Personality neuroscience

If you’re interested in the (growing) link between personality research and neuroscience – that’s the way in which we are able to map specific areas of the brain in terms of personality traits – the link below is a good place to start. And if you’re reading this and thinking, you know, that sounds sort of interesting, you probably have your Amygdala to thank… Why? Click and find out.

http://psychometricsforumblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/personality-neuroscience-unlocking-the-mystery-of-the-brain-in-order-to-understand-the-whole-person/

Your brain on a slow website…

How the Internet is ruining your brain

 

The Big Two

I guess you’ve all heard of the ‘Big Five’ personality factors, or the five fundamental factors that help to describe most observable individual differences – namely, Openness (to experience), Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You probably also know that when they are combined in various ways they help to frame all manner of other things like emotion and motivation. I suspect you also have an idea about what happens when you try to break them down into smaller units. For example, that Extraversion is composed of facets that include warmth, gregariousness and excitement-seeking. And that there’s a debate about whether, when you look at all five factors, you end up with 16 ‘bits’, or 30, or 32… But have you ever thought about what happens if you go the other way? What, if I can put it like this, happens before the Big Five?

The Big Two

It turns out there are two higher-order factors. The first brings together Emotional Stability (the opposite of Neuroticism), Agreeableness and Conscientiousness; the second Extraversion and Openness. These new groupings are called Stability and Plasticity, respectively. So what? Well, these two meta-traits capture the two basic human requirements. These are the need to maintain a stable social structure in order to get things done, and what is in some ways the flip-side, the need to be able to cope with change and the unknown (and learn from it). This is quite an elegant distinction as at various times either stability or plasticity is likely to confer a competitive advantage. It’s also useful because it ties in nicely with the action of the neurotransmitters Serotonin (stability and the generation of feelings of ‘well-being’) and Dopamine (plasticity and reward-driven learning).

From a business perspective the tension between maintaining a dependable social structure in order to ensure steady progress and being able to cope with unpredictable change also has a familiar resonance.

More information from Colin DeYoung’s website.

Seeing what there is to see

I was reminded of this famous selective attention experiment a few weeks ago. Watch the video, following the instructions carefully:

Brain myths #1: You only use 10% of your brain

The brain is an amazing thing and can do amazing stuff. However, and I hate to disappoint you, we do know what all the bits do. There isn’t some hidden part, which if only you could activate it, would give you super powers: super memory, super intelligence, or indeed super anything. This is of course in direct contradiction to the common belief that we only use a fraction of our brains, maybe only 10%. So where did the myth come from? One of the main suspects is the great American psychologist William James who believed that we all had ‘reserve energy’ – a bit of extra brain oomph that we could tap into if only we knew how. The other, and perhaps more credible explanation, is that early on researchers discovered that just 10% of neurons were firing at any given time. Thus it seemed that only 10% were in use, which of course isn’t the case. Even when you’re asleep or day dreaming the brain is busily and actively doing its thing. Whatever the explanation, and of course it is possible to increase the efficiency of the brain, New Age hopes of tapping a great reserve of potential, and coming over all super human, appear to be unfounded.

Neuro-linguistic Programming

I was waiting at a railway station recently and wandered into the bookshop. What struck me when I got to the ‘management’ section was the number of books on Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP is an interesting (and highly successful) phenomenon that brings together elements of linguistics, behaviour modification, hypnosis and many other things besides. Popularised by Richard Bandler and John Grinder it seems to offer a quick and powerful way of understanding the link between the unconscious mind, language and behaviour; and to provide a channel for breaking out of learned patterns and of modelling successful behaviour, so increasing personal effectiveness. And make no mistake it is now big business, and is widely used not only for personal development, but extensively in management training, coaching and sales.

Despite its undoubted popularity it remains a controversial set of techniques, in particular when it’s used in a sales context. To take an example: consider what happens when you ask a person to do something and they respond by saying: ‘I can’t make that decision now.’ Obviously they are being resistant, but why?

NLP suggests that you try to spot which bit of the response is given the most emphasis, so if it’s on ‘now’, the problem is with the timing; on ‘that’, the issue is with what the person is being asked to do; on ‘make’, that they may not have the capability to make the decision; on ‘can’t’, that they don’t believe they can do it; and finally, on ‘I’, that it’s something ‘I’ cannot do. This is all fine and dandy and if it was proven to work it would be a really fantastic sales technique, as it would allow you to zero in on the real block to action. However the issue that bedevils NLP is that there is no empirical evidence that supports its effectiveness. Yes, there’s lots of anecdotal stuff but the hard science is missing. This also goes for the other bit of NLP that most people remember: the link between the movement of the eyes and the part of the brain that is being accessed. For example, eyes down and to the right, a person is being asked something about their feelings.

