the first thing I already explained to you that about the shift in our emphasis from here on in and I suppose in some ways we're we're switching from the part of the P the course that has to do with transformation into the part of the course that has to do with stability at least relative stability now the idea behind the work that we're going to talk about now is that personality has stable and identifiable features across time and I suppose it's traits that you're referring to when you say to yourself or to someone else I know that person and when you say that you know that person it seems to me that you're presuming that there's something stable and identifiable about them that you can track over time you might consider that who they are and so trait theory is the study of who people are now if there's 177,000 trait descriptors in the English language that suggests in some way that there are 17,000 ways that people can vary or be the same you know vary from each other and be the same across time but 177,000 seems like an un UNM manageable number and it's possible that a very large number of those words are variance they're synonyms in some sense and trait theory in some ways is an attempt to find the clumps of synonymous words that are encapsulated within language that apply to people the basic hypothesis is something like this this because tracking the behavior of other people is extremely important to us and because we want to communicate about that tracking and because we're studying each other all the time there's at least a reasonable probability that the fundamental dimensions of Personality are going to be encapsulated within the language and what that means in some sense is that you may be able to use the language as a tool if you use the appropriate statistical techniques in order to extract out the fundamental dimensions of personality and so you could say those are the basic imagine there's five or six canonical words or 10 canonical words within that collection of 177,000 and then all the others are slight variants of them or mixtures of them or or something like that so perhaps there's a simple structure underneath the apparent complexity um the first people who tried this as I said were all part alport and odbert but they really didn't have the statistical techniques that were necessary to do a particularly good job so uh all port and a tried to reduce their 18,000 trait terms to 4500 descriptors of what they figured were stable traits and then catel came along in 1942 restricted those to 171 by judgment and then further to 16 by factor analysis these are cel's 16 traits the first three were the most important you could be reserved versus outgoing less or more intelligent emotional versus stable humble versus assertive sober versus happy go-lucky expedient versus conscientious shy versus venturesome tough tender-minded trusting suspicious practical imaginative forthright shrewd Placid apprehensive conservative or experimental group oriented or self-sufficient casual versus controlled and relaxed versus tense and cel's 16 personality theory dominated the field for for quite a long time really until the early 1960s um now I'll go back tell you a little bit about how these things are measured so here's some here's some definitions of what a trait might be this is the theoretical these are theoretical propositions the tradeit has more than a nominal existence what does that mean well it refers to something that's outside its linguistic marker so hypothetically there's something about a trait that that makes it real that might be physiological or biological or at least behavioral that that that can be examined outside mere subjective analysis although that's often proved more difficult than people originally expected traits are more generalized than particular habits well God only knows how many habits people have you know and you kind of maybe you run into the same problem with habits as you do with with 177,000 words there's so many of them that you know you can drown in the description and again you have to look for something that's more fundamental their Dynamic and determined Behavior so there's something about a trait that in some sense acts as a causal agent traits may be identified empirically we covered that traits are relatively independent of other traits they're not synonymous with moral or social judgments and acts and even habits that are inconsistent with a trait are not proof of the non-existence of that trait and then the more complex one traits May either be viewed idiographically in light of the personality that contains them oretically on the basis of their distribution in the population measurement techniques so imagine that you collect your list of adjectives and then you transform them into a very simple questionnaire and so the questionnaire would look like a list of adjectives down the left hand side and then on the right hand side there'd be maybe a scale that's yes or no or maybe a scale from 1 to seven and so if the descriptor was intelligent you could ask the person apply that descriptor to yourself on a scale from 1 to 7 or you could ask the person to rate someone else and describe that person as intelligent on a scale of 1 to 7 and then you can have let's say A large group of adjectives like that three 00 or so and then you can have a large number of people assess themselves with all those adjectives and you can apply statistical techniques that then allow you to determine how the data is patterned so for example if two of the 400 words were intelligent and smart then you might find that within the entire population of Raiders if they were rating themselves if they rated themselves as high on intelligence they're also going to rate themselves as high on smart and maybe high on quick and maybe high on insightful and then you may also find for example that if they rated themselves as nice highly they might also rate themselves as kind highly or empathic highly and so by analyzing the groups of words that Clump together in the same direction across many many people you can start to in and you can do this statistically you can start to infer what the fundamental dimensions of variation are now it's taken a long time for people to get the fundamental dimensions of variation right and part of the problem is well how do you reduce the pool of adjectives to begin with to something that's because you're not going to have you know a thousand people rate themselves on 177,000 adjectives that's just not going to go very well so you have to reduce that in some way that's not exactly biased and then you have to get enough people to fill it out so that your sample is going to be reliable across time and then you have to have statistical techniques that are powerful enough to handle those operations and that all really didn't come together until probably the early 1960s something like that when when cel's 16 factors were finally reduced to something approximating five now I'm going to tell you a little bit how you would go about making a questionnaire because that's part of what you need to know in order to do experimental psychology especially social