grew up in hot or cold climates, the researchers took a more nuanced approach, looking at whether people grew up in milder climates, where temperatures are closer to about 71 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), or if they lived in places with more extreme temperatures.

In the new paper, the researchers conducted two separate studies within two large, yet culturally distinct countries — China and the United States. By looking at data from these two countries, the researchers hoped to eliminate confounding effects from other factors — such as cultural or economic differences —that might also have influenced the subjects' personality.

The scientists analyzed data from more than 5,500 people from 59 Chinese cities and data from about 1.66 million people from about 12,500 ZIP codes in the United States. They examined data from personality questionnaires as well as the average temperatures of places where those people grew up.

The scientists discovered that the people who grew up in climates with milder temperatures were generally more agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, extroverted and open to new experiences. These findings held true for people in both countries, despite gender, age and average income.

It's possible that mild temperatures can influence personality by encouraging social interactions and supporting a wider range of activities, the researchers said.

These new findings do not suggest that climate was the sole factor that shaped a person's destiny, said Evert Van de Vliert, a cross-cultural psychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the new study.

"I would caution … against thinking that our ancestors, and we ourselves of course, are passive products of where we live," Van de Vliert told Live Science. "By intelligently and actively using property and money, humans can and do create their own identity and destiny in harsher climates."

Indeed, the study found that despite living in climates that are similarly harsh, people in certain Chinese regions differ, personality-wise, from people living in northern states in the U.S., suggesting that other factors aside from temperature play a role, Van de Vliert said. [5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect Your Health]

For example, in China, where people are relatively poor compared with those living in the United States, those "who live in the harsher climates of Heilongjiang, Xinjiang and Shandong have a more collectivist personality than their compatriots living in the more temperate climates of Sichuan, Guangdong and Fujian," Van de Vliert said.

In contrast, in the United States, those "who live in the harsher climates of North and South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota have a more individualist personality than their compatriots in the more temperate climates of Hawaii, Louisiana, California and Florida," he said.

Van de Vliert noted that questions about potential links between personality and geographical regions have often led to controversy. For example, by suggesting that climate essentially controls a person's destiny, some researchers "have put forward self-serving claims about the intellectual superiority of some races and the inferiority of others," he said. Such claims have led others to avoid "research into climatic influences on people," he said.

The authors of the study said that more research is still needed to understand the potential effects of temperature on personality. However, the researchers noted that "as climate change continues across the world, we may also observe [associated] changes in human personality. Of course, questions about the size and extent of these changes await future investigation."

The scientists detailed their findings online Nov. 27 in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Originally published on Live Science.

In 2014, one of Roy Caldwell's octopuses went missing.

Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, had kept the reef octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus) he and his team collected on Lizard Island in Australia in separate, sealed tanks. Puzzled, he peered into the female octopus's tank and found spermatophores, the capsules that contain octopus sperm, floating in the water. He looked closer and found the male there, too, buried in the gravel.

The only way the male octopus could have made it into the female's tank, Caldwell said, is for the male to have wriggled through the pipe that fed water into both octopuses' tanks, an act some might deem proof of a calculated nighttime tryst.  

Given the abundant neurons in an octopus — a whopping 500 million — individual personalities and anecdotes of octopuses playing, it's easy to imagine they are smart creatures. But is this just a matter of seeing intelligence where we want it to be? [Video: Watch a Clever Octopus Make Like a Flatfish]

Lots of neurons

So, are octopuses card-carrying brainiacs?

To Caldwell, the quantity of neurons alone isn't an indicator of intelligence, which he defines as flexibility, or the ability to alter behavior from past experience. He suspects that many of an octopus's neurons — three-fifths of which are located not in the brain but in the neve cords that extend down the octopus' arms — are used for movement and to control its skin appearance.

Unlike humans, restricted by the range of motion of our joints, octopuses — soft but for their beaks — have no such limitations. As such, moving its body and eight arms requires more neurons than human movement.

Many other neurons are devoted to altering the appearance of an octopus's skin. It takes a lot of neurons to control an octopus's chromatophores — pigment-containing cells — and skin texture, which make it possible for octopuses to transform from blotched and thorny to solid and smooth in a matter of seconds.

Octopuses may also put some of their neurons to use for planning, according to Jennifer Mather, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, who has been studying octopuses since the mid-1980s. Like Caldwell, she defines intelligences as using information from the environment to alter behavior, although she also thinks this information can be used to make decisions.

Mather's assumption that octopuses plan ahead is based on observations other researchers have made in the western Pacific on the coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus), which is known for its ability to carry around coconut halves and opened coconut shells before clamping the two sides closed around their bodies for protection. To Mather, it's key that these octopuses carry the coconut halves or shells and don't just scrunch into their new shelter at the site where they found the shells. [8 Crazy Facts About Octopuses]

"That's using the environment but it's much more important, [it's] predicting what you're going to need for the future and taking the actions now, planning for what you're going to have to do later," she told Live Science.

Bouncing the ball

Whether or not an animal plays may offer a glimpse into the creature's intelligence, as some intelligent creatures play, though it's a tricky concept to define. According to psychology professor Gordon Burghardtat the University of Tennessee, play can be defined as actions that are spontaneous, repetitious, voluntary, performed by healthy subjects, and don't alone improve survival. Although it can resemble non-play behavior, it must be a modified or exaggerated form of this other behavior. Children slurping juice into their mouths and swallowing doesn't fit the definition of play. However, children slurping juice into their mouths and spraying it all over the carpet — repeatedly — qualifies.

Knowing that boredom can be a catalyst for play, Mather and her colleague Roland Anderson, a biologist at the Seattle Aquarium when he conducted the research but who died in 2014, put eight giant Pacific octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) in individual tanks with nothing but a floating pill bottle. At first, the octopuses brought the bottle to their mouths before letting it go. Two of the eight octopuses, though, took this one step further — they aimed a jet of water at the pill bottle, which then boomeranged back, thanks to the water intake at the other end of the tank, an act they repeated a dozen times.

Anderson, upon observing one of the octopuses performing this behavior, called Mather and exclaimed, "She's bouncing the ball!"

In another study, Mather and her team observed one of their 14 common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris)passing a block composed of Legos between its arms more than six times, which the researchers categorized as play. Although other octopuses in the study interacted with the block of Legos — and a whimsical-sounding snowflake-shaped Lego construction — none passed it between their arms, pushed, pulled or towed it enough for the researchers to classify the act as play.

"That we do see play, we don't see a lot of it, but we do see it and we see it in juveniles and adults the same amount, suggests that it's something like an overflow of exploration of the environment and testing of what's going on around you and figuring out how things work. Sort of like having excess cognitive space," Mather said. She is careful to point out that the type of play she's seen in octopuses is with objects, not with other octopuses. (Not surprisingly, as octopuses are cannibals.)

Although Caldwell, too, has seen octopuses manipulate objects, he's not as certain as Mather about what to call this behavior. He has observed a Pacific reef octopus (Octopus cyanea) catching and releasing a cork bobbing around at the surface of its aquarium.

"Whether that is play, I don't know," he said, noting that sustained catch-and-release in a kitten can be considered play. "In more rational moments, I would think [the octopus is] merely examining [the cork] to see if it's edible."

Individual personality

Intelligent animals tend to display personality traits, individuals' distinctive long-standing behavioral characteristics. And while individuals of the same species, such as octopuses, can vary drastically when it comes to boldness and aggression, whether this indicates that octopuses are intelligent is another story.

Caldwell is the target of a larger Pacific striped octopus he keeps in his Berkeley lab — whenever he gets close to this particular octopus, it squirts him with water. This isn't just a foul-tempered octopus, as it doesn't squirt other members of the lab as often. Nor is it an indication of how distasteful octopuses may find Caldwell, as this doesn't happen with other octopuses of the same species. [Release the Kraken! Giant Squid Photos]

Since spraying is a defensive behavior, Caldwell interprets the frequent squirts as a sign the octopus doesn't want Caldwell around. But does he take this as a sign of that particular octopus' intelligence?

"I could just as easily say I take it as an indicator of its irritation," he replied.

Mather has a different take on octopuses' individual personalities.

"I think the more complex the nervous system, the more space there is for individual variation," she said. "And we would presume, of course, that the more intelligent an animal is, the more different ways it's likely to use the environmental variation that it sees in front of it."

So is Caldwell's escaped octopus smart?

The tourists who visited Caldwell's Lizard Island lab seemed to think so, when he told them the story of how his male octopus wriggled its way into the female's tank through the water pipe. They may have imagined that the octopus ascended into the tube abuzz with amorous intent.  

Although Caldwell can't say for sure whether the octopus was intelligent enough to plan such a feat, he sees the male octopus's success differently.

"I think it was just luck and based on the fact that octopus like to explore tubes," he said.  

Original article on Live Science.

Developing a better understanding of yourself may also improve your capacity to better understand the thoughts and feelings of other people, a new study from Germany suggests.

Researchers found that adults who participated in a psychology-training program to enhance their "perspective-taking" — a term psychologists use to describe the ability to understand another person's "inner world," meaning his or her thoughts, beliefs, emotions and personality — became better at understanding themselves as well as understanding others, according to the findings published online (May 16) in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement.

The study shows there is some truth to the saying that, "You need to know yourself to understand other people," said Lukas Herrmann, one of the study authors and a researcher in social neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciencesin Leipzig, Germany. [10 Things That Make Humans Special]

Getting to know yourself more fully is not just an ego trip, Herrmann suggested. Learning how to better put yourself in other people's shoes is a useful social skill in everyday life that could also be important in promoting more cross-cultural understanding in society, the study authors wrote.   

Looking inward

In the study, the researchers looked at data collected from two groups, of about 80 adults each, who all lived in Germany and were between ages 20 and 55.

The training included a three-day retreat followed by weekly 2-hour meetings over the next three months. The participants were taught skills to develop their inner awareness. For example, they learned how to do a daily meditation exercise in which they observed the thoughts that popped into their heads without getting emotionally involved in them.

This meditation practice was designed to help participants gain more insights into the workings of their mind without reacting to it.

A second skill the participants learned was how to identify and classify the "inner parts" of their own psyche; for example, their "inner critics," "managers," "protectors," "helpers" or "optimists." These may also include "happy parts," "fear parts" or "vulnerable parts."

Participants were asked to name the "inner parts" that would be activated in themselves in everyday situations, such as when playing with a child or giving an important presentation at work, Herrmann said.

During one session, the participants worked in pairs to complete an exercise in which one of them acted as the speaker and selected a recent situation that happened to him or her, but described it from the point of view of one of their inner parts. During the exercise, the other participant listened and tried to guess the inner parts the speaker was portraying, an activity that teaches perspective-taking, or understanding another person's thoughts. 

For example, one participant may have been sitting in a traffic jam and wound up late for a meeting, and in real life his "inner manager" took over his actions and behaviors. But for the sake of this exercise, he would be asked to reframe the situation from the perspective of his "inner happy child," Herrmann said. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

By practicing this exercise regularly, participants learn how to detach from the inner parts that are automatically activated in certain situations, Herrmann told Live Science. This allows them to deal more flexibly with their typical behavior patterns, he said.

Understanding others

The study found that the more participants recognized these internal aspects of personality, the better they became in understanding the intentions and beliefs of other people.

Interestingly, participants who could identify a higher number of negative inner parts of personality were more likely to have greater improvements in understanding other people, the researchers found.

It was surprising that recognizing positive inner parts was not linked with a greater understanding of other people, Herrmann said. It seems that for most participants, identifying the negative inner parts was what really required dedication and skill, he explained.

To face your own negative inner parts, you may need to overcome inner resistance against some painful emotions, so perhaps that's why people who did face these parts developed a better understanding others, Herrmann suggested.

Although not everyone may have access to the type of training used in this study, there are other ways that people might gain similar skills and insights.

Practices such as meditation, mindfulness training, as well as other forms of self-inquiry can all be valuable experiences, Herrmann said.

But in his opinion, some of the best ways to improve your understanding of others is by "being curious, suspending preconceptions, asking questions and listening," Herrmann said.

Originally published on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.Homo sapiens is a very moody species. Even though sadness and bad moods have always been part of the human experience, we now live in an age that ignores or devalues these feelings.

In our culture, normal human emotions like temporary sadness are often treated as disorders. Manipulative advertising, marketing and self-help industries claim happiness should be ours for the asking. Yet bad moods remain an essential part of the normal range of moods we regularly experience.

Despite the near-universal cult of happiness and unprecedented material wealth, happiness and life satisfaction in Western societies has not improved for decades.

It’s time to re-assess the role of bad moods in our lives. We should recognise they are a normal, and even a useful and adaptive part of being human, helping us cope with many everyday situations and challenges.

A short history of sadness

In earlier historical times, short spells of feeling sad or moody (known as mild dysphoria) have always been accepted as a normal part of everyday life. In fact, many of the greatest achievements of the human spirit deal with evoking, rehearsing and even cultivating negative feelings.

Greek tragedies exposed and trained audiences to accept and deal with inevitable misfortune as a normal part of human life. Shakespeare’s tragedies are classics because they echo this theme. And the works of many great artists such as Beethoven and Chopin in music, or Chekhov and Ibsen in literature explore the landscape of sadness, a theme long recognized as instructive and valuable.

Ancient philosophers have also believed accepting bad moods is essential to living a full life. Even hedonist philosophers like Epicurus recognized living well involves exercising wise judgement, restraint, self-control and accepting inevitable adversity.

Other philosophers like the stoics also highlighted the importance of learning to anticipate and accept misfortunes, such as loss, sorrow or injustice.

What is the point of sadness?

Psychologists who study how our feelings and behaviors have evolved over time maintain all our affective states (such as moods and emotions) have a useful role: they alert us to states of the world we need to respond to.

