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Episode 20: Personality Talks
117 Plays4 years ago
Grant and Fara discuss the different models of personality and break down some of the major traits. Where do these traits come from? More importantly- can they be changed?
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Transcript
Introduction to Doorknob Comments
00:00:05
Speaker
The best doctor I ever worked with often would say perfect is the enemy of good. Thank you for joining us on doorknob comments, a podcast that we created to discuss all things involving mental health. We take the view that psychiatry is not just about the absence of illness, but rather the positive qualities, presence of health and strong relationships and all the wonderful things that make life worth living.
What is Personality?
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm Dr. Farah White. And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner. Today we will start talking about a complex topic of near universal interest but much confusion, personality. We will discuss what personality is, how it is measured, and how personality can change over time, both across the lifespan and as the result of psychotherapy and other efforts to change.
00:01:14
Speaker
Thanks so much for being
00:01:20
Speaker
or disagree?
Can Therapy Change Personality?
00:01:21
Speaker
I absolutely agree, but I think recently been very interested in, you know, we intended today to talk about what types of change in personality are possible. I think a lot of people come into therapy
00:01:36
Speaker
hoping to make changes, whether it's because they are having interpersonal issues, struggling with work or with romantic relationships. And I guess maybe I think it would be helpful if you could talk about some of the personality traits and then in a follow-up conversation, we can discuss what types of traits are more subject to change.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's a huge subject. I was joking before. I'm pretending actually to be antagonistic, which is one of the... You don't have to pretend that's hard. Well, some things come naturally to certain folks.
00:02:21
Speaker
There's a kind of a way where playfulness is a characteristic of
Openness and Creativity Connections
00:02:26
Speaker
a person. Maybe it goes along with one of the personality traits that's commonly discussed is openness to new experience, creativity, mental flexibility, imagination. But play, of course, is a two-way street. And we all know that if you're teasing someone, it can be quite fun and an expression of affection and sort of a game that people play together.
00:02:48
Speaker
but if it's not mutual it can it can quickly tip over into something else. I was thinking about my kids where my son likes to tease my daughter and she asks him not to but sometimes she goes along with it and I keep trying to make the distinction that by definition play
00:03:05
Speaker
is with the agreement of all the parties involved. But I've been keenly interested in psychology since a young age. And it's one of the reasons why I went into psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but I almost went into psychology in terms of getting a PhD and have always been interested in the research.
Big Five Personality Traits
00:03:22
Speaker
But recently, I was asked to write something like a mini user's guide to personality. So I have immersed myself in it even more
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, so do you want to share with us, is there anything that really stood out to you as something that people should know? It's really kind of a Wild Wild West in a way. For psychologists, the Big Five model is one of the predominant research models. Where did it come from, like come out of?
00:03:49
Speaker
I don't recall who developed it originally. But it's kind of that's kind of a standard thing. Yeah, I should I should look that up. But it's a fairly standard model. It's used in the in the neo approach, which is like a psych testing model. But the big five traits are openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness.
00:04:10
Speaker
and neuroticism. Neuroticism is also emotional instability. So kind of the positive side of neuroticism would be emotional stability. O-C-E-A-N. Even though there are these five traits, and then there's also a model called the hexico, which is the same as the ocean, except the H stands for honesty, humility. But all of those traits have what are called sub facets.
00:04:36
Speaker
And a lot of the research looks at the big traits, the big five or the hexico big six. There's also like a big two, which is, you know, a distilled model. There's something called the general factor, which is kind of your overall personality flavor. But there's no real consensus agreement. People kind of use the one that they find most useful.
00:04:57
Speaker
The O stands for openness to new experience. So what kinds of, I mean, I took this test last night just kind of for fun. What are the kinds of things that you would look at if you want to gauge someone's openness to new experiences?
00:05:13
Speaker
So for openness, and if you look it up, you'll see that they use different labels for the facets. The first one is fantasy. Sometimes that's referred to as imagination, aesthetics, which is also referred to as artistic temperament, feelings, actions, ideas, and values. Would you think that people who have a high degree of
00:05:35
Speaker
openness are the more sort of like either creative or entrepreneurial or like how would you sort of characterize.
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, it's one of the traits that you often see in entrepreneurs, but you also see other traits that go together with that, you know, like extraversion, typically.
Environment's Role in Personality
00:05:53
Speaker
And so, you know, you can't really understand these traits, or more importantly, the facets without sort of seeing the whole picture. And in addition to the loading on the other personality traits, it's also what environment are you in? Someone who's more open to new experience in general is going to be better at divergent thinking.