or personality psychology and so we'll step into method a little bit before we return to the to the trait theories so if you wanted to measure something let's see someone think of a potential personality trait don't don't use the standard Big Five how give me a word that you might use to describe someone fun fun okay good so now now we have to figure out so now we've got a problem hey and the problem is well you can use fun as a marker in a linguistic exchange Joe is a fun person to hang around with and then part of the meaning that you attribute to fund is a consequence of the words that you surround it with and then of course the context in which you utter the sentence and your determination of whether or not the person you're talking to knows who Joe is and and so you're always providing the person that you're communicating with when you use a word like fun with a bunch of information that sort of surrounds the word so that they can infer what you mean but if you're going to use that word and infer that it actually ref refers to something that's objective outside language then you have to go about it in a different way and so the first thing you try to do is to figure out okay what do you mean by Fun exactly so let's have some characteristics of a person who's fun what do they like we can't use big five descriptors that's that's okay but that's that's right by the way but but I want to stay away from that just just for funny okay okay so a funny a fun person is funny and so a funny person is someone who makes you laugh I presume and who's witty and so you could start generating Associated words okay what else makes a person Fun interesting they're interesting okay so they're funny and they're interesting what else friendly friendly okay enthusiastic enthusiastic talk cative lighted light-hearted all right you guys are really getting into this now okay so you're starting to surround the word with a cloud of add additional words that you believe in some in some ways have some important similarity with that underlying word right they they seem to belong in the same category okay what are some words that that indicate that someone's not fun boring okay so they're boring miserable miserable what's the difference between boring and miserable that's a good one yeah misery can be interesting yeah yeah yeah okay so other differences between boring and miserable that's probably an open answer by the way just just so you know any other differences come on you guys know the difference between boring and miserable for God's sake yeah miserable usually take people down boring just okay so boring sounds like it's more neutral in some sense miserable was that PO is that a positive thing or negative thing negative okay so and what sort of emotions might it be associated with depression sadness depression what else anxiety hate hate fear cynicism cynicism Okay so now we've got the fun person sort of identified with regards to a positive poll and a negative poll right all right so you can conduct a brief statistical investigation to determine whether or not your characterization of fun had any utility was was was valid in some sense reliable and valid so the first thing we might do is write down all those words on a on a little questionnaire so we probably generate about 20 of them a and then we might ask everyone to rate themselves according to that questionnaire and then we we might submit the data set to factor analysis which is a complicated form of correlation analysis and then we could find out what words Clump together now what we would find if we analyzed all the words that you guys generated is that we'd have one little Clump that was associated with interesting and we'd have another Clump that was associated with negative emotion and we'd have another Clump that was associated with positive emotion and so you guys actually Define fun as a three-dimensional construct from given what we know about personality because we know that there's a positive emotion Dimension and a negative emotion Dimension and then another dimension that's associated with creativity and so from for at least in so far as you all characterized it fun is not a unidimensional word it it crosses a variety of different domains now so if you're if you're trying to get at how to measure fun the first thing you have to do is Define it and that's what we were trying to do when we were collecting up all these words I'll show you how catel in 1965 characterized conscientiousness so he says well this thing exists and in its existence it manifests these characteristics conscientious is conscientiousness is that disposition governing persevering unselfish Behavior and impelling the individual to duty as conceived by his or her culture a conscientious person is honest knows what is right and generally does it even if no one is watching him or her does not tell lies or attempt to deceive others respects others property an unconscientious person is somewhat unscrupulous not too careful about standards of right and wrong where personal desires are concerned tells lies and is given to little deceits and does not respect others property so you could imagine how you could transform that that definition into a questionnaire you could use the adjectives that are in it and just have people rate themselves by the adjectives or you could use little phrase phrases like do you respect others property one to7 um do you have a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong if you know what's right do you generally do it are you a persistent person are you unselfish so you can extract out individual items from your sort of global definition of what constitutes the the hypothetical trait and there's some of the examples do usually keep emotions under control are you a person who is scrupulously correct in manners and social obligations and likes others to be the same are you cautious and considerate so that you do not hurt people's feelings by unconsidered conversational remarks I like the adjective approach in some ways because you might notice that the last question there clumps a number of descriptors together and it isn't absolutely certain that all those descriptors belong in the same question and so I would say this is was constructed quite a long time ago and I would say if you're going to construct questions you should try to answer you should try to ask as close to one thing as possible because otherwise the question gets confusing so I would say the you know the second question also has the same problem all right so if you're going to make your questionnaire and let's say you're you're trying to figure out how fun someone is and simultaneously figure out whether or not investigating fun is actually a reasonable thing to do like is it is it a scientifically valid category um then you might want to generate a whole bunch of items and also put some in there that don't obviously measure fun so let's have some descriptors that don't seem to fall on the fun nonf fun dimmension what's outside of that okay which one I would Sayo okay and Define stoic being quite careful with your words not having an excess of emotion okay so so you