In fact, the range of human emotions includes many more negative than positive feelings. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, shame or disgust are helpful because they help us recognise, avoid and overcome threatening or dangerous situations.

But what is the point of sadness, perhaps the most common negative emotion, and one most practising psychologists deal with?

Intense and enduring sadness, such as depression, is obviously a serious and debilitating disorder. However, mild, temporary bad moods may serve an important and useful adaptive purpose, by helping us to cope with everyday challenges and difficult situations. They also act as a social signal that communicates disengagement, withdrawal from competition and provides a protective cover. When we appear sad or in a bad mood, people often are concerned and are inclined to help.

Some negative moods, such as melancholia and nostalgia (a longing for the past) may even be pleasant and seem to provide useful information to guide future plans and motivation.

Sadness can also enhance empathy, compassion, connectedness and moral and aesthetic sensibility. And sadness has long been a trigger for artistic creativity.

Recent scientific experiments document the benefits of mild bad moods, which often work as automatic, unconscious alarm signals, promoting a more attentive and detailed thinking style. In other words, bad moods help us to be more attentive and focused in difficult situations.

In contrast, positive mood (like feeling happy) typically serves as a signal indicating familiar and safe situations and results in a less detailed and attentive processing style.

Psychological benefits of sadness

There is now growing evidence that negative moods, like sadness, has psychological benefits.

To demonstrate this, researchers first manipulate people’s mood (by showing happy or sad films, for example), then measure changes in performance in various cognitive and behavioral tasks.

Feeling sad or in a bad mood produces a number of benefits:

• better memory In one study, a bad mood (caused by bad weather) resulted in people better remembering the details of a shop they just left. Bad mood can also improve eyewitness memories by reducing the effects of various distractions, like irrelevant, false or misleading information.
• more accurate judgements A mild bad mood also reduces some biases and distortions in how people form impressions. For instance, slightly sad judges formed more accurate and reliable impressions about others because they processed details more effectively. We found that bad moods also reduced gullibility and increased scepticism when evaluating urban myths and rumours, and even improved people’s ability to more accurately detect deception. People in a mild bad mood are also less likely to rely on simplistic stereotypes.
• motivation Other experiments found that when happy and sad participants were asked to perform a difficult mental task, those in a bad mood tried harder and persevered more. They spent more time on the task, attempted more questions and produced more correct answers.
• better communication The more attentive and detailed thinking style promoted by a bad mood can also improve communication. We found people in a sad mood used more effective persuasive arguments to convince others, were better at understanding ambiguous sentences and better communicated when talking.
• increased fairness Other experiments found that a mild bad mood caused people to pay greater attention to social expectations and norms, and they treated others less selfishly and more fairly.

Counteracting the cult of happiness

By extolling happiness and denying the virtues of sadness, we set an unachievable goal for ourselves. We may also be causing more disappointment, some say even depression.

It is also increasingly recognized that being in a good mood, despite some advantages, is not universally desirable.

Feeling sad or in a bad mood helps us to better focus on the situation we find ourselves in, and so increases our ability to monitor and successfully respond to more demanding situations.

These findings suggest the unrelenting pursuit of happiness may often be self-defeating. A more balanced assessment of the costs and benefits of good and bad moods is long overdue.

If feelings of sadness persist, contact your GP, Lifeline 13 11 14, beyondblue 1300 22 4636 or SANE Australia 1800 18 7263.

Joseph Paul Forgas, Scientia Professor of Psychology, UNSW

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Even if a guy has a great personality, a woman looking for a date still hopes he's at least a little cute, a new study suggests.

Researchers asked young women (ages 15 to 29) to choose potential dates from a series of photographs and descriptions, while the women's mothers (ages 37 to 61) were asked to select possible boyfriends for their daughters using the same information. Results showed that a man's looks influenced both groups of women more strongly than his personality profile. This held true even if a man's profile was filled with highly desirable personal qualities, such as being respectful, honest and trustworthy.

Both daughters and mothers rated the attractive and moderately attractive men as more desirable dating partners than unattractive men, said the findings, published online in March in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.

The study suggests that women value physical attractiveness in a potential mate far more than they say they do, said study author Madeleine Fugère, a professor of social psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic. [Busted! 6 Gender Myths in the Bedroom & Beyond]

Previous research on this subject has given conflicting results. Some studies have suggested that both parents and their adult children (especially daughters) may say that personality is more important than looks in a potential mate, with these individuals typically ranking physical attractiveness lower on a list of personality characteristics. However, in real life, that's not how people seem to make these romantic decisions, Fugère told Live Science. For example, data from speed-dating research shows that a man's physical attractiveness has a strong impact on women's mate preferences, Fugère said.

So, this new study attempted to put the looks-versus-personality decision to the test in women.

Minimum level of attractiveness

In the new study, researchers looked at 80 daughters and 61 mothers. In one experiment, each woman was shown color photographs of three men. One of these men was considered "attractive"; one was considered moderately attractive," and one was "unattractive," as determined based on data from previous research.

Each photograph came with one of three trait profiles, which included personality characteristics and attributes that prior studies had determined to be one of three different levels of attractiveness to women looking for potential romantic partners. These were "highly desirable," "desirable" and the lowest-rated category, which the researchers called "moderately desirable."

The profile of the highly desirable traits contained three qualities: respectful, trustworthy and honest. The traits for desireable were friendly, dependable and mature, while the moderately desirable traits described the man as having a pleasing disposition and being ambitious and intelligent.

After looking at the three photographs and personality profiles, the women were asked to rate how attractive they found each man, how favorable they thought his personal description was and how desirable he was as a date (or, for the moms, how desirable he was as a date for their daughters).

The results showed that as long as a man was considered attractive or moderately attractive, both mothers and daughters would pick the guy who had the most desirable personality traits. But when an unattractive male was paired with the most highly desirable personality profile, neither daughters nor mothers rated him as favorably as a potential romantic partner, compared with better-looking men with less desirable personalities.

Both young women looking for men and mothers seeking boyfriends for their daughters consider a minimum level of attractiveness to be an important criterion in a potential mate, the researchers concluded.

Looks matter to women

The study suggests that if a man is considered at least moderately attractive, then his personality matters to women, Fugère said. If a man is viewed as less than moderately attractive, it doesn't seem to matter as much to women what his personality is like, Fugère explained. [5 Myths About Women's Bodies]

But Fugère also added that "different people have different perceptions of what they consider to be moderately attractive." 

In addition, the findings demonstrated that "a moderate level of attractiveness is a necessity to young women and to their moms, and they are not willing to give that up in favor of personality," Fugère said.

She explained that physical attractiveness appears to act as a gatekeeper for potential mates. If a man meets a required level of physical attractiveness, then women are willing to consider his personality characteristics, the study revealed. 

However, the new findings, combined with previous research in which women have reported that personality is more important to them, suggest that women tend to underestimate the true importance they place on a man's physical attractiveness, Fugère said.

This is not true of men, she said. Men are more consciously aware — or more willing to admit — that good looks in a woman are more important to them than personality, Fugère said. Men's emphasis on looks in a mate choice may have a biological basis, because men may associate a woman's physical attractiveness with her fertility, Fugère said.

In the next stages of her research, Fugère will do a similar experiment with fathers and sons as participants (and using women's photos) to see if this study produces similar findings, she said. She will also conduct another trial with mothers and daughters and include both positive and negative personality characteristics in the personality profiles of potential mates, because her current findings included only positive attributes, she said. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Some personality traits are just likable. Agreeableness, for example, is marked by kindness and warmth — who could object?

But although psychologists know a fair amount about how personality traits are generally perceived, they know a lot less about how a person's own personality influences how they handle the personality traits of others. Now, a new study finds that people with dysfunctional traits such as narcissism and antagonism are more tolerant when they run into others who share those troublesome traits.

People's tolerance of such traits might be one reason that personality disorders can be difficult to treat, said study researcher Joshua Miller, a psychologist at the University of Georgia.

"Psychopathic and narcissistic individuals, they understand they are more antagonistic" than other people, Miller told Live Science. "They just don't think it's problematic for them." [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

What people like

A 2014 study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences had found that despite their preference for being in the spotlight, people with higher levels of narcissism —meaning they had an outsize sense of their own self-importance — are actually more accepting of narcissism in others than people low in narcissism are. Prompted by that study, Miller and then-doctoral student Joanna Lamkin decided to study a broader array of personality traits.

In their first study, the researchers recruited 218 college students and surveyed them to determine to what extent they had certain personality disorder traits, including narcissism, antagonism (a dislike of others and a willingness to use people for one's own ends), psychoticism (hostility and aggressiveness) and disinhibition (lack of impulse control). In the second study, 198 students completed surveys on their own levels of general personality traits, not just maladaptive ones.

In both cases, the participants then waited 10 days before coming back for a second survey, to rate how they felt when they encountered those traits in other people. The waiting period was meant to limit people's biases — if you just rated yourself high on a certain trait 5 minutes before, you'd be unlikely to declare yourself against that trait in the next survey, Miller said.

Like likes like

The consistent finding, Miller said, was that people were more positive toward traits they themselves had — whether those traits were personality disorder traits or more general personality traits.

"If you describe yourself as neurotic, there is a correlation with you saying that you like that trait," Miller said. "It was strongest in the trait we're most interested in, antagonism."

Interestingly, though, the preference of antagonistic people for antagonistic traits wasn't so simple as liking those other traits. In fact, people whose own levels of antagonism were higher than the average rated the trait as 2.52 on a five-point scale, on average. That's on the low side of likability, but still far more forgiving than non-antagonistic people, who rated the trait at 1.6 in likability, on average.

"Antagonistic people don't really like antagonism, and neurotic people don't really like neuroticism, and introverted people don't really like introversion," Miller said. "They're just more tolerant of it. They don't rate it as strongly negative as people who don't have those traits." [Top 10 Controversial Psychiatric Disorders]

The tolerance may explain why psychologists have found that people with personality disorders are slightly more likely to marry or befriend people with similar traits, Miller said. These people don't seek out other narcissists or psychopaths, he said, but they may shrug off the bad behavior of people they meet who have these traits.

There are questions remaining, Miller said. For example, some research has found that narcissists are often initially likable, but that people tend to become more and more negative about interacting with them over time. Likewise, Miller said, "there is data that shows that when two antagonistic people get together, as you might surmise, boy, that's going to be a really big, unpleasant interaction." In a study where people had to interact with others high in their own dysfunctional traits over time, the results might turn out differently.

Ultimately, though, people are aware of their own personality traits and might have a hard time disavowing such an integral part of themselves, Miller said.

"Personality disorders are relatively stable," Miller said. "Not unmalleable, but not the easiest thing to change, and we don't have a lot of great therapeutic approaches to changing really severe personality disorder. This might explain why they don't want to change."

The findings appeared March 4 in the Journal of Personality.  

Editor's note: This story has been corrected from the original version. The researchers used a five-point scale in their study (not a seven-point scale). 

Original article on Live Science. 

Other people's attitudes toward laziness and impatience can rub off on you, a new study from France reveals.

Researchers found that people not only pick up on other's attitudes toward three personality characteristics — laziness, impatience and prudence — but they may even start to imitate these behaviors, suggesting a strong social influence.

Prudence, impatience and laziness are personality traits that guide how people make decisions that involve taking a risk, delaying an action and making an effort, said Jean Daunizeau, a team leader of the motivation, brain and behavior group at the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) in Paris. Daunizeau is the lead author of the new study, published today (March 30) in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. [7 Personality Traits You Should Change]

Prudence is a preference for avoiding risk, such as choosing a sure reward rather than a reward that may be greater but riskier to achieve, according to the study. Impatience is a preference for options that involve little delay and a strong desire for a payoff now rather than later. Lazy people are those who determine that the potential rewards are not worth the effort.  

Typically, these three personality traits are thought of as "entrenched" traits, meaning  they are difficult to change, Daunizeau told Live Science.

The new study, however, suggests that this is not the case: People may unknowingly align their attitudes toward risk, delay or effort with the attitudes of others, Daunizeau said.

Socially contagious attitudes

In the study, the researchers recruited 56 healthy people. To measure the participants' attitudes toward risk, delay and effort, they were given a series of tasks in which they were asked to choose between two alternatives. For example, participants were asked to choose between a small payoff in three days or a higher payoff in three months; or to choose between a secure lottery outcome (a 90 percent chance of winning a small payoff) or a riskier lottery outcome (lower odds for a higher payoff). 

Next, the participants were asked to guess "someone else's" decisions on a similar task, and after making a selection, they were then told which choice this "other" participant had made, according to the study. But the "someone else" wasn't a real person — instead, it was a fake participant based on a computerized model developed by the researchers. This model predicted how people learn about, and learn from, other people's attitudes toward laziness, impatience and prudence.

During the final phase of the experiment, the participants repeated the first task, in which they were asked to make their own decisions.

The researchers found that after the participants observed the prudent, impatient or lazy attitudes of "others" on the task, their own choices about putting in effort, waiting during a delay or taking a risk drifted toward that of others. In other words, the participants started acting more like the computer-generated study participants.

Attitudes such as prudence, impatience and laziness are typically considered traits that are thought to be at least partly genetic, Daunizeau said. Moreover, researchers have thought that these three traits should be immune to environmental influences, such as social influence, at least in adulthood, he said. 

But the study suggested that social influence can change people's attitudes about being prudent, impatient or lazy, even though participants were unaware that social influence was having this effect on them. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

Why might these three behaviors be "socially contagious"?

One explanation might be that people imitate the behavior of others because of social norms, including the desire to feel as though they belong to a group, Daunizeau said. People imitate others so their behavior might conform to and resemble individuals in that group, he said.

A second explanation is that people may think others possess some form of private information about how to best behave in a social context, Daunizeau said. In this case, people imitate others because they have learned how to behave from others, he said.