00:06:12
Speaker
and better at tolerating a lot of diversity. Someone who's lower on openness to new experience is more likely to want to kind of wrap things up and have a clear answer or be high on what they call need for closure, though that also may depend on how conscientious the person is. So if you have someone who's very open and very conscientious, that's going to be very different from someone who's very open but not particularly conscientious.
00:06:41
Speaker
conscientiousness, for example, has underlying facets that are feeling competent, liking order, having a sense of duty or responsibility, striving for achievement, having a high level of self discipline, and being very deliberate. And it's really interesting because sometimes the sub facets are really what determine a behavior. So for example, I was looking at research on what personality facets correlate with infidelity. And typically,
00:07:11
Speaker
conscientiousness is negatively associated. So more conscientious people are less likely to cheat on their partners.
Perfectionism and Conscientiousness
00:07:17
Speaker
But when they broke it down by facet, they found that it was the sense of duty, really, that was leading to the faithfulness. And also people who are less extroverted are less likely to cheat, but particularly the ones who are lower on excitement seeking.
00:07:33
Speaker
because there's something about infidelity that stimulates excitement. But you can be extroverted without being an excitement seeker because extroversion consists of warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, a need for more activity, excitement seeking, and a preference for positive emotion. So there's a lot of different ways to be extroverted.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah, I know that you also have talked a lot or written a lot about perfectionism. And I wonder... I think I wrote two blogs about it. I would characterize that a lot. I've written zero blogs about it. Well, I mean, I'm a dilettante. I'm making fun of myself because obviously there are psychologists who make basically their whole research is about perfectionism.
00:08:21
Speaker
Whereas I'm a generalist, so I get it though. I'm glad to be able to communicate it. There is a relationship because when you were describing the facets of conscientiousness, I felt a little bit, I don't know, anxious because it seems like bordering on perfectionism. Right. That's something that I feel like is the other side of the coin. Well, here's the thing. Most of these traits, some of them seem to be overall positive.
00:08:50
Speaker
you know, correlated with performance, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness. Others, you know, it depends on the context. It's not so bad to be introverted if you're a computer programmer, and it's not bad to be introverted at all. It doesn't mean that you're antisocial or anything like that. Our society, you know, tends to highlight extroversion. So there's also cultural factors. People talk about whether personality is measured too much from a Western point of view. They call it weird. I don't remember what it stands for, but it's like Western
00:09:20
Speaker
educated, industrial, something, something. There's a question as to whether these personality constructs apply to Eastern countries, though a lot of it has been cross-culturally validated. In terms of perfectionism though, I've seen two big models around perfectionism, and sometimes perfectionism, often it causes problems for people, but sometimes perfectionism actually drives high performance, and it does overlap with conscientiousness.
00:09:49
Speaker
So with perfectionism, they talk about self-directed perfectionism, like your expectations for yourself, other directed perfectionism, like thinking others need to be perfect, and then socially prescribed perfectionism, which is sort of like how you were raised and what your culture says. So if you were raised by a kind of a
00:10:08
Speaker
in a very perfectionistic demanding family, you might internalize a feeling that like it's never good enough and you always need to try harder. The other cuts I've seen on perfectionism are there's a distinction made between what are called perfectionistic strivings, like your aspirations and perfectionistic concern or preoccupation. People who have high perfectionistic striving actually tend to do very well.
00:10:33
Speaker
professional athletes do well when they're very perfectionistic and conscientious, but of course they lose out on many other areas of life. But on the other hand, perfectionistic concern can overlap with neuroticism and it's like too worried and it bothers other people and you kind of spin reels. Or what they say is perfect is the enemy of good, right? Perfect is the enemy of good. Yeah, the best doctor I ever worked with often would say perfect is the enemy of good. Yeah.
00:11:02
Speaker
in med school and I would spend a really long time like writing a progress note. You know, the only thing that I had to do that day on rotation was to write a progress note. So I really wanted to make it perfect. Now I want like that one progress note. Yeah.
00:11:18
Speaker
So I really, you know, gave it my all and then the resident would look at the note and he'd be like, oh, this is just, this note is so complete. It's so wonderful. I'm just, I'm so sad that the other services aren't going to get to read it. Why weren't they going to get to read it? Because it was three o'clock by the time everyone had already rounded by the time it got into the chart.
00:11:39
Speaker
Oh, I see. I see. Like you missed the deadline because you were trying to you were having trouble wrapping up the details of the project. Exactly. And so, you know, I was getting bogged down and spending too much time and then didn't really matter how great my note was because no one thought.