think you could you think you can be fun and not have an excess of emotional response I'm not trying to put you on the spot I'm just I'm just wondering if that's what you're claiming I think because just because you're in a social situation and not okay okay okay so what what other what other descriptors look I mean fun can't mean everything right because if it means any everything then it's it's not a useful word because a word has to mean some things and not other things that's um convergent and Divergent validity in a sense a word can't mean everything it has to mean something specific so what does what's outside of the fun non-f fun domain intelligence yeah so you can be fun and stupid fact fact that might even be easier all right so intelligence might be outside of that what else might be and you could be envious and fun still seems least probable how about mean can you be mean and fun yeah so that's kind of interesting so so okay okay so now we're starting to get the idea that fun circumscribes one dimension but there are other potential dimensions of variation outside of that that might be interesting to look at and so we've sort of thought about we thought sort of thought about mean and we thought about intelligent what else did we come up with what else is sort of outside of the fun realm patient okay so you can be impatient fun or patient fun all right seems reasonable fashionable yeah okay is that you think that's a person who said that you think that's a personality trait um I think it means yeah okay so so you you definitely do think it's a personality characteristic and that that's fine it could well be you know um is there a difference between a personality characteristic and an emotion you think you think emotion is inside personality so it's nested inside it the personality is the larger category and emotion is the smaller category yeah it's a it's a funny thing a because there's lots of there's lots of a priority suppositions in Psychology that you have to watch out for and one of them is that just because there's different words for different things that doesn't mean those different things really exist separately as separate things do in scientific terminology so for example the relationship between personality traits and emotions and values is relatively unclear whether those things belong in the same or different categories is by no means clear and people will claim that they do but um the overlap is substantial so okay yes we also usually think of emotions as being more kind like we're all we all experience sadness at some point that doesn't mean that that's a fundamental tra of our personality it's like we're all able to experience it but it doesn't usually we are unless we're right and so and so okay and so that's part of the definition of a trait as something that's enduring rather than transient okay so you could say that's actually a hypothesis your hypothesis is that what we refer to as emotions are brief flareups of some of the phenomena that we would consider traits if if they were enduring yeah and that I mean that's a reasonable hypothesis although if you if you describe a person as sad you think you're describing their their personality or their emotion it could be either I would yes yeah okay okay yeah it's it's a trick It's Tricky business okay so the reason I had you generate all these additional words is because you you need to find out that your category fun has a bunch of things that it doesn't cover as well as a bunch of things that it does and so we've hypothesized a number of things that might constitute additional domains of variation and so you might want to throw those in your questionnaire to okay now you might say well what are you going to do with your scale so you've now you have a scale and you can give it to people and you can tell the difference between the fun people and the not fun people and so what might be some practical purposes towards which you could put that knowledge you don't have to be too serious about it I mean what are you going you could invite all the non-fund people to a party that would seem rather counterproductive your your hypothesis would be that maybe you'd have two parties you'd have a party with all the fun people and you'd have another party with all the non-f fun people and then you could get the attendees to rate how fun the party was and then that would help you determine whether or not your measurement of fund was actually practically useful for something that's called Criterion related validity by the way so and Criterion related validity if a scale possesses Criterion related validity you can identify something that it might predict that isn't like completely obviously associated with the initial measure although you know fun and fun at a party probably are so that's bad example but you can use it to predict something that might be of value so I can give an example of that is that conscientiousness for which is a trait is is frequently used to EV valuate how good an employee might be If you hired them or even how good a student might be because conscientiousness turns out to be a pretty good predictor of academic achievement okay so if you're going to make a if you want to make a questionnaire and some of you do this when you do your honors thesis or if you're involved in research at all and people tend to think about developing a questionnaire of something that's relatively straightforward um it's not you need to figure out what it is that you're after you know what's your central construct of interest and then you have to figure out well how do I generate a very large number of items that hypothetically measures this or it's reverse or it's opposite it doesn't really matter and then a bunch of items that don't measure it because again you have to show that it's good for something and not good for everything so and then you have to demonstrate statistically that your your concept is coherent and then you have to show that you can use it to predict something and it gets worse than that actually then you have to show that it predicts something better than some other thing that someone already invented so you know if if you came up with a fun scale it's it's probably primarily extroversion that as as you mentioned that a scale like that would measure although it' be a little complicated because generally fun people also have less negative emotions so what you'd end up with as we mentioned before your fund scale would be a mangling up of a couple of different categories and so it probably end up not being a very good questionnaire at all so it's a tricky thing to make a questionnaire it takes an awful lot of work and you you you you can't start with the assumption that just because you've been able to think up a concept that it actually constitutes a concept that meets the criteria for scientific um evidence or for for scientific category so we should also talk maybe a little bit about some different kinds of categories because it's not all that obvious to people that there are different kinds of categories so I can I can name three very rapidly there there are many others uh the first category and