The researchers are applying this work to learn whether the attitude alignment observed in this study may differ in people with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

Originally published on Live Science.

We all want more well-being in our lives. But which traits are most likely to be associated with well-being? This is an important question because it can help inform our decision to cultivate some aspects of our being over others, and can even inform culture-wide interventions to increase societal levels of well-being.

But in answering this question there are some important considerations. For one, what aspect of well-being are we talking about? In recent years, multiple aspects of well-being have been studied that go beyond the stereotypical smiling and positive vibes associated with happiness (see here for a review). Here are 11 dimensions of well-being that have been systematically investigated based on three prominent models of well-being (Subjective Well-Being, Psychological Well-Being, and PERMA):

11 Dimensions of well-being:

1. High Positive emotions (high frequency and intensity of positive moods and emotions)
2. Low negative emotions (low frequency and intensity of negative moods and emotions)
3. Life satisfaction (a positive subjective evaluation of one's life, using any information the person considers relevant)
4. Autonomy (Being independent and able to resist social pressures)
5. Environmental mastery (Ability to shape environments to suit one's needs and desires)
6. Personal growth (Continuing to develop, rather than achieving a fixed state)
7. Positive relations (Having warm and trusting interpersonal relationships)
8. Self-acceptance (Positive attitudes toward oneself)
9. Purpose and meaning in life (A clear sense of direction and meaning in one's efforts, or a connection to something greater than oneself)
10. Engagement in life (being absorbed, interested, and involved in activities and life)
11. Accomplishment (goal progress and attainment, and feelings of mastery, efficacy, and competence)

Another major consideration is: what aspect of personality are we talking about? The standard "Big Five" model of personality consists of 5 major dimensions of personality: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience. It has been shown over and over again that the two major personality traits most predictive of well-being in the Big Five model are high extraversion and low neuroticism. But is that it? If you're not extraverted or are a neurotic mess, there's no path to well-being--besides changing who you are?!

Well, a new study led by rising superstar Jessie Sun suggests there's more to the story. Across two samples (totaling over 700 participants), we analyzed the link between multiple aspects of well-being and a broader array of personality dispositions. We based our analysis on a new model of personality that breaks each Big Five trait down into two separate aspects. We found that this more finely grained personality analysis was really helpful in understanding the link to well-being. We also found it was helpful to broaden the measures of well-being. As Carol Ryff and her colleagues have noted, broadening the different ways someone can have well-being allows a broader range of personality profiles to be recognized.

So which personality traits are most predictive of well-being? The findings from both independent samples (one which I collected in collaboration with Susan Cain's Quiet Revolution) was strikingly similar. Out of the 10 personality aspects we looked at, 5 were broadly related to well-being, 2 showed more limited links to well-being, and 3 aspects of personality were just not predictive of well-being. Here are the findings (drum roll, please):

The 5 Personal Paths to Well-Being

Each of these 5 personality traits were independently related to a wide range of well-being measures. In other words, these are 5 different personal paths to well-being. If you score high in any of these 5 personality aspects, you are probabilistically more likely to have high well-being across multiple aspects of your life.

1. Enthusiasm

People who score high in enthusiasm are friendly, sociable, emotionally expressive, and tend to have lots of fun in life. Enthusiasm independently predicted life satisfaction, positive emotions, less negative emotions, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations, self-acceptance, purpose in life, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and achievement.

2. Low Withdrawal

People who score high in withdrawal are easily discouraged and overwhelmed, and tend to ruminate and be highly self-conscious. As a result, they are susceptible to depression and anxiety. Lower levels of withdrawal predicted greater life satisfaction, positive emotions, and less negative emotions. Lower levels of withdrawal also predicted greater autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relationships, self-acceptance, meaning and purpose, relationships, and achievement.

3. Industriousness

People who are industrious are achievement-oriented, self-disciplined, efficient, purposeful, and competent. Industriousness is strongly correlated with "grit"- passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Industriousness was correlated with life satisfaction, positive emotions, less negative emotions, and more autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relationships, self-acceptance, meaning and purpose, engagement, and achievement.

4. Compassion

People who are compassionate feel and care about others' emotions and well-being. Compassion was correlated with more positive emotions, and more environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relationships, self-acceptance, meaning and purpose, engagement, and achievement.

5. Intellectual Curiosity

People who score high in intellectual curiosity are open to new ideas, enjoy thinking deeply and complexly, and tend to reflect a lot on their experiences. Intellectual curiosity predicted autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, self-acceptance, purpose, and accomplishment. Interestingly, intellectual curiosity was not predictive of the more 'emotional' variables, such as life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions, positive relationships, and engagement with life.

Two More Limited Predictors of Well-Being

While the 5 traits above were the clear winners when it came to predicting a large swath of well-being, these two traits were still predictive of certain aspects of well-being.

1. Assertiveness

People who score high in assertiveness are socially dominant, motivated to attain social status and leadership positions, and tend to be provocative. We found that assertiveness was positively related to autonomy in life (being independent and able to resist social pressures) but was also related to greater negative emotions. This makes sense considering that being autonomous often requires nonconformity and standing up for what you believe in, which can make us feel less happy in the moment. Interestingly, enthusiasm predicted LOWER levels of autonomy, as well as less negative emotions. As we note in the our paper, enthusiastic people may be less likely to go against social consensus if this makes social interactions less enjoyable, whereas assertive individuals may be comfortable with boldly voicing their opinions if this helps them to attain rewards such as status, even to the possible detriment of other forms of adjustment.

2. Creative Openness

People who score high in creative openness need a creative outlet, and appreciate beauty, daydreaming, imagination, fantasy, and feelings. We found that both creative openness and intellectual curiosity had independent associations with personal growth and engagement. Therefore, while intellectual curiosity appears to be more widely predictive of well-being, creative openness is still a path to two key elements of well-being: personal growth and engagement. This is consistent with prior research on the link between living the creative life and certain forms of well-being.

The 3 Traits Not Predictive of Well-Being

These three traits were just not predictive of well-being, no matter what measure of well-being we looked at. These findings may be surprising to some people (especially those raised with certain values).

1. Politeness

People who score high in politeness tend to be fair and considerate, respect others' needs and wants, and cooperate easily. Politeness was not correlated with any form of well-being! That's right. Being polite all the time doesn't seem to be related to well-being. Remember, assertiveness is different than politeness.

2. Orderliness

People who score high in orderliness have a preference for tidiness and routine, and tend to be perfectionistic. Like politeness, orderliness was not correlated with any of our measures of well-being. Well, except for one variable: Orderliness predicted lower levels of personal growth! So being super obsessed with orderliness in your life really isn't doing you any favors when it comes to well-being.

3. Volatility

People who score high in volatility are susceptible to mood instability and irritability, and have difficulties with impulse control. Interestingly, once we took into account withdrawal (see above), volatility was not predictive of any any measure of well-being. Therefore, if you tend to be a really moody, impulsive person, as long as that doesn't also make you anxious and fearful, then you are not lowering your probabilities of having higher well-being!

Can You Be Happier By Changing Your Personality?

These findings show that there are certain traits you can capitalize on more if you want to increase well-being in your life. There are multiple personal paths to well-being.

But what if your personality profile seems really detrimental to well-being? Relax! Personality can be changed. A large number of scientific studies are piling up now showing that interventions exist to change personality, and that achange in personality has a direct effect on changes in happiness. What's more, a makeover in happiness can also affect our personality!

If anything, I think these findings are optimistic (maybe it's because of my high levels of enthusiasm). For one, it highlights that there are multiple routes to well-being. But less well recognized, it also highlights that there are multiple personality profiles that can get you there. The standard story is that well-being is all about extraversion and emotional stability. But these findings show the importance of including a broader array of personality traits, and leaving open possibilities for individual changes in personality as well as cultural interventions that can help all people increase their happiness by influencing their patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

© 2016 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved

Note: If you are interested in the character strengths most predictive of well-being, see my prior post, in which I conducted an analysis showing that the two character strengths that are most predictive of well-being are gratitude and love of learning.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Susan Cain, Mike Erwin, Jeff Bryan, Spencer Greenberg, and Aislinn Pluta for their invaluable assistance in collecting and preparing the Sample 2 data for analysis.

This article was first published at ScientificAmerican.com. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

Personality, once thought to be fundamental and resistant to change, can shift in response to therapy, new research finds.

The study synthesizes data from 207 published research papers that measured personality traits as one outcome of various psychotherapies. Though most of the research was observational rather than experimental, the review, which was published on Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Bulletin, adds new weight to the idea that personality is not static.

But that doesn't mean that personality change is easy, warned study researcher Brent Roberts, a social and personality psychologist at the University of Illinois.

"For the people who want to change their spouse tomorrow, which a lot of people want to do, I don't hold out much hope for them," Roberts said. However, he continued, "if you're willing to focus on one aspect of yourself, and you're willing to go at it systematically, there's now increased optimism that you can affect change in that domain." [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

Consistency or change?

Previous research has found that the "big five" personality traits —  openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism — are predictive of success in life.

And much research has suggested that these traits are stable. For example, one 2010 study showed that people's personalities were relatively stable from first grade to adulthood, and that a first grader's personality could predict his or her adult behavior, the review said. People who were impulsive as kids were likely to be talkative and expansive in their interests as adults, while those who were more restrained as children grew up to be more insecure and timid.

Studies such as that one have led some researchers to view personality as basically immutable. But other scientists have challenged that notion, including Roberts in his own research. For example, he and his colleagues foundthat people become more conscientious and emotionally stable during young adulthood and midlife. Openness to new experience increases in the teen years and declines in old age.

If personality can change, even late in life, Roberts told Live Science, the natural next question was whether a person could change his or her personality deliberately. Some research analyzed in the review suggested that even surprisingly short-term interventions might do just that.

In 2009, for example, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois found that antidepressants make people more extraverted and more emotionally stable. And a  2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin, the hallucinatory compound in "magic mushrooms," can increase people's openness to experience for at least 14 months, which is considered a long-term change.

Gold mine of data

When Roberts and his colleagues first became interested in looking at whether interventions can change personality, they expected to find few studies to analyze, because personality psychologists don't typically focus on altering personality, Roberts said.

"I thought we could do this pretty quick, which, you should never say that as an academic," Roberts said. [5 Things You Must Know About Sleep]

To his surprise, Roberts said, he found what he called a "gold mine" of data on personality change. It came from an unexpected source: clinical psychology. While personality psychologists had more or less neglected the question of how to change personality, clinical psychologists had been measuring personality change that resulted from therapy and psychiatric medications all along, but almost as an afterthought.

"Most of the literature is [asking], 'Does this version of cognitive behavioral therapy work better than that version of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety?'" Roberts said. "It's usually something very specific to a clinically motivated agenda … [but] in the process, they measure a bunch of different things."

Those things included personality. The biggest changes, Roberts and his colleagues found, were in people's levels of neuroticism. This trait is marked by jealousy, fear, anxiety and other negative emotions. People typically become less neurotic as they age, Roberts said. The new analysis found that three months of psychological treatment could also significantly lower neuroticism, by about half the amount you might expect to see over 30 to 40 years of adulthood.

"One way to look at that is you get half of a life in a three-month period," Roberts said. "I honestly did not expect to see effect sizes that large."

Another personality trait, extraversion, also showed significant, though smaller, changes after psychological interventions. The type of therapy used didn't seem to matter, the researchers reported Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Bulletin, though psychotherapy was associated with slightly larger changes in personality than drug therapies alone. Hospitalization for psychiatric problems did not result in any personality changes, the researchers found. 

Trait vs. state

One key question is whether the changes were representative of a change in fundamental personality traits versus simply a shift in psychological state, or mood, Roberts said. A person's mood, for example, can affect how he or she responds to questions about his or her personality.

"If you're in a bad mood and I force you to take a 150-item personality inventory, you might not respond well," Roberts said.

Complicating matters, few of the studies available were true experiments that randomly assigned patients to treatment and control groups. Those studies that were experimental, however, did show significantly larger effects on personality in the treatment group compared with the control group, the researchers found. And in the observational studies, follow-ups that took place months or years after treatment showed no evidence that people were backsliding: The changes that followed therapy stayed stable, suggesting that these are changes in people's basic personality traits rather than moment-by-moment moods, the researchers said. [9 DIY Ways to Improve Your Mental Health]

Still, more studies with long follow-up periods need to be done in order to really test the idea that personality can be changed, Roberts said. Ideal research, he said, would include randomly assigning patients to treatment as well as getting outside observers, like friends or family, to rate any personality changes. A perfect study would also follow people for several years after the treatment, Roberts said.

A further question is what is the "magic ingredient" in therapy that ushers in personality change, Roberts said.

"If you can actually affect change in something like neuroticism or conscientiousness," he said, "you could possibly have pretty interesting consequences for somebody, because personality traits are important."

Original article on Live Science.

Looking for love? If you're living in Virginia, you may be in the wrong state.

In a study of positive relationships in all 50 U.S. states, researchers found that Virginia ― despite its slogan ― is not "for lovers." That travel slogan should belong to Mississippi, Utah or Wisconsin, which topped the rankings. Not interested in love? North Dakota fared the worst in the study.

Lead author William Chopik, an assistant psychology professor at Michigan State University, said the study results fit many state's stereotypes. [Find Out How Your State Ranked in the Complete List]

"When I think of New York, I think of the anxious Woody Allen type, and New York had one of the highest scores for attachment anxiety," which was one of the factors included in the rankings, Chopik said in a statement. "California, on the other hand, seems like a romantic place with beautiful sunsets, oceans and warm weather. And Utah residents are known to be very nice, warm and generous, which many people attribute to the large Mormon population."

