•Extraversion predicts more positive attitudes towards everyday social touch.•Attachment avoidance and anxiety are stronger predictors of intimate touch.•Interoceptive accuracy and body image only ...weakly predict touch outcomes.•Results were obtained from a large and diverse UK healthy adult sample.•Highlights the interplay between perceiver and context in shaping touch perception.
Attitudes and experiences of touch vary considerably between individuals and also shift in response to societal change. This preregistered study examined predictors of inter-individual variability in touch attitudes and experiences in a large and diverse UK healthy adult sample (N = 15,166). Trait extraversion was the strongest predictor of day-to-day social touch attitudes (e.g., handshakes), where greater extraversion predicted more positive attitudes. Attachment avoidance and anxiety most strongly predicted attitudes and experiences of intimate touch (e.g., kissing, caressing). This study is the first to analyse the relative contribution of individual difference predictors to this broad range of touch attitudes and experiences. Findings highlight the complex interplay between perceiver and context in shaping touch experiences.
Objective and Method
This meta‐analysis reports the most comprehensive assessment to date of the strength of the relationships between the Big Five personality traits and academic performance by ...synthesizing 267 independent samples (N = 413,074) in 228 unique studies. It also examined the incremental validity of personality traits above and beyond cognitive ability in predicting academic performance.
Results
The combined effect of cognitive ability and personality traits explained 27.8% of the variance in academic performance. Cognitive ability was the most important predictor with a relative importance of 64%. Conscientiousness emerged as a strong and robust predictor of performance, even when controlling for cognitive ability, and accounted for 28% of the explained variance in academic performance. A significant moderating effect of education level was observed. The relationship of academic performance with openness, extraversion, and agreeableness demonstrated significantly larger effect sizes at the elementary/middle school level compared to the subsequent levels. Openness, despite its weak overall relative importance, was found to be an important determinant of student performance in the early years of school.
Conclusion
These findings reaffirm the critical role of personality traits in explaining academic performance through the most comprehensive assessment yet of these relationships.
We performed a quantitative review of associations between the higher order personality traits in the Big Three and Big Five models (i.e., neuroticism, extraversion, disinhibition, conscientiousness, ...agreeableness, and openness) and specific depressive, anxiety, and substance use disorders (SUD) in adults. This approach resulted in 66 meta-analyses. The review included 175 studies published from 1980 to 2007, which yielded 851 effect sizes. For a given analysis, the number of studies ranged from three to 63 (total sample size ranged from 1,076 to 75,229). All diagnostic groups were high on neuroticism (mean Cohen's
d
= 1.65) and low on conscientiousness (mean
d
= −1.01). Many disorders also showed low extraversion, with the largest effect sizes for dysthymic disorder (
d
= −1.47) and social phobia (
d
= −1.31). Disinhibition was linked to only a few conditions, including SUD (
d
= 0.72). Finally, agreeableness and openness were largely unrelated to the analyzed diagnoses. Two conditions showed particularly distinct profiles: SUD, which was less related to neuroticism but more elevated on disinhibition and disagreeableness, and specific phobia, which displayed weaker links to all traits. Moderator analyses indicated that epidemiologic samples produced smaller effects than patient samples and that Eysenck's inventories showed weaker associations than NEO scales. In sum, we found that common mental disorders are strongly linked to personality and have similar trait profiles. Neuroticism was the strongest correlate across the board, but several other traits showed substantial effects independent of neuroticism. Greater attention to these constructs can significantly benefit psychopathology research and clinical practice.
Introduction In December 2019, an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) probably occurred in Wuhan, China. By March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) had ...declared a pandemic. Containment measures such as social distancing and hand hygiene were recommended. In this study, we start from the hypothesis that engaging with containment measures in a pandemic situation should be more comfortable for some people than for other people. Thus, individual differences should be associated with engagement with containment measures. Objective To investigate to what extent two personality traits, extroversion and conscientiousness, are associated with engagement with two containment measures (social distancing and handwashing). Methods The sample consisted of 715 Brazilian adults aged 18-78 years, who answered the Big Five Inventory 2 Short (BFI-2-S) and factors from the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory 2 (IDCP-2). Results Higher scores for extroversion were associated with lower means for social distancing (p < 0.001) and higher scores for conscientiousness were associated with higher means for social distancing and handwashing (p < 0.05). Conclusion The findings indicate the importance of acknowledging extroversion and conscientiousness traits as relevant to people's engagement with the measures recommended for COVID-19 containment.
We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for ...age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.
Whether one is in one's native culture or abroad, one's personality can differ markedly from the personalities of the majority, thus failing to match the "cultural norm." Our studies examined how the ...interaction of individual-and cultural-level personality affects people's self-esteem and well-being. We propose a persorxulture match hypothesis that predicts that when a person's personality matches the prevalent personalities of other people in a culture, culture functions as an important amplifier of the positive effect of personality on self-esteem and subjective well-being at the individual level. Across two studies, using data from more than 7,000 individuals from 28 societies, multilevel random-coefficient analyses showed that when a relation between a given personality trait and well-being or self-esteem exists at the individual level, the relation is stronger in cultures characterized by high levels of that personality dimension. Results were replicated across extraversion, promotion focus, and locomotive regulatory mode. Our research has practical implications for the well-being of both cultural natives and migrants.