these are usually the categories that scientists do investigate they are technically called proper sets and so a proper set is like the set of all triangles and triangles are clearly not squares we we' all agree on that so what makes a triangle different than a square which one okay I was trying to trip you up there so okay so and is that true of all triangles right right right what about a triangle that like is open on one line does that qualify as a triangle no it just looks like a triangle it's like an impostor so okay so a proper set has this interesting characteristic which is it has absolutely clear inclusion and exclusion criteria and there are no exceptions and so or or almost no exceptions so you might say well um is the set of all helium atoms a proper set and the answer to that fundamentally is yes and is and it's distinguishable say from the set of all hydrogen atoms or the set of all Iron atoms there's there's there's characteristics that you can Define that precisely indicate the boundaries of the category and those sorts of things are are relatively easy to study scientifically because they tend to behave similarly in different circumstances so here here's another category um it's called a familial resemblance category that's a little harder to understand but um a familial resemblance category is a category that that imagine that the prototypical example is the Smith Brothers so the Smith Brothers here's some things that could characterize the Smith Brothers um large ears large nose floppy lips uh glasses mustache beard and bald so they're obviously not very attractive these Smith Brothers and then you can tell the smith brothers are related to each other because they all look like each other of course they don't look exactly like each other so one Smith brother brother is bald with glasses and floppy lips but he has little ears and then another Smith brother has hair but he's got you know large glasses and large ears and floppy lips and then there's another Smith brother that has a big nose and glasses but he has nice hair and and no and no mustache but a beard and you get the picture so so what what uh a familial resemblance category how a familiar resemblance category works is that there's a list of say 10 attributes and in order to be a member of that class you only have to have say four of the attributes any four and or maybe five whatever the weird thing about a familial resemblance category is that one person could have four of the attributes and another person could have four different attributes if there were 10 attributes in total and they'd still be members of the same set even though they don't share any attributes in common and what a familial resemblance category works because each of the members of the category are related to a central prototype and the Prototype has all the features and the Prototype might not even exist so there could be a prototypical Smith brother who would have all the characteristics of the smith brothers that I described but he doesn't even exist he's like he's like an amalgam of all the smith brothers and then each of the smith brothers are related in some way to that Central prototype so that you could tell that they belong in a family and that's not a proper set and one of the things you know you you might be asking well why should you know this and one reason is is because it's useful to know that there are different forms of categories but more particularly for psychological purposes psychiatric diagnostic categories are familial resemblance categories they're not proper sets so if you go into the Diagnostics and statistical manual which is the sort of APA American Psychiatric association Bible for doing diagnosis you'll see that if you list the symptoms of something like a personality disorder there might be 10 symptoms and in order to have that personality disorder you only need four of them and so there can be wide variation within the category and of course then that begs the question of whether or not it's actually a category certainly whether or not it's actually a scientific category so um guy named Barcelo talked about a different kind of category he called them ad hoc categories and these are strange things like here's here here's an ad hoc category for you um things to take out of your apartment when it's on fire so what things would those be pictures y pets pets yes children you forgot about that okay what else what's that seniors yes hopefully or yeah Insurance ID maybe what's that anything else okay now you might say well what do all those things have in common since they're apparently a category about they're things you care about yeah yeah ID you care about that you about it you need it yeah so they're necessary or emotionally valuable or or what or valuable yeah or irreplaceable in some ways okay so that's a funny category and one of Barcelo claims was that ad hoc categories can become Auto automatic categories perceptual categories if you practice them enough so Barcelo would say a fireman has a better ad hoc category of what to take out of an apartment during a fire than you do because he's practiced that using that category frequently so those are categories that sort of have pragmatic utility and that's another kind of category okay so I mentioned family res resemblance proper set and ad hoc categories that's all I can sort of spin off in in in real time here so um generally what you're trying to do when you extract a word out from the language you have to demonstrate it that it has the characteristics of a proper set before you can think of it as having some genuinely objective existence and that turns out to be a very difficult thing to do so and it's one of the things that throws psychologists for a loop constantly because we make the presupposition that just because a word two different words exist for something that that signifies two different things or two things at all and so it's it's it's it's difficult to disentangle your description of the world from the world itself but hypothetically this construct validation process with regards to questionnaires is one of the ways that you can step forward towards doing that I mentioned convergent and discriminant validity before um once you get your scale established you have to demonstrate as I said that it measures something that that that exists in some real way and that it also has to be separable from measures of other things so for example if you generated up a scale that measured fun and you found out that it was highly correlated with SC other scales that measure anxiety then that would cast some doubt on whether or not you You' had appropriately extracted out your scale for fun other people would have been looking at similar things over the years and hopefully your scale would correlate positively with those similar things and negatively with the things that you assume to be different and that's convergent and Divergent validity and then the Criterion related validity we already talked about okay so now I want to show you a different uh PowerPoint presentation just for the yeah so this you might think about this as the current arguably standard