Utah and California both landed in the top 10 list. As for New York, when it comes to romance, fuhgeddaboudit! The Empire State was the ninth worst state for lovers.

To determine which states had the most positive romantic relationships, the researchers used measurements of both attachment anxiety — clinginess and feelings of fear of being abandoned by a partner — and attachment avoidance — a discomfort with intimacy. Both of these traits, Chopik said, can weigh on relationships. So he and co-study researcher Matt Motyl of the University of Illinois at Chicago looked for states that scored low on those measures.

The study's rankings were based on survey data from 127,070 adults across all states. Participants were asked to self-measure their attachment anxiety and avoidance, rating the extent to which they agreed with statements such as "I don't feel comfortable opening up to romantic partners" (avoidance), and "I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me" (anxiety).

By averaging the measurements of each attachment type, the state's rankings were determind. As predicted, the researchers found that people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions showed the highest scores for the anxiety measure, with the exception of Vermont, one of the 10 least-anxious states in the study.  

The researchers also compared the attachment meaurements of other state data on relationships. For instance, they looked at U.S. Census information on relationships — number of individuals never married, married couples, divorced couples, etc. — as well as each state's mortality rates. The researchers also studied the state's level of well-being, as measured by the 2013 Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index. Even factors like the temperature and weather in a region can affect relationships, the study researchers said.

The study's authors concluded that while their research provided valuable information for how states, and their residents, vary in relationship attachments, "positive relationships are found everywhere and transcend time and place."

Their research is detailed in a study published online Dec. 21 in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Original article on Live Science.

Are you a pessimist or an optimist? If you're anything like pigs, your outlook on life may depend on your personality and mood, according to a new study.

Previous research revealed that humans' "cognitive biases" — deviations in judgment that form people's individual characteristics and personalities — are affected by mood and behavior. Now, scientists have found that the same process can affect how animals think. In a new study, scientists demonstrated for the first time that a combination of mood and personality can have a significant impact on a pig's outlook.

Pigs' personalities are either "proactive" or "reactive," according to the researchers. A proactive pig is characterized by a lively demeanor and steady behavior, whereas a reactive pig is more passive and inconsistent in its responses. In humans, proactivity and reactivity have been linked to extraversion and neuroticism; extroverted individuals tend to be more optimistic, and people with neurotic tendencies are typically more pessimistic. [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]

"Our results suggest that judgement in pigs, and potentially in other animals, is similar to [that in] humans — incorporating aspects of stable personality traits and more transient mood states," study lead author Lucy Asher, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University in England, said in a statement. "The study provides a fascinating insight into the minds of these intelligent animals and paves the way for even more in-depth studies in the future."

The researchers studied the behavior 36 domestic pigs, each classified as either proactive or reactive. Then, the researchers divided the pigs into two groups with a mix of personality types, and housed each group in a different environment known to influence their mood: One environment was more enriched, with more straw and space, and the other was plain. Next, pigs in each environment were presented with feeding bowls: One contained the positive outcome of sweets, and another contained the negative outcome of coffee beans.

Then, the researchers introduced a third, "ambiguous" feeding bowl that was empty. They observed whether the pigs approached the bowl expecting more sweets (another positive outcome), thus showing how optimistic or pessimistic each pig was.

Proactive pigs were more likely to respond optimistically. However, reactive pigs' responses depended on their environment. Those in the enriched environment, and thus in a better mood, tended to respond optimistically, the researchers said.

"The results of our study clearly show that those pigs living in a worse environment were more pessimistic, and those in a better environment were much more optimistic," said project leader Lisa Collins, a professor of animal science at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. "Importantly, this finding demonstrates that humans are not unique in combining longer-term personality traits with shorter-term mood biases when making judgments."

The results of the study were published online Nov. 16 in the journal Biology Letters.

Original article on Live Science.

"Temperament" was the buzzword of last night's presidential debate, the first between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The most tweeted-about line of the night, according to The Hollywood Reporter, was Trump saying, "I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament. I have a winning temperament. I know how to win. She does not."

Later, Clinton said that some of Trump's foreign-policy statements revealed a person without the right temperament to be commander in chief. [The 5 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]

What is temperament?

Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines "temperament" as "the usual attitude, mood or behavior of a person or animal," but psychologists use the term a little more specifically. In 1981, psychologists Mary Rothbart and Douglas Derryberry defined the term as "individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation assumed to have a constitutional basis." By "constitutional," the researchers meant that these differences are based in the "relatively enduring" biology of the person, and are influenced by genetics, they wrote in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000.

This definition encompasses mood and emotion but also includes processes such as attention and even heart rate. For example, a more reactive person might experience a heart-thumping response to a loud noise, whereas a less reactive person might not have that visceral response.

Despite this rather permanent view of temperament, Rothbart and her colleagues soon discovered that their original global approach didn't always pan out. In the first studies of infant temperament, for example, the researchers tried to find out if some babies might be more intense than others in all of their reactions and behaviors. It didn't work out that way, the researchers wrote in their 2000 article. A baby who tended to laugh and smile easily and intensely did not necessarily get intensely frustrated as well, the scientists found.

Nevertheless, the researchers were able to discover aspects of temperament that are more stable, such as level of activity and the ability to maintain attention. Following children from infancy to age 7, they found that fearfulness in infancy predicts fearfulness in childhood; positive anticipation, or excitement about upcoming activities, also remained stable over time. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

Temperament vs. personality

In last night's debate, Clinton and Trump seemed to use the word "temperament" almost interchangeably with the concept of personality. In psychology, however, personality is defined as individual differences in patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, according to the American Psychological Association. Unlike temperament, psychological traits don't necessarily have to be innate. Personality emerges from the interaction of temperament and life experiences. The boundaries between the concept of inborn traits and traits that are developed as a result of the environment are fuzzy, though.

Psychologists have found that personality is well established and difficult to change as early as the first grade. Temperament, though, does not set a child's future personality in stone. A landmark 1962 study of children followed from infancy to adulthood by psychologists Jerome Kagan and Howard Moss found that many traits, such as aggression or dependence, in childhood didn't predict future personality.

Temperament is more likely to prevent a person from developing a specific personality type than it is to determine his or her future personality, Kagan told The Dana Press in 2010.

"Knowledge of a child's temperaments does not predict their adult personality profiles very well," he said. Knowing that an infant is highly reactive to new stimuli doesn't necessarily tell you that he or she will be extremely shy or timid later in life, Kagan said. However, it's pretty rare for an extremely reactive infant to transform into the most outgoing, enthusiastic person at the party.

Short of digging up Trump's baby book or finding Clinton's childhood home movies, it's not going to be particularly easy to determine what parts of each candidate's personality is owed to innate temperament and which aspects are due to their upbringing and experience. And it's safe to say that voters would probably still disagree on the appropriate presidential personality anyway — after all, the country has seen leaders as diverse as melancholic Abraham Lincoln and buoyant Theodore Roosevelt, and historians consider both former presidents to have been strong leaders.

Assessing presidents' temperaments after they're no longer in office (and, in many cases, posthumously) is tricky business. One attempt, "Presidential Temperament: The Unfolding of Character of 40 Presidents of the United States" (Prometheus Nemesis Book Co., 1992), divided the presidents into artisans, guardians and rationalists (none qualified for the fourth category, idealist) based on a personality test similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (a test that is itself not seen as particularly reliable by psychologists).

Temperament category as defined by this assessment (which does not differentiate between personality and temperament) does not necessarily predict popularity or historical rankings. According to the analysis, Calvin Coolidge and Harry S. Truman were both "guardians" by nature, for example. Truman typically ranks in the top 25 percent of presidents in historian polls, while Coolidge is in the third quartile, at best.

Original article on Live Science.

The majority of people fall into one of four personality categories, a recent study from Spain finds. And while people with three of the personalities types — optimistic, pessimistic and trusting — were equally represented in the study, people who were identified as having an envious personality were the most common, the researchers found.

The findings also suggested that being envious may lead people to act in ways that are not rational, according to the study, which was published in August in the journal Science Advances.

In the study, researchers categorized about 540 people as belonging to four personality types — optimistic, pessimistic, trusting and envious — by asking them to play a series of games in pairs. In the games, the people were able to cooperate with their partners, oppose their decisions or even betray them. Then, using a computer algorithm, the researchers sorted the people into the four groups. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

People who were found to have an optimistic personality included those who believe that cooperating with their partners would lead to positive choices for them both, according to the study. The pessimistic group included people who tend to believe in the worst possible outcome. The trusting personality included those people who were born collaborators and were great at working with others. And the researchers assigned to the envious group those people who feel threatened when someone else is more successful than they are.

The researchers found that 30 percent of the people fell into the "envious" category, making it the most common personality type. People with optimistic, pessimistic and trusting personalities each captured 20 percent of the participants.

People in the remaining 10 percent were "undefined" because the algorithm was unable to sort them into a category, according to the study.

The new findings show that people may sometimes act in ways that are not rational without realizing it, the researchers said.

One way to illustrate the different personalities is by imagining a specific dilemma for them, study co-author Anxo Sánchez, a physicist at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain, said in a statement.

In this dilemma, two people are allowed to hunt deer if they are hunting together, but if each of them is hunting on his or her own, the person is allowed to only hunt rabbits, Sanchez said.

According to the new findings, an envious person would always choose to hunt rabbits, because he or she would be able to do as well or better than his or her partner when it comes to the prey they might both capture, Sanchez said. An optimist would choose to hunt deer, because he or she would see this option as the most beneficial to both hunters. Similarly, a trusting person would choose deer because hunting them involves cooperation. A pessimist would go for rabbits, because rabbits are easier to hunt, and this would ensure that he or she would catch something, Sánchez said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of "Closer to Truth," a public television series and online resource that features the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions. This essay, the first of a four-part series on the "Self," is based on "Closer to Truth" episodes and videos, produced and directed by Peter Getzels and streamed at closertotruth.com. Kuhn contributed it to Live Science's Expert Voices.

My mom just celebrated her 100th birthday. This once vibrant, eloquent, stylish lady with a sense of pride and a touch of vanity can no longer walk or talk. But she recognizes family, smiles when her great-grandchildren visit or her fingernails are polished, and utters rough phrases of displeasure when caring aides must intervene bodily. She makes an angry face when she senses (quite correctly) that people are talking about her, and she expresses overt frustration at her incapacity to communicate orally by scrunching up her face and balling her fist.

Is she still a "self"? Of course she is. She may not be "her self" — that is, her old self. But though diminished, she is surely a self.

What about her fellow residents in an assisted-living unit specializing in memory impairment? Some have advanced Alzheimer's and can no longer recognize their loved ones. Are they still selves? When does one cease being a self? [10 of the Biggest Mysteries of the Mind]

What is a "self," anyway? What does it mean to be a self? What are the requirements of selfhood?

The nature of self is one of philosophy's perennial and persistent questions. Self is easy to describe, yet maddening to decipher. Part philosophy of the mind, part biology of the brain, it combines two elusive ideas: the philosophy of continuity (how things persist through time) and the biopsychology of psychic unity (how the brain makes us feel singular). I see; I hear; I feel. How do separate perceptions bind together into a continuing, coherent whole? How do sentient properties congeal as "me"?

Look at an old photo, perhaps from primary school. Then look in the mirror. Those two people are the same person. But how so? They don't look the same. Their memories are different. Almost all of the cells that composed that child's body have gone from that adult's body.

I feel myself to be the same person who attended high school, went off to college, started a family and struggled through careers — the same person, until I look in that mirror. Decades roll by. Experiences accumulate. Memories multiply.

Yet I sense myself, inside, all together the same. "I" am always "me." Not just continuity, but unity. Some say my feeling is an illusion.

Is there a "me"?

"The problem with personal identity is, we feel there is a fact that 'I'm me,'" John Searle, a philosopher of mind at the University of California, Berkeley, said on my TV series "Closer to Truth." "But that's hard to pin down philosophically, because all of my experiences change, all of the parts of my body change, all of the molecules in my body change."

(All quotes are derived from "Closer to Truth.")

The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume denounced the very notion of a self. Paraphrasing Hume, Searle said, "Whenever I grab my forehead and wonder, 'Where is the self?' all I get is a kind of headache. I feel my hand pushing against my head; I may feel a vague hangover from last night. But in addition to all of my particular experiences, there isn't any self." [The 7 Biggest Mysteries of the Human Body]

To Searle, we can try to define continuity of self — that is, a self that remains even as every other aspect of a person changes — by continuity of body (or of memory, personality, etc.). But we find that none of those criteria suffices, because any or all of them can be altered, even eradicated, and we still sense a continuing, unified self.

"You have to postulate a self to make sense of rational behavior," Searle said. "We want to find a 'soul' that is at the bottom of all this … but, of course, there isn't any."

British philosopher of mind Colin McGinn agrees. To him, our confusion about the self is essentially ignorance about the brain. "The self is something real," he said, but "the self has got to be grounded in the brain — the self's unity over time must be a function of what's in the brain. We don't know how that works, but it must be so."

McGinn stressed that we don't yet have a clear definition of self. "Our grasp of the concept of the self is very limited because we experience it from our first-person point of view when we say 'I,' but we really don't know what that thing ['I'] is at all, except as the bearer of mental states," he said. "Our imaginative adventures with the concept reflect our ignorance about what the self actually is and what constitutes it in the brain."

McGinn worries that theories of the "self" seem "too thin to ground the idea of personal identity" persisting through time. "All we've got is the idea that you, at a later time, are causally connected to you at an earlier time," he said. "That isn't the same thing as you persisting through time."

But McGinn rejected any sort of supernatural entity, which he called "a kind of receding transcendent thing that is capable of strange feats." "People imagine themselves to be capable of all sorts of strange things, supernatural things, where a self can exist independently of the brain," he said. "I'm saying that the self is rooted in the brain. … But we have a really thin conception; it's just the idea of 'I.'"