So what? Well, I cannot say for certain that all of the techniques that comprise NLP do not work. There may well be useful bits. However it has been enormously over sold, in particular on the back of its apparently science-based credentials – which it does not have. More to the point it doesn’t feature in mainstream psychology texts and is not taught on psychology degree courses. So perhaps in the words of Douglas Adams: ‘If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.’ The bottom line is that it doesn’t hold up as a coherent approach, and almost certainly is just too good to be true.

Note: There’s much on the Internet both for and against NLP. However if you’re interested in a more scientific view of the area, try Martin Heap’s website.

Personality models: perhaps we’re all wrong!

In Japan many people believe that a person’s blood type is predictive of their personality. Being asked about your blood type is commonplace and most Japanese would be puzzled if you didn’t know what it was. Blood type is used in recruitment and matchmaking, and for example many Japanese celebrities and politicians include it in their personal profiles. The gist is that if you’re Blood Type A you’re a responsible perfectionist; B, a practical individualist; O, a confident leader (and naturally this is considered to be the ‘best’ blood type!); and AB, that you’re unpredictable because you’re a mix of other types. Now it’s easy to take a smug, Western view of this, and whilst there is no proven link between blood type and personality, there is a heritable component to personality. Thus at the population level, mean estimates of heritability for the Big Five traits, which are not the same as the ABO ‘traits’ just mentioned, are: Openness (57%), Conscientiousness (49%), Extraversion (54%), Agreeableness (42%) and Neuroticism (48%)* – Bouchard & McGue, 2003.

Why do I mention all this? We are uncertain about what really ‘causes’ personality. It is likely to be influenced by heredity and environment, but how? And the other big question, what about the structure of personality itself? This last issue brings me to a recent and fascinating piece of research. Read et al (2010), using a neural network model of human personality, suggest that the Big Five is a representation of the structure of personality across a large group, based on the covariance (a measure of how pairs of variables change together) of characteristics within that group, not the structure that you would observe for an individual. The punch line: if you created a large number of virtual humans, specified by a random set of characteristics, you would expect the pattern across individuals to end up looking like the Big Five. Oops, amongst other obvious questions, if this is true and structure operates at a group (population) level, what does the score for a scale on a personality questionnaire for an individual actually mean? It looks like we may need to do some serious thinking about the structure of personality.

Bouchard, T.J. &  McGue, M. (2003). Genetic and Environmental Influences on Human Psychological Difference. Journal of Neurobiology, 54, 4-45.

Read, S.J., Monroe, B.M., Brownstein, A.L., Yang, Y., Chopra, G. & Miller, L.C. (2010). A Neural Network Model of the Structure and Dynamics of Human Personality. Psychological Review, 117, 61-92.

* Note. This does not imply that for an individual 57% of their ‘openness’, for example, is caused by their genetic makeup. It means that the (observable) phenotypic variation is 57% due to genetic variation.

In two minds, or just the one?

Let’s put this one to bed. The left-brain right-brain thing is a gross over-simplification of how the brain works. So forget all that stuff on left-brain (logical, analytical, objective) and right-brain (creative, intuitive, subjective) thinking, the brain is a distributive system, with the two halves generally both being involved in all aspects of thinking and problem solving.

First impressions count (literally)

It looks like first impressions are all about ‘what’s in it for me’. Those pesky neuroscientists have been at it again and have identified two areas of the brain that fire up when we’re dealing with impression-relevant information. They are the amygdala, which seems to have a hand in all sorts of stuff, but this time it’s to do with trust; and the posterior cingulate cortex, which is your very own internal accountant, concerned with economic decision-making and the evaluation of rewards. The upshot is that before someone has even had a chance to sneeze you’ve checked out whether they are of value to you. A bit depressing isn’t it? However it might help to explain social climbing…

Want it straight from the horse’s mouth?  Here’s the reference:

Schiller, D., Freeman, J.B., Mitchell, J.P, Uleman, J.S. & Phelps, A. (2009). A Neural Mechanism of First Impressions. Nature Neuroscience, 12, pp. 508-514.

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