model of human personality and it's a model that this is only half of it by the way there's another slide that has the other half this shows the personality of a person laid out in in hierarchy from most General to most specific it's sort of analogous to that little drawing I showed you of behaviors at the bottom and then higher order descriptors at the top although they don't map onto each other one to one and that's actually one of the things I'm trying to figure out um it's very difficult to it's very difficult to map the trait theories directly onto the narrative and the clinical theories all right so at the highest level of resolution here's how people can differ from one another they can be industrious or orderly and that those two aspects are quite highly intercorrelated but in sufficiently differentiable so that the differences are interesting industriousness and ordin seem to predict different things so for example industriousness seems to be a better predictor of academic achievement and orderliness does even though they both both Clump under conscientiousness and then there's volatility and withdrawal for emotional stability or neuroticism it's described different ways if it's you're neurotic if you feel a lot of negative emotion and you're emotionally stable if you don't neg the negative emotions that are associated with neuroticism we thought for a long time it was all negative emotions that were associated with neuroticism but it seems to be more like pain and anxiety and and and pain is somewhat equivalent to the emotion you feel if you're frustrated or disappointed or grieving and anxiety seems to be the emotion you feel when you're subject to uncontrollable or unexpected circumstances or when you're subject to cues of frustration disappointment or grief so volatile people don't really seem to avoid because of their negative emotion although their emotion their their emotions bounce a lot especially their negative emotions so if you're associated with someone who's volatile what you would observe is that they seem to overreact to things they get more irritated than the circumstance might seem to indicate and their emotion emotional response to things is on the negative end is relatively unpredictable day-to- day so there's a lot of variability and a lower threshold for the experience people who withdraw are people who who appear to be stopped by their experience of negative emotion so if they're afraid of something they won't do it where the volatile person they might do it but they'll complain a lot while they're doing it you know so we don't know a lot about the difference between volatility and withdrawal yet because those have been recently extracted out using statistical means and they seem stable but exactly what they predict yet apart from the few things that I've tentatively suggested to you isn't yet clear agreeableness sounds like a positive thing politeness and compassion we know that Liberals are more compassionate and conservatives more polite but we don't know a lot more about the distinction between politeness and compassion um and we don't know why conservatives are more polite and Liberals are more compassionate but we do know that that appears to be the case we also know by the way that conservatives are more orderly they're less open as well which is the dimension we'll talk about in a moment those three those are three of the five big five traits conscientiousness emotional stability and agreeableness they Clump together to make a super Factor called stability and stability looks like it might be associated with higher levels of Serotonin so serotonin is a major brain neurotransmitter that seems to regulate broadly speaking emotion and motivation and if your serotonin levels so to speak are relatively High then you're a relatively stable person and if your serotonin levels are low then you tend to be impulsive and prone to negative emotion now one of the things that's quite interesting about serotonin is that it tracks your position in the dominance hierarchy as well so the higher you are up in a given dominance hierarchy the more serotonin your brain brain produces and that makes you more confident and less unstable and the lower you are in the hierarchy the lower your brain serotonin levels and the reason for that seems to be that if you're low in the dominance hierarchy well you should be afraid because almost anything can knock you into Oblivion because if you're right at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy you're barely you're barely hanging on and you just can't tolerate any more threat and conversely it might also be appropriate for you if someone dangles a reward in front of you for to grab it because it's not exactly clear it's going to be the next there the next day whereas if you're up high in the dominance hierarchy it's like you can take a lot of blows and you're so well situated socially that it's probably not going to overwhelm you that much and you don't have to be impulsive because the micro environment that you inhabit is very stable so the negative emotion Dimension emotional stability is particularly associated with serotonergic function but we think that the whole super factor of stability is a associated with serotonergic tone so some of this lot like I mentioned already all of these different F aspects traits and super factors were all derived statistically but evidence has continued to AC over the last 20 years with regards to the biological substrate of the traits and so as we progress through them one by one we'll also talk about hypothetically what constitutes the underlying biology agreeable people um I think the easiest way to conceptualize agreeableness as is as um a negotiating strategy in some sense so you know you're always attempting to divide up resources between you and other people and a disagreeable person will make a pretty damn strong case that the resources should go to them whereas an agreeable person will be much more likely to under represent their own interest and over represent the interest of others and so you know in some ways people like that are very pleasant to be around you know because they're always doing things for other people unfortunately they're often not doing enough for themselves in my clinical practice I can always tell who the agreeable people are because when they come and see me they bring me coffee the disagreeable people bring themselves coffee so yeah pretty sad animation the aspects here so openness remember you guys hypothesized that intelligence was unrelated to fun well fun is pretty much an extroversion sub element and intelligence is associated with openness and it roughly breaks down like this so um IQ is probably a better measure of the aspect intellect like IQ tests are a better measure of the subscale intellect than personality measures are so what it means is that for for intellect for intelligence we have a measure that isn't merely self-report and it's a good measure and we'll talk a lot about intelligence it's actually a very easy it's a simple thing to conceptualize so um it's a it's a more difficult thing to try to explain but conceptually