Extraverts are often characterized as highly social individuals who are highly invested in their interpersonal interactions. We propose that extraverts’ interaction partners hold a different ...view—that extraverts are highly social, but not highly invested. Across six studies (five preregistered; N = 2,456), we find that interaction partners consistently judge more extraverted individuals to be worse listeners than less extraverted individuals. Furthermore, interaction partners assume that extraversion is positively associated with a greater ability to modify one’s self-presentation. This behavioral malleability (i.e., the “acting” component of self-monitoring) may account for the unfavorable lay belief that extraverts are not listening.
In early adolescence, levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness have been found to temporarily decrease, with levels of neuroticism increasing, indicating a dip in personality maturation. It is ...unknown whether these changes are related to the process of puberty, a major developmental milestone with numerous changes for children. Here, we first replicated the dip in personality maturity in early adolescence (N = 2640, age range 8-18, 51% girls, 65% non-Hispanic white, 21% Hispanic/Latino, 10% African American, 9% other, roughly 33% of families received means-tested public assistance) and tested associations between the Big Five personality dimensions and pubertal development and timing across late childhood and adolescence (n = 1793). Pubertal development was measured using both hormonal assays (DHEA, testosterone, and progesterone) and self-reports of secondary sex characteristics. Of hormonal measures, only higher DHEA concentrations were associated with lower conscientiousness and openness. Nonparametric moderation analyses using LOSEM indicated Complex Age × Sex interactions involving all three hormones. Self-reported pubertal development was associated with lower extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. More advanced pubertal timing was also related to lower levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. All associations were small. As some evidence was found for small associations between pubertal development and lower levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness, a dip in personality maturation in these personality traits may be partly due to pubertal development in early adolescence. Overall, results did not indicate that pubertal development was the primary explanation of the maturity dip in adolescent personality. Many small influences likely accumulate to explain the dip in personality maturity in early adolescence.
Many individuals—including Eysenck, Gray, Strelau, and Depue—have helped to explicate the temperamental basis of extraversion. The current study builds on this work by examining how two positively ...correlated aspects of extraversion—agentic extraversion (i.e., individual differences in reward anticipation and incentive motivation) and communal extraversion (i.e., individual differences in consummatory pleasure)—relate to psychopathology. We examined these relations in two samples. We extended previous work by analyzing three pairs of communal and agentic extraversion scales. These scales generally showed strong convergent and discriminant validity across samples. We assessed psychopathology using selected scales from the Comprehensive Assessment of Traits relevant to Personality Disorder (CAT-PD; Wright & Simms, 2014). Structural analyses of these CAT-PD scales revealed that the same two factors emerged in both samples; they were labeled Detachment (e.g., Anhedonia, Social Withdrawal) and Externalizing (e.g., Grandiosity, Risk Taking). All three indicators of communal extraversion were strongly negatively related to Detachment, whereas all three measures of agentic extraversion were moderately positively associated with Externalizing, thus demonstrating high replicability across measures and samples. Finally, regression results established that the unique component of communal extraversion is healthy and adaptive, whereas the unique component of agentic extraversion is largely maladaptive in nature.
•Detachment is a dimension characterized by anhedonia and social aloofness.•Externalizing is a dimension characterized by grandiosity, rudeness and risk taking.•Detachment is strongly negatively related to the communal aspect of extraversion.•Externalizing is positively related to the agentic aspect of extraversion.•These results replicate across 2 samples and 3 different measures of extraversion.
How and to what extent does extraversion relate to work relevant variables across the lifespan? In the most extensive quantitative review to date, we summarize results from 97 published meta-analyses ...reporting relations of extraversion to 165 distinct work relevant variables, as well as relations of extraversion's lower order traits to 58 variables. We first update all effects using a common set of statistical corrections and, when possible, combine independent estimates using second-order meta-analysis (Schmidt & Oh, 2013). We then organize effects within a framework of four career domains-education, job application, on the job, and career/lifespan-and five conceptual categories: motivations, values, and interests; attitudes and well-being; interpersonal; performance; and counterproductivity. Overall, extraversion shows effects in a desirable direction for 90% of variables (grand mean ρ̄ = .14), indicative of a small, persistent advantage at work. Findings also show areas with more substantial effects (ρ̄ ≥ .20), which we synthesize into four extraversion advantages. These motivational, emotional, interpersonal, and performance advantages offer a concise account of extraversion's relations and a new lens for understanding its effects at work. Our review of the lower order trait evidence reveals diverse relations (e.g., the positive emotions facet has consistently advantageous effects, the sociability facet confers few benefits, the sensation-seeking facet is largely disadvantageous), and extends knowledge about the functioning of extraversion and its advantages. We conclude by discussing potential boundary conditions of findings, contributions and limitations of our review, and new research directions for extraversion at work.
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