But how could a conscious self be rooted in a physical brain? By what mechanisms? I can't even imagine what could count as an answer.

Is self an illusion?

Some say there is no mystery because there is no self; the self does not exist.

Could our internal sense of personal identity — about which we seem so sure — be an illusion? I asked former parapsychologist, now skeptic, Susan Blackmore.

"There's no reason to suppose that we have real continuity," Blackmore said. "Because if you look at what a body and a brain are, there's no room for a thing called a 'self' that sort of sits in there and has experiences. So then, the question becomes, why does it feel that way?"

To Blackmore, we invent that feeling ourselves. "The illusion of continuity is created only when you look for it," she said. Though all things about us change from moment to moment, when we connect all of our experiential dots, we conjure up our inner sense of self. "So you imagine this kind of continuous stream of consciousness when you're awake, but actually, it's not like that at all," she said. "There are multiple parallel things going on. And every so often, we go, 'Oh, that's me,' and we invent the self-story. [Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?]

"This so-called 'me' is really just another reconstruction," she continued. "There was an earlier one 30 minutes ago, and there will be others in the future. But they're really not the same person; they're just stuff happening in the universe."

"So there's no self to die," she concluded, because there is no self prior to death and "there's certainly no self to continue after death."

Sue appears rather cheerful in her inexorable mortality, so I asked if she thinks that "no self" is "good news?"

"I'm smiling because it's so beautiful when you get it," she says. "You can let go and just accept that it's just the universe doing its stuff. It's not me against the world because there really isn't any me at all. Death has no sting, because there never was a 'you' to die. Every moment is just a new story."

To Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, our conception of a self is an illusion created by our experience of the world. He offered an analogy of an object's center of gravity, which is an abstraction, not an actual concrete thing, yet we treat it as something real. "Faced with complex human sentience, we do the same thing: We try to make everything cohere around a single point," Dennett said. "That's the self — the center of narrative gravity.

"What makes a self is a big collection of memories and projects, desires and plans, likes and dislikes — a psychological profile," Dennett continued. "Well, what holds that all together? Opposing processes in the brain, which tend to abhor inconsistency." And so when inconsistencies arise, Dennett said, either you have to jettison the thing that's inconsistent or concoct a coherent story to explain the inconsistency. 

How, then, does the self persist through time, notwithstanding all the changes to the body and brain? "The notion that the only thing that could persist is a little, special, unchangeable pearl of self-stuff seems like a fairly lame solution to the problem," Dennett stated. "That's just gift wrapping the problem and pretending to solve it.

"But more to the point, what makes you so sure there has to be an answer to these questions?" he continued. "The conviction that there has to be a single right answer is a leftover from metaphysical absolutism. And we should just dismiss it."

But, sorry Dan, I can't just dismiss it. My sense of self — my inner feeling of personal identity and unity through time — seems so real.

Am I fooling myself?

Next in this four-part series on the self: SELF II: Can Your 'Self' Survive Death?

Kuhn is co-editor, with John Leslie, of "The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything at All?" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Read more of Kuhn's essays on Kuhn's Live Science Expert Voices landing page and Kuhn's Space.com Expert Voices landing page.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. 

Perhaps it isn't surprising, given the intense rhetoric of this year's presidential election, that politicians have started throwing around accusations of insanity.   

In early August, California Rep. Karen Bass, a Democrat, launched the hashtag #DiagnoseTrump and started a change.org petition claiming the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, meets the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Not long after, Trump called Hillary Clinton "unstable," and at a rally in New Hampshire said, "She's got problems."

The candidates' verbal volley highlights a persistent stigma about mental illness in politics. In the past, an admission of mental health problems was a death knell to political careers. In recent years, a few members of Congress have been open about getting treatment for mental illness, but they remain few and far between. Nevertheless, there's good evidence that even some of the most beloved presidents in American history might have met the modern criteria for mental illness.

Heroic ideal?

The presidency is a high-pressure job, and one that Americans typically view through almost a fairy-tale lens. [The 5 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]

"Americans have a version of the presidency in mind, the textbook presidency, that bears very little relationship to the actual job of being president," said Jennifer Mercieca a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University. Political scientists talk about "heroic expectations" for presidents — that they'll be generally good-hearted, magnanimous and well-meaning. Their health, both mental and physical, is a part of these expectations, Mercieca told Live Science.

"There's definitely a politics of 'fitness' for office," she said. "Using that word as a pun."

Related:

• Election Day 2016: A Guide to When, What, Why and How
• Democratic Party Platform 2016: We Fact-Checked the Science
• Republican Party Platform 2016: We Fact-Checked the Science

In not-so-long-ago elections, mental health issues stalled political ambitions. Perhaps the most famous example was Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 vice presidential pick of Democratic Party presidential nominee George McGovern. Only a few weeks after being chosen, Eagleton withdrew from the ticket after it became public that he'd been treated with electroshock therapy for depression. He went on to a successful career in the Senate, and then worked as an attorney and professor until his death in 2007.

Some politicians have sought to be open about their mental health struggles. Lynn Rivers, a Democrat from Michigan, who served in Congress between 1995 and 2003, was open about having bipolar disorder. Sean Barney, a Democrat who is running to represent Delaware in the House of Representatives, has spoken about coping with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his time in the Marines in Iraq, where he was left partially paralyzed after being shot by a sniper. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, is another Iraq-veteran-turned-congressman who has talked about seeking help for PTSD.

In the executive branch, however, candidates and presidents have been mum on their own mental health. When John McCain ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2000, he faced a whisper campaign alleging that he was mentally unstable from his time in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. He released his medical records to the press to counter the rumors.

Presidential pressure

Attitudes toward mental illness have changed since Eagleton lost his shot at the vice presidency. In 1990, Florida gubernatorial candidate Lawton Chiles disclosed that he was taking the antidepressant Prozac. His competition in the Democratic primary, Bill Nelson, said the prescription raised "serious questions" over whether Chiles would be able to perform as governor. But Chiles won the primary, and went on to defeat the Republican nominee and incumbent governor in the general election. When reached in 2015 by Politico about that race, Nelson said, "Knowing what I know now, I never would have said such a thing about [Chiles] or anyone else."

Although the understanding of mental illnesses as biological diseases —and no more the result of a character flaw than cancer or lupus —has expanded, more subtle forms of bias against the mentally ill persist. Several studies have examined implicit biases against people with mental illnesses. Implicit biases are subtle, and people may not consciously realize they have them. Researchers uncover them with rapid word-association tasks. People with an implicit bias against the mentally ill are quicker to associate the word "depressive" with "unpleasant" than "pleasant," for example.

A 2006 study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, for example, found more negative implicit attitudes toward people with mental illnesses than people with physical illnesses, even among those diagnosed with a mental illness themselves. A 2011 study in the same journal found that people claimed to have similar feelings about depression and physical illnesses, but were more implicitly negative about depression.

Despite all this, there's evidence that some people with mental illness have made it to the White House — and even into the pantheon of most-admired presidents.

A 2006 study in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders took a stab at evaluating the mental health of 37 U.S. presidents, starting with George Washington and ending with Richard Nixon. With caveats about the difficulty of psychologically diagnosing the dead, three psychiatrists analyzed the biographies of these figures and concluded that 18 of them may have had psychiatric disorders at some point. Ten seemed to have been affected while in office. [Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders]

Among those 10: John Adams, who may have had bipolar II, a disorder marked by depressions and periods of low-level mania. Franklin Pierce, who saw his 11-year-old son (his last surviving child) crushed in a train accident just after his election, may have had depression and abused alcohol.

Abraham Lincoln regularly ranks in the top three greatest presidents of all time in historian polls, Mercieca said. He also had recurrent depression. Like Pierce, Lincoln lost children. One son, Edward, died in 1850 at age 4. Another, William, died in 1862, while his father was in the White House.

Teddy Roosevelt may have had bipolar I disorder, featuring more extreme mood swings than bipolar II, according to the 2006 study. William Howard Taft could have had a breathing-related sleep disorder. Woodrow Wilson seemed to display signs of depression during his time in office (he also had a stroke during his presidency). Calvin Coolidge had depressive symptoms during his time in office, as did Herbert Hoover, the researchers wrote. Lyndon Johnson frightened his cabinet with dark moods and may have had bipolar disorder. A 1988 article by his special assistant Richard Goodwin argued that Johnson became pathologically paranoid during his time in office. Finally, Nixon showed signs of alcohol abuse, the researchers wrote. 

Some of these presidents were bad leaders (Pierce regularly ranks in the lowest quartile in historian surveys) and others were great (Roosevelt almost always shows up in the top 25 percent in historian polls), rankings recently published by the nonprofit policy group The Brookings Institution show.

Likewise, the eight presidents who had psychological issues that manifested before, but not during, their presidencies, were a mixed bag, the rankings published by Brookings show. Ulysses S. Grant, whose struggles with alcoholism caused scandals during the Civil War, is low-rated by historians. Thomas Jefferson, who met criteria for social phobia early in life, and James Madison, who at times seemed depressed, are both considered above-average presidents and beloved founding fathers.

Original article on Live Science.

It is generally thought that science helps good ideas triumph over bad. The weight of evidence eventually pushes false claims aside.

But some ideas march onward despite the evidence against them. The discredited link between vaccines and autism continues to cause mischief and climate change sceptics continue to resurrect dead science.

Why, then, are some bad ideas so hard to kill?

A striking example of such a “zombie theory” comes from personality psychology. Personality psychologists study human individuality – how and why individuals differ in their patterns of behavior and experience, and how those differences influence our lives.

For almost 50 years, an idea with a vexing immunity to evidence has needled this field. This idea is called situationism.

Is personality an illusion?

Introduced in the 1960s by American psychologist Walter Mischel, situationism is the idea is that human behavior results only from the situation in which it occurs and not from the personality of the individual.

In his 1968 book Personality and Assessment, Mischel claimed that the whole concept of personality is untenable because people behave differently in different situations.

If there are no consistent patterns in our behavior and we merely react, chameleon-like, to different contexts, then our sense of an enduring personality is illusory. With that bombshell, the person-situation debate erupted.

Situations versus personality

The notion that situations influence behavior is patently true. Could we even imagine a world in which people did not adjust their behavior to different contexts – from job interviews to romantic dinners?

Personality psychologists have shown time and again that the demands of situations shape and guide our behavior. As one of the founders of personality psychology, Gordon Allport, observed in the 1930s:

But does this flexibility mean there is no consistency in behavior, rendering the whole notion of personality untenable? Is there no tendency in some individuals to be consistently more courteous than others?

Here the empirical record disagrees. There is significant consistency of behavioral differences between people, both over time and across situations. These tendencies are well captured by measures of personality, as study after study has shown. This tells us that stable differences in personality are real and observable – they are not illusions.

As for the importance of personality, the evidence shows that personality traits are reliable predictors of many important life outcomes, from social behavior to job performance, from educational achievement to health and well-being.

A case of consistency: the marshmallow study

Ironically, a particularly famous example of the stability and power of personality came from Mischel’s own research, which, as one report points out, drives him crazy.

In the marshmallow study, Mischel measured young children’s willpower by timing how long they could resist the temptation of a delicious treat. This simple test, it turns out, is a measure of the personality trait called conscientiousness. It also predicts the same outcomes later in life that conscientiousness does, including higher educational achievement and lower drug use. The facts that have emerged from this research are simply incompatible with situationism.

Laying situationism to rest

Even before it was disproven by the evidence, Mischel’s theory of situationism contained a logical non sequitur. Specifically, it assumed that a person’s behavior can only be 100% consistent or else inconsistent – in which case there is no such thing as personality.

But why should the observation of changeable behavior imply the absence of personality? By this reasoning, we should dismiss the whole notion of climate because weather is changeable.

By the 1990s, most personality psychologists considered situationism a dead duck. A prominent review of the literature concluded that the debate had, at last, fizzled out. The field was moving on and looking forward.

But the theory didn’t die.

Back from the dead

Time and again, the spectre of situationism has reappeared, causing a groaning sense of déjà vu for personality psychologists.

The theory has even spread beyond psychology, with a prominent behavioral economist recently claiming that Mischel’s “great contribution to psychology” was to show that there is “no such thing as a stable personality trait”.

Despite being buried by decades of research, situationism keeps kicking. According to one commentator, it “has morphed into something beyond the veracity of its arguments”. It has become an ideology.

In June this year, Mischel wheeled out situationism once again, this time on an episode of the NPR Invisibilia podcast titled The Personality Myth. Once again, we’re told “ultimately it’s the situation, not the person, that determines things.”

This baseless message drew sharp criticism on social media by several eminent personality psychologists.

As one observed:

What gives life to bad ideas?

Why is situationism still being revived after decades of refutation? We suspect this can be explained by at least two factors.

The first is our all-too-human preference for lazy thinking. As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking Fast and Slow:

In this case, the tricky question, “can our patterns of behavior be generally stable yet highly changeable?”, is switched for a no-brainer, “is our behavior perfectly consistent, or not?”

The second explanation may lie in the appeal of a surprising story. Some of the most alluring ideas in science – and to scientists – are those we find unexpected or counter-intuitive. And what could be more counter-intuitive than the thought that there may be nothing at all that makes you you?

The situationist idea that personality is an illusion is an arresting one, but it is false.

Luke Smillie, Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Personality Psychology), University of Melbourne and Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

For people with schizophrenia, it can be difficult to determine what is real and what isn't. This chronic mental disorder is characterized by hallucinations and delusions — false beliefs, hearing voices and seeing things, among other abnormal perceptions — but do people with schizophrenia really have multiple personalities?