it's fairly straightforward um the other aspect of openness is openness proper I I put creativity here and and what that seems to be associated with is the degree to which someone there's a variety of things but one of them seems to be the degree to which a given idea if you throw someone an idea or you offer someone idea there's some probability that that's going to make them think of other things the more open someone is the more likely it is that any given idea is going to make them think of more things and also the open person has a more diverse range of things that that idea might bring about and so often the speaking style of someone who's open is associated is characterized by relatively loose associations I mean like my lectures for example so it's a measure of creativity but it's also a measure in some sense of lack of con constraint on on the propagation of ideas through the idea Network and I don't know exactly what that means neurologically I do know that you can be relatively high in intelligence and relatively low in in openness or creativity but the two things do tend to coary so for example it's very rare for people to make any major contribution to a creative sphere unless they have an IQ of over least over 120 so it's a pretty it's pretty selective one in 12 20 that's about the 90 91st 92nd percentile so it's pretty high so openness is creativity and intelligence it's a bit broader than that too though because open people are also more capable of aesthetic experience so it's not only that they are more creative but they also enjoy the products of creative Endeavor more than non-open people so open people are going to be interested in dance and music and poetry and philosophy um they're characterized by the capacity for aesthetic experiences you know so some people can listen to music and the hair on the back of their neck will stand up or maybe they get the same sensation when they're watching someone dance or so um just out of curiosity if you're inclined to answer how many of you have had the experience of it's called pyo erection actually because sometimes the hairs on your arms will stand up too as a consequence of watching you know something that's aesthetic movie or how many quite a lot of you how many haven't okay okay so well there's a lot of you know by that measure anyways there's a awful lot of open people in this class so um that sense by the way of having your the hairs on the back of your neck stand up that's sort of a the remnant of the pyo erection reflex so you know let's say you you you're watching a cat and the cat comes around a corner and all of a sudden there's a dog there what what happens to the cat goes right it Puffs right up even so now it's tales about this big around right and I mean it's startled but it Puffs right out and it's like that's an automatic Reflex on the part of the cat now it's trying to look like it's big you know of course the dog will do the same thing so it's a bit counterproductive but whatever the cat's trying to look like it occupies a lot more space than it actually looks like and but there's also at least in principle an emotion associated with that which is one of it's sort of a combination of Terror and awe and maybe that's what the cat feels but that's what the our experience of awe even filtered down is still associated with that you know experience of pyo rection so that's pretty interesting so extroverted people or at least I think it's pretty interesting extroverted people are assertive and enthusiastic and so the enthusiasm Dimension seems to be associated with a lot of overt positive emotion and so extroverts in many ways are more fun they laugh more they talk more that is not necessarily more fun they're very gregarious they like to hang out at parties they plan parties they tell jokes in fact telling a joke is actually a real marker of of extraversion so how many of you here tell jokes yeah how many don't okay okay so um how many of you tell good jokes anyway so yeah um also one of the behavioral markers we found for extroversion was that extroverted people also tell dirty jokes so how many of you are capable of that particular act yeah so you in particular you all right so yeah so the assertiveness element of extroversion that's I guess sometimes that's the part of extroversion that maybe isn't so much fun because extroverts can be very verbally dominant one of the things I do in my fourth year undergraduate at personality seminar is I split the group into introverts and extroverts so because I often have the class do debates and if if you put an extrovert in with a bunch of introverts and there's a debate so there's one extrovert here and three introverts and one extrovert here and three introverts then the two extroverts have the debate and the introverts don't say anything and introverts are interesting because it's not like they don't have anything to say because if you point at an introvert and say do you have something to say then they'll say something that they're thinking but they'll very rarely especially if they're very introverted they'll very rarely offer it spontaneously and so if I found that if I divide the class into two groups of introverts and two groups of extroverts and then I have them do like a four-way debate the introverts will talk like mad in in their in their own group you know because they're not being overpowered by an extrovert and the extroverts seem to have a much lower threshold for for speaking it doesn't take much of a stimulus to get them talking or they have a real impulse to talk like my daughter is super introverted or extroverted it's impossible for her to think something without saying it so you know which is not always to her benefit but I but I I extroverts have a real impulse to speech you know and whereas introverts they have to be sort of prodded into it extroverts also seem to be sort of um what would you call it energized by social interactions you know they'll go to a party and they get more and more and more energy whereas an introvert will go to a party and it's like they'll be there for an hour and then they've had enough people and they want to go home and sit in the room and recharge and it isn't exactly we really don't have any idea why that is but it seems to be a pretty reliable marker of the difference between the two groups here's some what um let's see yeah here's some items so you guys can do a quick Big Five on yourselves and I'll tell you the upside and downside of it so if you're orderly you follow a schedule how many of you follow a schedule okay how many of you don't okay so one thing I would recommend is that you do and I'll I'll tell you why like intelligence is a very good predictor of academic Prof performance and there's not a lot you can do about your intelligence I mean you can squander it but it's very difficult to improve it conscientiousness well it's a trait too so it's hard to work on but we know that conscientious people get better grades and it's reliable and it's a powerful effect and so if your time use is organized then the probability that you're going to be successful is very high so one of the things you might think about is make friends with a calendar like Google Calendar or something that and I can tell you some tricks about that because really it is important like and I'm not kidding around about this if you're low in conscientiousness it's really going to trip you up as you walk through life there's not very many advantages to it that I've been able to see and I'm not assuming that just because you don't follow a schedule you're low in conscientiousness but it is one of the items that Mark it um the only Advantage I've seen so far to being unconscientious is that if you become unemployed it doesn't bother you as much and I mean that that actually turns out to matter in some situations so like you know if a big company has to shed 50% of its employees it's the conscientious people are going to suffer themselves to death for it and the unconscientious people they're not going to care anyways because they weren't working anyways so doesn't matter if they have a job or not so here's one way of thinking about making use of a schedule often people are afraid of schedules because they think of them as a trap you know you make a schedule and it's like this little prison that you have to live inside and you know and all doing in your schedule is putting down things you have to do or should do and so you know there's not a lot of fun in that and so not only is it a trap or a prison but it's kind of an unpleasant one but a way to work with the schedule in a lot more sophisticated way is to to think well I'm going to plan the next week say because you plan it day by day but we'll take the week as the unit level of analysis and think well I'd like to plan a week I'd like to have and then your schedule all of a sudden becomes a tool for increasing the quality of your life and that's a whole different issue you know because you might think what what's the emotion that you suffer assuming you suffer one of these emotions if you have an essay that's due and you're not doing it like would you regard that as a pleasant emotion or unpleasant emotion UNP okay so is there anybody who is disagreeing with a statement that having an essay do or overdo that you're not doing is unpleasant everyone agrees with that okay do you think you can characterize the unpleasantness like what kind of emotion is it guilt it's guilt okay anything else frustration frustration frustration with what you feel like failure like you're unable to yeah so you're sort of frustrated with yourself yeah yeah you need a slap right you think I need a slap and so okay so guilt anything else aniet anxiety Restless restlessness so that's kind of an agitation yeah it's because your body knows you should be doing something but it you know you're not pointing it in the right direction so it's anxiety you're going to fail yeah shame is that reasonable so okay so the reason I was asking you about that is because you know most of the negative emotions are associated with neuroticism but some of them seem to be associated with conscientiousness and the conscientious negative emotions seem to be guilt and shame fundamentally and so Recent research and really recent I only got this paper like a week ago I think it's about four months old seem to indicate that conscientious people feel less guilt but they're more guilt prone so if they don't do something that makes them guilty but they organize their time so they are doing the things they're supposed to do so then they don't feel guilty so anyways back to the schedule so all right you think about your week and you think about your day and you think well how would you improve the quality of a given day or a given week well one of the ways of improving it is to not put yourself into the situation where there are things hanging over your head that you have to feel guilty and ashamed about because that's a very unpleasant way of being and you know if you have an essay that's due in a week and you're procrastinating then the fact that you have to do that essay can ruin the whole week and even when you're doing something that's positive hypothetically it's kind of that horrible kind of positive that you experience when you know that you should be doing something else and so that's when you end up watching YouTube videos about like dancing cats or something like that you know and it's it's a it's at best it's a guilty pleasure it's not a pleasure at all you think like what the hell am I doing watching videos of dancing cats you know but then you know that you're procrastinating and that's low quality very low quality existence so if you use your schedule you can think okay well here's some times that I'm going to do this work and then you can also sort of ask ask yourself about that when you're designing your schedule because you don't want to design a schedule like your Adolf Hitler telling yourself what to do you know because you're not going to comply with it then what you have to do if you're going to design a schedule is you have to ask yourself all right I'm going to set aside some time to study over the next week or to do this essay or whatever it is how much time would I actually spend studying and you know I'm going to go to the library for four hours a day it's like how many of you go to the library for four hours a day you do how much work do you do during those four hours you do that's very impressive is it more than four hours and so what proportion of the time you're spending there do you think is actually efficient H that's good that's good my suspicions are that you're conscientious so that's that's exceptional I mean people usually don't manage that so but you know an hour or two a day might be a worthwhile thing to schedule in and I would say won't schedule in more than that to begin with because then you'll fail and then you'll stop using the schedule and so the other thing you want to do is you want to schedule in things that you want to do and then you want to look at the day or the week and you want think you want to think hey that's a week I'd like to have if I had a week like that it would be good you know I'd be caught up so so that all that negative emotion doesn't have to acrew and I want have done a bunch of things that I'm interested in doing and at the end of the week I'd be in better shape than I was at the beginning and if you treat a SK like that so that what you're using it is to design the days and weeks that you want to have instead of using it as this little you know jail that you have to put yourself in that you're not going to do anyways then you can learn to use them and that's one thing you can do to make yourself more industrious or or uh more conscientiousness more conscientious follow a schedule am not bothered by disord so how many of you people are not bothered by disorder okay okay and how many of you are bothered by disorder yes so some of those of you who are bothered by disorder probably have an eating disorder that would be my guess I'm not going to ask but that would be my guess because one of the things that does characterize people who are who have Eating Disorders is they tend to be very orderly and orderly people tend to be quite sensitive to disgust