Schizophrenia actually refers to problems with hallucinations, not multiple personalities. In general, everything you see, hear, touch, smell and feel is processed by your brain. Special cells, called sensory receptors, take in information from the world around you and communicate the data to your mind, buthallucinations are sensory experiences without a stimulus — the brain is essentially getting faulty data. In people with schizophrenia, these hallucinations most commonly manifest as voices originating from inside the head or from a person who isn't there, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Personality, on the other hand, is a different concept. The American Psychological Association defines personality as "individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving." It can also be understood as "how the various parts of a person come together as a whole." [Top 10 Controversial Psychiatric Disorders]

Of course, if the information you're getting about where you are, what you're doing and who's around you is flawed, it could certainly have an impact on your cognition and behavior. But the idea that people with schizophrenia have more than one personality is a common misconception, experts said.

There is, however, an illness that causes people to adopt different personalities. That phenomenon is known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). Fluctuations in mood and behavior are normal for most individuals, but those with DID alternate among multiple identities, each with its own voice, characteristics and mannerisms.

DID is a "trauma-based illness," Dr. Randon Welton, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Pennsylvania State University's Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, said in a statement. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, DID is "more likely to occur in people who have experienced severe, ongoing trauma before the age of 5."

While the two disorders are different, they may have something in common. In the U.S., approximately 2.4 million adults, or 1.1 percent of the adult population, have schizophrenia, according to the NIMH. DID falls under the umbrella of general Dissociative Disorders, which, according to the the National Alliance on Mental Illness, affect an estimated 2 percent of the population. Experts have been long been interested in the biological origins of mental illness, and one idea in particular resurfaces about every generation: infection.

With the advent of genetic research, "people thought there would be only 'brain genes' involved, but many [of the genes associated with these disorders] involve some aspect of the immune system," Dr. Robert Yolken, a virologist and infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, told Live Science. The idea here is that some sort of infectious agent (such as a virus) might trigger an immune response in the body that eventually leads to the development of a mental illness, he said.

"There's a subset of people with a degree of immune activation in the brain at the level of the glial cells," Yolken said. Glial cells are part of the nervous system but do not directly communicate via electrical signaling, or synapsing, the way nerve cells do. There are three types of glia: astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia, and they all function to support the signaling abilities of neurons according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Glial cell inflammation could lead to hallucinations, rechanneling of the surfaces involved in memory and cognitive deficits — symptoms that can correspond with an illness like schizophrenia, Yolken said.

Some infectious diseases, like syphilis and malaria, are already known to induce psychiatric symptoms. But Yolken speculated that more common and even asymptomatic viruses, such as cytomegalovirus, which infects nearly one in three US children by age 5 according to the CDC, might trigger mental illness in individuals with a genetic predisposition. If an association is found between infections like CMV and mental illness, that could spur vaccine research or other public health measures, he said.

"Prevention is always better. In theory, if we could come up with infections that we know are more common, even though [psychiatric symptoms] only manifest in some people, it would be worth it" to develop vaccines against those infections, Yolken said.

Original article on Live Science.

In early May, with Donald Trump on the verge of solidifying the Republican nomination, his opponent Ted Cruz ranted to the press:

Journalists and psychiatrists have agreed with his characterization of Trump. He’s been called “remarkably narcissistic,” “a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder” and even “a total narcissist … who will be the destruction of the United States.”

The rise of Trump has surprised many. But it shouldn’t surprise those who are familiar with personality trends over the last several decades.

When we think someone’s a narcissist, there’s a chance they have subclinical narcissism – the technical term for a personality trait characterized by grandiosity, entitlement, envy, a tendency to exploit others and a preoccupation with fame and success. It’s not considered pathological, like the more serious and clinically diagnosable Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). But it’s disconcerting nonetheless. (People who do develop NPD almost always have the subclinical narcissism trait.)

In 2008, psychologists were able to show that scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which measures subclinical narcissism, have been steadily increasing in the United States since the 1970s.

A year later, two popular books, “The Narcissism Epidemic” and “The Mirror Effect,” analyzed the phenomenon, floating potential reasons for the rise of narcissism in America. They both concluded that the rapid growth and reach of entertainment media and celebrity culture shared much of the blame.

However, neither of those books tested this claim, so we recently conducted a study on television viewing habits that was designed to do just that.

How college students responded

We were interested in three particular questions:

• Is narcissism related to television exposure?
• Are preferences for specific television genres related to narcissism?
• Are narcissism trends continuing?

For the study, we administered a survey to 565 college students. We asked them to complete several questionnaires, with questions that included how much television they watch and their preferred genres, in addition to the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). Participants selected which of a pair of statements best describes them. Each pair contained one narcissistic and one non-narcissistic answer, with an individual’s score determined by the total number of narcissistic options selected.

By comparing results from our sample, taken in 2012, with a hypothetical 2006 sample constructed from a prior meta-analysis of narcissism research, we found that our sample of college students had an average NPI score approximately 1.5 points higher. This evidence suggests that narcissism among college students is continuing to increase.

We also found that people who watched more television were more likely to score higher on the NPI. However, once we accounted for genre, this correlation diminished and a different one emerged.

Regardless of how much TV they watched, people who liked political talk shows, reality shows, sporting events and horror shows tended to score higher on the NPI. But those who preferred news broadcasts – even if they watched a lot of TV – usually had lower scores on the NPI.

Taken together, these results suggest that there is a relationship between television exposure and narcissism. Furthermore, the type of show one prefers is more influential than the amount of TV watched.

A model to mimic

On the surface, these results make sense. Take horror shows: the villains often exhibit narcissistic personality traits as they profess their grand plans for destruction or domination.

Meanwhile, political talk shows (“The O'Reilly Factor,” “Real Time with Bill Maher”), sporting events and, in particular, reality shows (Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice,” “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”) all feature plenty of narcissistic personalities who viewers might then mimic in their everyday behavior. Contestants and stars typically brag of their accomplishments, insult their opponents and demand special treatment during and after filming. Meanwhile, a baseball star, after hitting a game-winning home run, might claim he’s been “blessed."

On the other hand, the results for those who prefer news broadcasts corroborate previous studies showing that news consumers are more civicly engaged and less individualistic.

Our findings come as reality TV series and partisan political shows have proliferated in recent years. In 2000, there were four reality television shows. By 2010, that number had ballooned to 320. Meanwhile, some cable news networks today, like Fox News and MSNBC, feature “wall-to-wall” opinion shows.

When viewers are exposed to so many characters and personalities exhibiting narcissistic behavior and being rewarded, they have reason to model such behaviors themselves.

The Kardashians receive lucrative television contracts, while golfer Tiger Woods nets massive endorsement deals. In Donald Trump, we’re now seeing a reality star being rewarded with the Republican presidential nomination.

While correlation doesn’t mean causation…

Of course, it’s important to remember that this was a survey rather than a controlled experiment. Therefore, we cannot infer whether television exposure and genre preferences actually make people more narcissistic, or whether people who are more narcissistic are simply more likely to watch certain types of shows. We think that the first explanation is more compelling, but future research will be able to better determine the direction of these relationships.

We doubt many people consider these results a surprise. Estimates of average television exposure now range from three to five hours per day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Nielsen. It’s a reasonable assumption that any leisure activity that occupies about 20-30 percent of the average person’s waking hours will have some influence on someone’s personality. And that’s just “traditional” viewing in front of a television. The average person will spend even more time consuming television shows on portable devices like laptops and smartphones.

This level of media exposure becomes concerning when the shows feature individuals who model rampant self-interest, disregard of others’ well-being and a focus on the individual above all else.

We think it partially explains the rise in narcissism since the 1970s. And perhaps in that, there is an explanation for the attraction to a candidate like Donald Trump.

Robert Lull, Vartan Gregorian Post-doctoral Fellow in Science Communication, University of Pennsylvania and Ted Dickinson, Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Money really can buy happiness — if you buy things that "match" your personality, a new study from the United Kingdom suggests.

Researchers analyzed more than 76,000 purchases that 625 people made over a six-month period, and grouped the purchases into categories based on how they might be tied to a personality trait. For example, purchases involving "eating out in pubs" were tied to the personality trait of extroversion (a person who is sociable and outgoing), while purchases involving "charities" and "pets" were tied to the personality trait of agreeableness (a person who is compassionate and friendly).

Then, the study participants completed a personality test and life-satisfaction survey, and their transactions were anonymously linked to their test results.

The researchers found that overall, people tend to spend money in ways that match their personality. For example, extroverted people spent an average of 52 British pounds ($73) more per year on "pub nights" than introverted people, and people who ranked high in conscientiousness (meaning they are disciplined and organized) spent an average of 124 British pounds ($174) more per year on "health and fitness" purchases than the people who ranked low in conscientiousness.

Moreover, the study showed that the people who made more purchases that matched their personality reported higher levels of life satisfaction than people whose purchases didn't match their personalities, the researchers said.

"Historically, studies had found a weak relationship between money and overall well-being," Joe Gladstone, an author of the study and a behavioral economics researcher at the University of Cambridge in England, said in a statement. "Our study breaks new ground by mining actual bank-transaction data and demonstrating that spending can increase our happiness when it is spent on goods and services that fit our personalities and so meet our psychological needs." [10 Fitness Apps: Which Is Best for Your Personality?]

In a second experiment, the researchers gave the study participants a gift card for either a bookstore or a bar. The extroverts who spent gift cards for a bar were happier than introverts who spent the bar gift card. And the introverts who spent the bookstore gift cards were happier than the extroverts who spent them.

While the first experiment showed a link, or an association, between purchases and happiness, the results of the second experiment suggest that spending money in ways that match personality may actually cause an increase in people's happiness, the researchers said.

A better understanding of the links between spending and happiness could lead to more personalized advice on "how to find happiness through the little consumption choices we make every day," said study researcher Sandra Matz, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Cambridge.

The study was published online today (April 7) in the journal Psychological Science.

Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Homophobic attitudes may say a lot about the person who holds them, new research suggests.

A new study of university students in Italy revealed that people who have strongly negative views of gay people also have higher levels of psychoticism and inappropriate coping mechanisms than those who are accepting of homosexuality.

This doesn't mean that homophobic people are psychotic; rather, psychoticism is a personality trait marked by hostility, anger and aggression toward others. But the study does suggest that people who cling to homophobic views have some psychological issues, said lead researcher Emmanuele Jannini, an endocrinologist and medical sexologist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

"The study is opening a new research avenue, where the real disease to study is homophobia," Jannini told Live Science. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

The psychology of homophobia

Earlier research has found homophobia to be a complex subject, with some studies suggesting that people with visceral negative reactions to gays and lesbians often harbor same-sex desires themselves. Other studies, though, contest that idea, and suggest that homophobic people are truly averse to same-sex attraction. Other factors — such as religiosity, sensitivity to disgust, hypermasculinity and misogyny — seem to play a role in anti-gay beliefs, Jannini and his colleagues wrote in an article published Sept. 8 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

But no one had ever looked at the mental health or psychopathology of homophobic people. In the new study, the researchers asked 551 Italian university students, ranging in age from 18 to 30, to fill out questionnaires on their levels of homophobia as well as their psychopathology, including levels of depression, anxiety and psychoticism. The homophobia scale required participants to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed (on a 5-point scale) with 25 statements, such as: Gay people make me nervous; I think homosexual people should not work with children; I tease and make jokes about gay people; and It does not matter to me whether my friends are gay or straight.

The students also answered questions about their attachment style, which categorizes how people approach relationships. The "healthy" attachment style is known as secure attachment, in which people feel comfortable getting close to others and having others get close to them. People who are insecurely attached, on the other hand, might avoid intimacy, become too clingy or desire closeness but feel uncomfortable trusting others.

Finally, the students answered questions about their coping strategies — defense mechanisms people use when they face unpleasant or scary situations. Defense mechanisms can be healthy ("mature") or unhealthy ("immature"). A mature defense, for example, might include regulating one's emotions and not depending on others for validation. Immature defense mechanisms might include impulsive actions, passive aggression or denial of a problem.

Homophobia and anger

Overall, the better the mental health of the person (based on the responses to the questionnaire), the less likely he or she was to be homophobic, the researchers found. People with "fearful-avoidant" attachment styles, who tend to feel uncomfortable in close relationships with others, were significantly more homophobic than those who were secure with close relationships. The researchers also found that people with higher levels of immature defense mechanisms were more homophobic than those with mature defense mechanisms.

High levels of hostility and anger, measured as psychoticism, were also linked to homophobia, the researchers found.

But other mental health issues had the opposite association: Depression and neurotic defense mechanisms (like hypochondria or repression) were both linked with lower levels of homophobia.

The findings position homophobia as a trait more often seen in dysfunctional personalities, but personality isn't the whole story. Homophobia is a "culture-induced disease," Jannini said, so personality traits probably interplay with factors like religion and conservative values. The researchers are currently expanding the study to students in Albania, Jannini said. They're also studying how the fear of not being "man enough" might influence homophobic attitudes.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Sir Isaac Newton formulated the laws of gravity, built telescopes and delved into mathematical theories. He was also prone to bouts of depression and once suffered a mental breakdown.

In this sense, Newton was like many other creative, driven individuals. Charles Darwin, for example, struggled with nausea and gastrointestinal distress in response to stress, so much so that modern psychologists have suggested that he may have had a panic disorder. Winston Churchill referred to his dark moods as his "black dog," leading to speculation that he might have had episodes of depression.

Whatever the truth behind these prominent men's mental health, multiple studies have found a link between creativity and neuroticism — a tendency toward rumination and negative thinking. Now, British researchers have proposed a possible reason for the connection: Creativity and neuroticism could be two sides of the same coin. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

Overthinking it

Neuroticism is a personality trait that lends itself to worry, anxiety and isolation. Highly neurotic people are more susceptible to mental illness than happy-go-lucky types; they're also worse at high-risk professions like military aviation or bomb disposal, which require coolness under pressure. On the other hand, neuroticism seems linked to creative pursuits. Studies have found, for example, that artists and other creative people score higher on tests of neuroticism than people who aren't in creative fields. 

"This is something that bothered me for a long time," said Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King's College London. Perkins is the co-author of a new opinion piece published Aug. 27 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that lays out the possible links between neuroticism and creativity in the brain.

Perkins was listening to a lecture by Jonathan Smallwood, a psychologist and expert on daydreaming at the University of York in England, when Smallwood mentioned that people who report high levels of negative thoughts show lots of activation in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex, even when they're just resting in a brain scanner. This area, which sits behind the forehead, is involved in the appraisal of threat.

"It's quite a simple leap to think they've got a sort of internal threat generator in their heads," Perkins told Live Science. "They can be lying down in bed or sitting in an armchair in a perfectly neutral environment, and yet they're feeling as if they're under threat."

Self-generated thoughts

These "self-generated thoughts" can obviously make people miserable, Perkins said. In essence, people are imagining problems that don't exist. Studies show that neurotic people have sensitive amygdalae, the almond-shaped brain structures involved in processing fear and anxiety. So, neurotic people not only invent problems, but tend to become very stressed by them.

But self-generated thoughts are also linked to planning skills and the ability to delay gratification. Perkins realized that the brain's internal threat generator might have pros as well.

"Neurotic people feel sort of miserable spontaneously, and they also tend to be better at coming up with creative solutions for things," he said. Isaac Newton, for example, once wrote that he solved problems by chewing over them incessantly. "I keep the subject constantly before me," he said, "and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light."  

Thus, the neurotic tendency to dwell on things might be the very root of creativity and problem solving, Perkins said. [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales of Famous Scientists]

Anxiety and genius

According to Perkins and his colleagues' hypothesis, the brains of neurotic people might have a particularly persistent "default mode network," which is the circuit in the brain that becomes activated when people are doing nothing in particular. The medial prefrontal cortex is part of that system. If neurotic people have trouble turning off this thought-generating network, it might make them more prone to overthinking, dwelling and otherwise mulling over problems — real and imagined.

This can be a problem because neurotic people also have oversensitive amygdalae. The tendency to become panicked over imagined problems can make neurotic people quite miserable, Perkins said.

On the other hand, neuroticism could have benefits, he said. "If you dwell on problems for a long time, when those problems are not in front of you … it seems quite obvious that you'll be more likely to come across a solution than one of those happy-go-lucky people who live their life in the moment," Perkins noted.

It's a tantalizing notion, but no one has yet done the experimental work that would prove that the same processes cause neurotic worrying and creative genius.

And finding proof will be difficult, Perkins warned. It's difficult to measure creativity in the lab. Most tests involve giving participants an ordinary object and asking them to come up with as many uses for that object as they can. That's not really the same thing as laying out the theory of evolution or inventing the jet engine, Perkins said. (Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, also suffered several nervous breakdowns during his life.)

"Really creative people are rare," Perkins said. "It just seems that a lot of them are neurotic."

One concrete step toward proving the link could be to study medial prefrontal cortex activity in people with high levels of neuroticism, Perkins said. However, it might take a neurotic genius to come up with other ways forward.

"We just hope this will give some impetus to people who are cleverer than us to come up with some good tests," Perkins said.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

An auto mechanic in Boston survived the removal of a rare "giant aneurysm" from his brain, according to a new report of the man's case.

Aneurysms larger than 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) are rare, and are called "giant aneurysms," but the size of this man's aneurysm was a whopping 7 centimeters (2.75 inches), which is extremely unusual, according to the report.

"A 7-centimeter aneurysm is mega-giant — it's about the size of a good-sized peach," said Dr. Nirav Patel, the neurosurgeon at Boston Medical Center who performed the man's surgery and co-authored the case report, published today (Aug. 5) in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"This is the largest reported aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery," Patel said, referring to the blood vessel that connects two major arteries on opposite sides of the brain. He said he once operated on an 8-cm (3 inches) aneurysm, but it was in a different location. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

An aneurysm is a weakening in the wall of an artery, Patel said, and in this Massachusetts man's case, the ballooning blood vessel formed a gigantic mass in his brain's frontal lobe, which is just above the eyes and forehead.

The 55-year-old man came to the doctor in January 2013 due to worsening vision in his right eye, Patel said.

Besides the man's struggles with his eyesight, his family was also concerned about personality changes they had noticed in him. Over the prior three years, he had become increasingly forgetful; he would blurt out inappropriate remarks in social situations, and he seemed to lack insight.

His family thought he might be abusing alcohol because he behaved the way someone would if he had a few drinks in him. But his symptoms are common for a person who is having frontal-lobe problems, Patel said.

Complex surgery

A CT scan and MRI of the man's brain revealed the giant aneurysm in his frontal lobe, the most common location for aneurysms to develop.

An aneurysm in this location squishes the brain, and can lower a person's ability to filter their behavior, Patel said. In the man's case, it led him to act on his impulses, and could also have been responsible for his lack of insight, as he truly wasn't aware of his personality changes, he said.

Patel said he suspects the man's aneurysm had been growing in his brain for more than 10 years.

The mechanic also had several risk factors for aneurysms. His sister had died of a brain aneurysm, and about 20 percent of people with brain aneurysms have a first-degree relative who also had the condition. He was also a smoker and had high blood pressure, which are two factors linked with aneurysms.

Giant aneurysms are much rarer than smaller ones, but because of their large size, they are more likely to rupture.

Once an aneurysm reaches 2.5 cm (the threshold at which it is considered "giant"), a person's chances of dying in the next five years is at least 40 percent, Patel said.

"Based on the size of this man's aneurysm alone, if it was not treated, it would have taken his life," Patel told Live Science. Given its extraordinary size, it's unclear why his aneurysm did not rupture, he added.

The man underwent a complex brain surgery that lasted 23 hours. Patel and his surgical team removed the mass from inside the aneurysm and repaired the vessel, so that it would never rupture. This procedure essentially removed the aneurysm, he said.

After the surgery, the man's symptoms improved dramatically, and he was able to go back to work three months later. His memory returned, and his personality showed improvement, Patel said.

When Patel last saw the man, earlier this year at his two-year follow-up exam, he was doing very well. He had quit smoking and was taking his blood-pressure medication. However, he still had some short-term memory problems.

A brain scan taken in 2015 showed the aneurysm had not returned.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

Life can be tough for kids whose ears stick out, and they may suffer from low self-esteem due to their appearance. But now, a new study shows that although people's eyes are naturally drawn to a child's ears if they protrude more than usual, the trait does not carry a social stigma. 

In the study, people rated the personalities of kids with protruding ears no differently than those of kids without protruding ears. In fact, they even tended to rate the kids whose ears protruded the most as being the most intelligent and likable.

The findings show that "protruding ears catch the eye, but not necessarily the imagination in a negative way," said Dr. Ralph Litschel, the lead author of the study.

For some kids in the study, "protruding ears may have added to their cuteness," said Litschel, an ear, nose and throat specialist and facial plastic surgeon at Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen in Switzerland.

In the study, the researchers took photos of 20 children, ages 5 to 19, who were considering undergoing otoplasty, a surgical procedure that reduces the protrusion of the ears. They also made a Photoshopped version of each image, altering the ears to show how the kids would look after the surgery. The researchers showed the images to 20 observers, using an eye-tracking device to measure exactly how long the observers spent looking at each part of the children's faces, and also asked the observers to make guesses about the kids' personalities based on the images.

The results showed that the observers spent about 7 seconds looking at each face, and looked at the ears for about 10 percent of that time for the images where the ears were protruding, compared with only 6 percent of the time for the Photoshopped images.

The researchers expected to find that people looked longer at protruding ears because people are universally attracted to facial features that are novel, or ones that look different from most other faces, according to the study, published Thursday (March 19) in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. [10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]

It's thought that people focus on distinctive facial features because they help us recognize other people, Litschel said. Researchers estimate that about 5 percent of people have protruding ears, according to the study.

But the researchers were surprised to find that the observers held no negative perceptions about the personality traits of children with protruding ears, Litschel said. The finding shows that protruding ears may not carry a social stigma, as some researchers had previously thought. In general, attractiveness is known to strongly influence the perception of a person's personality, the researchers said. In other words, when someone is rated as smart or highly likable, they're also seen as attractive.

The kids in the study "all looked cute and smart in their own way," Litschel said.

It is unclear why it has been thought that protruding ears lead to a biased perception of people, Litschel told Live Science. The roots may lie in ideas proposed in 1876 by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist and physician who thought that criminals could be identified by features that were considered congenital defects at the time, like protruding ears. Lombroso's ideas became popular, Litschel said.

"Up to today, popular comic cartoons with prominent ears represent the less-intelligent, immature, oddball character, like Shrek," he said.

People of different cultures may hold differing ideas about atypical facial features, Litschel noted. For example, in Asian countries, protruding ears or especially big ears are desirable, and a sign of good fortune, he added.

But regardless of whether there's a stigma, it can be rough out there for kids with protruding ears. Children pay more attention than adults do to even small differences in appearance between themselves and others, the researchers said in their study.

Bullying is one of the main reasons that parents seek corrective surgery for their kids, Litschel said. Otoplasty is not a trivial operation, but in general, it causes little discomfort and carries a very low risk of severe complications, he said.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a mental disorder characterized by recurrent, persistent thoughts and images (obsessions) and ritualistic behaviors (compulsions) that interfere with a person's daily life and relationships, according to the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition" (DSM-5).

People with OCD often realize their compulsive behavior is irrational, but they may feel that they do not have the ability to stop engaging in it, since doing so would only increase their level of anxiety.

The International OCD Foundation estimates that about 1 in 100 adults, and 1 in 200 children in the United States has OCD. The condition often appears first during the childhood or teen years, and it tends to occur in men and women in roughly equal numbers. 

Symptoms of OCD

OCD can manifest in many ways, but in general, a person with this disorder has obsessions that result in compulsive behaviors. 

"Obsessions are automatic and obtrusive. They come on you whether you like it or not," said Jeff Szymanski, a clinical psychologist and executive director of the International OCD Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Boston. "Compulsions are deliberate, purposeful behaviors that someone does in response to the obsession and anxiety [of OCD] in an effort to make the obsessions and anxiety go away." 

This is why compulsions often have some connection to the obsession that triggers them. A child who obsesses about germs or contamination, for example, might compulsively wash his or her hands. Other common obsessions and compulsions include the constant need to "check" things, such as whether the front door is locked or the oven is turned off, and an obsession with counting or arranging things in a particular order, according to the International OCD Foundation. 

While OCD symptoms show up differently in each individual, those with the disorder have at least one thing in common: Their obsessive-compulsive tendencies get in the way of everyday life. This is what separates OCD from day-to-day anxiety and habits that are deemed "normal."

A small amount of obsessive thinking or compulsive behavior is not necessarily a symptom of OCD. Anxiety is a normal response to stress that serves a valuable purpose, Szymanski told Live Science. The ability to foresee, and then worry about, possible dangers allows humans to take precautionary measures and survive difficult situations. But those with OCD may worry and compulsively perform "precautionary" behaviors even after they have determined that no danger exists.

Related: OCD obsessions often come with physical sensations

Causes of OCD

In most cases, there isn't one particular cause of OCD. Many factors likely combine to create the disorder. One of those factors is genetics, as OCD often runs in families. 

The disorder is also known to coincide with abnormalities in certain brain processes. When exposed to threatening or frustrating situations, most people with OCD experience hyperactivity in the parts of the brain regulating external stimuli. These brain regions include the amygdala, which evaluates and processes danger, and the orbital frontal cortex, which performs cognitive processing and decision-making functions.

The neurotransmitter serotonin may also play a part in OCD. (Neurotransmitters are chemicals that relay messages within the brain.) Medication that modifies serotonin levels can reduce OCD symptoms (see Treatments, below).

A lesser-known cause of OCD is bacterial infection in children. Known as Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections (PANDAS), this form of OCD only affects children and is associated with sudden onset of extreme OCD symptoms, including:

• anxiety (including acute separation anxiety and irrational fears)
• depression
• irritability or aggression 
• behavioral (developmental) regression
• sudden deterioration in school performance
• sensory or motor abnormalities (particularly trouble with handwriting)
• physical signs and symptoms 

While this sudden onset of OCD usually occurs after a strep infection, it can also come after other bacterial infections, according to the International OCD Foundation. 

Diagnosis of OCD

Not all perfectionist or repetitive behaviors are symptomatic of OCD. Washing your hands two times after exiting the subway or triple-checking that the front door is locked before going to bed do not mean that you have OCD, according to Szymanski.

"In popular culture, OCD has come to mean 'someone who likes things a particular way,' but it's important to look at the other part of the definition for this disorder, that you're having these obsessions and doing these behaviors, and it's really time-consuming. It's really distressing, and it's getting in the way of you functioning in the world in the way that you would like to," Szymanski said.

It is only when the behaviors become so severe and time-consuming that they interfere with that person's normal daily life that a health care expert might make a diagnosis of OCD. And only a qualified physician or mental-health specialist can make such a diagnosis accurately. 

The condition is often present with other mental-health disorders, such as depression and anxiety disorders, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Treatment for OCD

There are several methods of treating OCD; most involve some kind of medication, psychotherapy or a combination of both.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be effective in treating OCD by teaching individuals with the disorder to try a different approach to those situations that trigger their obsessive-compulsive behavior. One type of CBT, known as exposure and response prevention (ERP), can help people with OCD by teaching them healthy ways to respond when exposed to a feared object (dirt or dust, for example).