and disgust seems to be the driving Factor behind Eating Disorders because people who have body dysmorphia or eating disorders tend to be relatively disgusted by what they see as you know inade AES in their own body so orderliness can get out of hand a lot we we have some suspicions that it's may be also associated with authoritarianism in in political viewpoints because conservatives are more conscientious than liberals but specifically they tend to be more orderly so and that doesn't mean orderliness is a bad thing it just means and this is something to think about with regards to all the traits that any trait exaggerated too far starts to become negative so the the big five traits at least in principle don't have any what would you call it intrinsic moral value and that's partly because too much of a good thing seems to turn very rapidly into a really bad thing so having a healthy personality seems to be more like something like the balance between the different traits and maybe also something like your ability to increase the breadth of your traits you know so maybe if you're like hyper orderly one of the things that would be good for you to learn is to not be hyper orderly in every situation all the time it's too rigid so okay so orderly people are bothered by disorder and they follow a schedule and so uh industrious people do not waste their time and they know what they're doing so how many of you people um don't waste your time so two people okay have I played how much time do you waste with you before I have okay that's too bad because I love torturing undergraduates with that game okay so that's another advantage to a schedule you know because it can it can really help you with time wasting and that's something that'll kill you AC kill you over time um how many of you have good goals and you know and know what you're doing yeah so that's better how many of you don't how many of you don't know really what you're doing or where you're going okay okay so okay so that's conscientiousness this is neuroticism volatile people get angry easy and they don't keep their emotions under control that should have been reversed by the way um withdrawal seldom feel blue it's the opposite and filled with or sorry seldom feel blue is the opposite and filled with doubts about things that's seems like more of a depression trait withdrawal so that's a negative emotion Dimension so people reliably differ on the degree to which they experience negative emotion and the degree to which they experience positive emotion and those two things are actually different because the circuitry that operates positive emotion is a particular circuit and the circuits that operate negative emotion are particular circuits and they're not merely opposites so you can be highly neurotic and very extroverted and so that means you're always at parties but you're continually worrying what people are thinking of you so it's people like that are actually quite complicated you know so it's it's it's a complicated uh combination of traits agreeableness polite people respect authority and they do not believe that they're better than others and compassionate people are interested in other people's problems and take time for other people so I'll tell you this after we do it extraversion open people we talked about this already if you're creative you believe in the importance of art you love to reflect on things if you're smart which is sort of the intellect category you're quick to understand things and can handle a lot of information and then extroverted people are assertive they take charge they're able to influence people so they're kind of charismatic and if they're enthusiastic they make friends easily and are easy to get to know um it might be of some interest to you that disagreeable people who are extroverted are narcissistic so because a disagreeable person doesn't isn't particularly polite they don't really care about your feelings and they're very dominant so and uh so if you're like that it would be useful to learn when to be quieter in social situations and how to attend more to other people one of the things that seems quite useful for people who are disagreeable and narcissistic for that matter is to try consciously on a regular basis to do something for someone else it also actually seems to make people who are narcissistic happier to do that interestingly enough okay so I'll just briefly also talk about General cognitive ability this is sort of an excuse me it's an overview of where we're going to head over the next few courses this is a Ravens Progressive matrices test I don't think this one is very difficult although I'm I'm going to look at it before I certainly tell you that because I don't want you to feel bad oh and the answer is there anyway so it actually turns out to be extremely easy so why is seven the right answer okay say that again it has to be the lowest why why does it have to be the lowest ccle and then the squar is at the top right so there has to be there has to be an item at the bottom at the bottom okay and be a little circle and it has to be a triangle why does it have to be a triangle because it's the only um thing missing right because every other row has a triangle so you inferred all that by analyzing the 3X3 Matrix okay the faster you can do that and it's an interaction between speed and complexity you can make these questions much more complex than this one this one's you know reasonably complex but they can get really vicious because maybe there's what two dimensions A variation here there's whether or not it's an oval a triangle and a rectangle and then where the thing is that's it but you could imagine you could make a matrix with like four dimensions of variability and so these tests turn out to be the most accurate tests of General cognitive ability Raven Progressive matrices that's not verbal intelligence it's non-verbal intelligence but um and I can tell you why it is that these tests turned out to be that way later um and I will General cognitive ability is a very good predictor of Life success and it seems to be very much biologically um what would you say biological factors play a large role especially in modern society in determining relative levels of intelligence which is a relatively rough it's a rough fact okay so we'll sum up briefly it looks like there's five basic dimensions of variability that characterize the human personality conscientiousness emotional stability agreeableness openness and extroversion and what we'll do as we progress through the rest of the or at least the next roughly little more than a the third of the classes we'll delineate each of these variables try to understand precisely what they mean see if we can analyze their effect on society and maybe also provide you with the opportunity to get some more insight into the personality traits that you have the exercise the personality self analysis the adjectives that were in there were taken from the big five models and so you know that sort of gave you an opportunity to assess yourself roughly on a big on the big five dimensions and see what you could do to to improve so we'll see you on Thursday