"In [ERP] you ask patients to purposefully make themselves anxious, and then you tell them not to do their compulsive behaviors, and [to then] see what happens," Szymanski said. "And what happens is that their anxiety levels go up. But when they allow their anxiety to just be, over time, their anxiety levels will come down."

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are the medications most commonly prescribed for treating OCD, according to the NIH. Anti-anxiety medication may also be prescribed.

It may take several weeks for both types of medications to begin working, according to the NIH. In addition to side effects such as headache, nausea and insomnia, antidepressants have been linked to suicidal thoughts and behaviors in some individuals. People taking antidepressants need to be monitored closely, especially when starting their treatments.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

Additional resources

• NIH: What is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?
• International OCD Foundation
• CDC: Diagnosing Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 12:50 p.m. E.T. on Saturday, Aug. 9

Are you a narcissist? Turns out, one question could reveal the tendency to think the world revolves around you.

People who have an inflated sense of self will readily admit they are narcissists if they're asked just one straightforward question, a new study suggests.

"Narcissists aren't afraid to tell you they're narcissists," said study co-author Brad Bushman, a communications and psychology professor at The Ohio State University. "They're not embarrassed about it at all." [7 Personality Traits That Are Bad for You]

Nation of egotists

People with a classic narcissistic personality tend to have an overinflated sense of self, an exhibitionist streak, a sense of entitlement and little empathy for others. People in Western countries rate higher on narcissistic traits than do those in Eastern nations, and millennials— people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s — are more likely to be self-centered than previous generations, at least in the United States, Bushman said.

"The self-esteem movement, I think, is a big part of that," Bushman said. "Also, I think social media provides a venue for people to project themselves to very large audiences."

Being egotistical can have its uses, at least in the short term. For instance, overconfidence can help people land a job or attract a partner, and some studies suggest that narcissists make good leaders.

But in general, narcissists aren't doing anybody any favors with their overinflated sense of self, Bushman said.

For the arrogant and self-absorbed, "if you already think you're great, then you're not going to try to improve yourself," Bushman said. And because narcissists show less empathy, they aren't going to be good for the people in their lives, he added.

No shame

Typically, researchers studying narcissistic traits rely on a 40-question survey in which respondents choose from one or two options. For instance, some of the options included the following:

"I prefer to blend in with the crowd" (non-narcissistic response) versus "I like to be the center of attention" (narcissistic response), or "The thought of ruling the world frightens me" versus "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place" (narcissistic response).

In the new study, which is detailed today (Aug. 5) in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers looked at 11 published studies of 2,200 people who were quizzed with the more extensive survey.

The team found that the answer to one question was strongly correlated with their overall score on the longer test: "To what extent do you agree with the statement, 'I am a narcissist'? (Note: The word "narcissist" means egotistical, self-focused and vain.)."

Participants had the option of rating their agreement on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me). Since narcissism is a continuous dimension, rather than dichotomous (i.e., two answers: narcissist or not a narcissist), there was no cutoff for whether a person was or was not a narcissist, Bushman said. The score just reveals where one would fall along a spectrum compared with others in the population.

Past studies show that younger participants and males tended to score higher on the narcissist scale than others in the study. (You can also take a quiz to see how you compare to others of the same age and sex.)

The new study suggests that researchers who are pressed for time or doing a much larger study can include this simple question in their research if they want to get a rough gauge of narcissistic traits. The question couldn't be used to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder, which is a psychiatric condition in which narcissism negatively impacts someone's life, Bushman said.

Quick survey

The new findings aren't terribly surprising, as similar one-question surveys have been found to work for self-esteem, said W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at University of Georgia, who was not involved in the study.

"There is some evidence in the literature that people who are narcissistic are self-aware," Campbell told Live Science. "That's why some of the self-assessment measures work."

Ideally, the question could be used in the context of other large research questions. Because it's only one question, it would be easy to send people text messages with the question when doing a quick survey of their mood, he said.

But for researchers specifically studying narcissism, the more extensive survey would be better, Campbell said. That's because narcissism has several components, from exhibitionism to a tendency to exploit others, Campbell said.

"With a longer scale, you can look at those factors; with the one item, you just can't," Campbell said.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to correct W. Keith Campbell's affiliation.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The way your Facebook profile looks may suggest a lot about your personality, a new study finds.

Researchers found that extroverts and neurotics both upload significant numbers of photos to their Facebook pages, but extroverts tend to change their profile cover photos, while neurotics tend to upload more photos per album.

The investigators recruited more than 100 people between the ages of 17 and 55, and the participants completed questionnaires about their personality and demographics. More than 70 percent of the participants were women. The researchers then studied how the individuals uploaded photos and interacted with their Facebook friends. [Top 10 Golden Rules of Facebook]

The link between extroversion and the tendency to upload lots of photos may not seem surprising, but how can the same tendency be explained in neurotics, whom the researchers describe as people who are "characterized by a temperamental nature, being prone to stress and anxiety"?

"Neurotics strongly desire approval," but they may not be good communicators and they lack social skills, said study author Azar Eftekhar, a Ph.D. student in the department of psychology at the University of Wolverhampton, in the United Kingdom.

"As socially anxious individuals, they see Facebook [as] a safe place for self-expression and to compensate for their offline deficiencies," Eftekhar told Live Science.

"Our findings suggest [neurotics] seek acceptance implicitly through intensive photo uploads to look more attractive and popular online and to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’ or to keep up with the popular visual culture," she said.

The researchers also found that conscientious people in the study uploaded more videos and created more "self-generated" photo albums than people who were generally less thorough in real life. The researchers defined "self-generated" albums as any collection of photos beyond the albums automatically created by Facebook (such as the profile picture album, cover album and video album).

"The point is that such [conscientious] individuals are self-disciplined and goal-orientated, thus they have [a] tendency to document and organize their photos and videos using online visual tools," Eftekhar said.

The researchers said that the study results point to certain similarities between how human relationships operate on Facebook and in real life.

"Facebook relationships tend to reflect offline networks," Eftekhar said.

For instance, the people in the study who were more "agreeable" in real life, meaning they are generally friendly to others and avoid arguing, tended to attract more comments and "likes" to their posts, the researchers said.

One possible explanation for this is that Facebook users may respond to the perceived kindness of their agreeable friends by liking and commenting on their photos more frequently, Eftekhar said.

"In Facebook popular culture, liking and commenting imply attention and care to friends’ life events announced via photo updates," she said. "In a similar vein, users ‘like’ product brands or fan pages and participate by leaving comments to express their support and admiration."

The findings of the study were published in the August issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Follow Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on Twitter. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

You may think you can judge a person you just met based on his or her facial expressions. Does a smile indicate a person is easygoing or insincere? Does squinting show concentration, or mistrust?

First impressions of people — such as whether they are trustworthy, dominant or attractive — can develop from a glimpse as brief as 100 milliseconds or less. Brain scans suggests that such judgments are made automatically, probably outside of people's conscious control.

But now, a computer system that mimics the human brain has identified which facial features most influence how others first perceive a person, scientists say.These findings could lead to computer programs that automatically see which photographs would help people give the best first impressions they can, the researchers added.

Because first impressions can affect people's future behavior and can be difficult to overturn, "it's useful to know how we're being judged on our appearance, especially since these judgments might not be accurate — think of effects on court cases or democratic elections, for example," said study co-author Tom Hartley, a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of York in England. "Should we really trust a smiling face?" [Smile Secrets: 5 Things Your Grin Reveals About You]

Although some previous research has suggested that there may be a kernel of truth in some first impressions, Hartley noted that people typically go too far with the judgments they develop from first impressions. "For instance, someone with a young-looking face is judged to have other immature characteristics," Hartley said. "Evidence is clear that often judging a book by its cover is just plain wrong, but we all do it."

Given the increasing presence of faces on social media sites, first impressions could be more important than ever, Hartley suggested.

"Whereas, in the past, we got to know people through meeting them in the flesh, increasingly, our first contact is online, and our first impressions are based on the images we provide on social media profiles," Hartley told Live Science.

Previous research has shown that "the many different judgments characterizing first impressions tend to fall along three underlying dimensions," Hartley said. "One is approachability — do they want to help me or to harm me? The next is dominance — can they help or harm me? The last is youthful-attractiveness — perhaps representing whether they would be a good romantic partner or rival."

Judging images

To learn more about how first impressions are formed, the research team at the University of York found 1,000 photographs of people on the Internet, and showed them to six volunteers. The participants rated their first impressions of the people in the photos on social traits such as trustworthiness and dominance. These images were typical of pictures seen every day, ranging widely in angle, lighting, ages, expressions, hairstyles and so on.

Each face was broken down into 65 physical features, such as the shape of a person's jaw, mouth, eyes, cheekbones or eyebrows. The researchers then analyzed these faces using an artificial neural network, a kind of artificial intelligence computing system that mimics how the brain works. They had the neural network attempt to learn which facial physical features might be linked to first impressions of social traits.

This modelsuggested "that given enough data, we can accurately gauge people's likely impressions of a given image," Hartley said. "If you're thinking about attaching a picture to their CV, résumé or online dating profile, maybe you should take a look at our paper first!"

The model found that mouth shape and area were linked to approachability — unsurprisingly, a smiling expression is a key component of an impression of approachability. When it came to youthful-attractiveness, eye shape and area were important, in line with views linking relatively large eyes to a youthful appearance. Dominance was linked with features indicating a masculine face shape, such as eyebrow height, cheekbones, as well as color and texture differences that may relate to either masculinity or a healthy or tanned overall appearance.

"Our results suggest that some of the features that are associated with first impressions are linked to changeable properties of the face or setting that are specific to a given image," Hartley said. "So, things like expression, pose, camera position, lighting can all, in principle, contribute alongside the structure of our faces themselves. In some ways, our model parallels or makes explicit the kinds of judgment that might be relevant to casting directors, animators and portrait photographers who select or manipulate images to create certain impressions."

Wanna look more trustworthy?

By reversing this process, the researchers created a model that generated cartoon faces depicting the typical characteristics of someone judged as having certain social traits. The researchers compared the results with those of 30 human judges, and found that these cartoon faces usually gave the first impressions they were designed to give. [7 Personality Traits You May Want to Change]

Hartley suggested that future research might be able to use these findings "to select an image which conveys a desirable impression, perhaps even automatically."

However, Hartley noted that the researchers looked only at Caucasian faces in this study, to avoid possible confounding effects of race, though they are currently conducting cross-cultural studies to find out how culture impacts the results.

"We know that people process faces of other ethnicities differently from their own — this might be because of cultural stereotypes, but also more subtle things such as the level of experience we have with different kinds of variation in the face," Hartley said. "As it's not practical to incorporate faces and judges from every possible geographic, cultural and ethnic background, we instead try to keep these factors fixed by focusing on one ethnic and cultural group at a time. We can then investigate the ways in which different groups rely on different facial features and perhaps reach different social judgments in a step-by-step way."

In addition to looking across cultures, future studies can also "use brain imaging to investigate how these social impressions are created in the brain," Hartley said. Another direction for research "will be to look at ways in which first impressions can be influenced by directly manipulating specific features, and whether, with the knowledge we now have, we can influence people's social decisions by choosing images with particular characteristics," he added.

The scientists detailed their findings online July 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

As NASA focuses considerable effort on a mission to send humans to Mars in the coming decades, psychology researchers are looking at what types of personalities would work the best together on such a long trip.

Now, a new study finds that on long-term space missions — such as missions to Mars, which could take as long as three years to complete a round trip — having an extrovert on board could have several disadvantages.

For example, extroverts tend to be talkative, but their gregarious nature may make them seem intrusive or demanding of attention in confined and isolated environments over the long term, the researchers say.

"You're talking about a very tiny vehicle, where people are in very isolated, very confined spaces," said study researcher Suzanne Bell, an associate professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago. "Extroverts have a little bit of a tough time in that situation."

If one person on a crew always wants to talk, while the other members are less social, "it could actually get pretty annoying," in that environment Bell said. (Remember George Clooney's character in the movie "Gravity"?) [10 Fitness Apps: Which Is Best for Your Personality?]

The researchers concluded that extroverts could potentially be a "liability" on these missions.

Extroverts and teams

NASA is interested in a number of issues related to planning long-term space missions, including how to put together the most compatible teams for the missions.

In the new study, which is funded by NASA, Bell and her colleagues reviewed previous research on teams who lived in environments similar to those of a long-term space mission, including simulated spacecraft missions of more than 100 days, as well as missions in Antarctica.

Typically, extroverts — who tend to be sociable, outgoing, energetic and assertive — are good to have on work teams because they speak up and engage in conversations about what needs to be done, which is good for planning, Bell said. And because of their social interactions, extroverts tend to have a good understanding of who knows what on a team (such as who the experts in a certain field are), which helps foster coordination.

But the researchers found several potential drawbacks to having extroverts on teams in isolated, confined environments.

In one study of a spacecraft simulation, an extroverted team member was ostracized by two other members who were more reserved, Bell said. "They thought he was too brash, and would speak his mind too much, and talk too much," Bell said.

Moreover, extroverts may have a hard time adjusting to environments where there's little opportunity for new activities or social interactions, the researchers said.

"People who are extroverted might have a hard time coping because they want to be doing a lot; they want to be engaged in a lot of things," said study researcher Shanique Brown, a graduate student in industrial and organizational psychology at DePaul. "And [on these missions], there won't be that much to do — things become monotonous after a while, and you're seeing the same people."

Don't send extroverts to Mars?

The new findings don't mean that extroverts can't go to Mars. More specific studies are needed to look at how extroverts fare on these teams, and whether certain kinds of training could help prevent problems, Bell said.

Such studies could be conducted in space-simulation environments, or on the International Space Station, Bell said.

Bell noted that a team of all introverts is likely not the solution. "The question is, where's the balance, and once we find the balance, what can we do through training" to promote team compatibility? Bell said.

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