Therapy Diagnosis: Importance and Challenges
00:11:56
Speaker
Right. One of the many two blogs that I've written about perfectionism. I also describe what psychiatry calls, you know, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, which is like being rigid and too rule bound and needing to get all the details and having trouble prioritizing and, you know, making choices, being indecisive. It can be quite maddening for other people as well. And that's described as a personality disorder.
00:12:20
Speaker
When people say I'm OCD about it, a lot of times I think they really mean I'm OCPD. Do you discuss personality diagnosis with patients? Is that something you integrate into clinical practice?
00:12:35
Speaker
I don't, sometimes it'll come up just in the form of, well, why am I like this? And then sort of, we can talk about these things organically and sort of link it to whatever might've happened in their childhood or any formative experiences, but I am not really, I don't get that hung up on diagnosis unless I think it's gonna be helpful in some way. Why do you say you don't get hung up on it?
00:13:04
Speaker
There's no reason that my patients need to have an accurate diagnosis. I think for billing purposes, and if you work with insurance companies, certainly you need to sort of give a rationale and a diagnosis and then an appropriate treatment plan. But that's not something that I really think about. And I look at what is going to be the most helpful. And I've found that sometimes it's helpful
00:13:29
Speaker
for people to understand, well, this is a part of your personality, maybe it's disordered, maybe it's not, but it's not your fault that you're this way. Certainly, I look at it from that perspective, but usually, I let them lead the way on that. Yeah. Well, if it's organic, it's good, right? I think so. Like lead is naturally occurring in organic.
00:13:53
Speaker
I was going to go down some Ayurvedic path about mercury, which is also naturally occurring and was considered at one time to be a remedy. But it turns out that they're both neurotoxins, right? Yeah, but mercury has its uses in hat manufacturing, making felt, hence the term mad as a hatter. I agree in the sense that there can be a negative reaction people have to being pathologized.
00:14:17
Speaker
And the feeling that one's personality is diseased is not necessarily a user friendly way to talk about personality for a lot of people, particularly if they are higher in neurotic traits. So they have a tendency to cope with worry or feel negative affect or blame themselves.
00:14:37
Speaker
The facets of neuroticism, for example, which is associated with anxiety and depression clinically, are anxiety, angry hostility, depression, self-consciousness, and in the sense of being sort of painfully self-conscious, not higher self-awareness, though it also can be higher self-awareness, which can be quite useful if properly leveraged, impulsiveness and vulnerability.
00:14:59
Speaker
And impulsiveness is a bad one in the sense that it undermines self-control, which as a trait, self-control, like discipline and conscientiousness is generally useful.
Agreeableness in the Workplace
00:15:12
Speaker
When I talk about personality, I usually just talk about traits, unless I think that there's good reason to identify something as problematic versus like depends what you do with it.
00:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, I want to go back to the facets of the E and the A. Yeah, sure. We talked about extroversion, but agreeableness breaks down into trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness. Tender-mindedness. I've never
00:15:45
Speaker
term, but I like it. Yeah, it's like a sensitivity. I think some of the traits of agreeableness seem to overlap with the honesty, humility dimension on the six factor model, the hexico model. And it's probably worth mentioning those as well, because they're important, because, for example, they predict whether or not someone is going to be deviant in the workplace pretty well.
00:16:06
Speaker
the hexico, the honesty, humility dimension, include a tendency towards sincerity, a sense of fairness, avoidance of greed, and modesty. And in particular, people who have a sense of fairness are less likely to be deviant in the workplace, and I presume elsewhere. So they're less likely to make offensive remarks to co-workers, they're less likely to steal from work, and they're less likely to be late to work.
00:16:32
Speaker
But are people, are they held back in any way? The idea of compliance makes me think of a sort of middle management type of situation. Is it always good to be agreeable? Absolutely not.
00:16:47
Speaker
Well, it depends on the context. In extreme, I think you would see that overlaps with something like what we call dependent personality disorder. Someone who is so agreeable, and there may be other factors like developmental trauma or high levels of neuroticism, someone who's so agreeable that they can't assert themselves.
00:17:06
Speaker
or they think that any kind of interest in their own well-being is pathologically narcissistic rather than a healthy sense of self. I think that's something that women and young women especially in the workforce have to deal with because we're sort of raised to be these like good little girls and
00:17:27
Speaker
anytime, you know, so sometimes speaking up and there's been a lot written about it. There's a really good book that I like to recommend called the likability trap written by Alicia Menendez. I think she's a journalist who was just interested in this topic.
Therapeutic Relationships and Feedback
00:17:43
Speaker
So I think the agreeableness might be something that warrants like
00:17:48
Speaker
further examination if people find that they're just like always okay with everything and they don't feel comfortable standing up with themselves. Some people are just really easy by nature and really flexible about certain things. Like I know there are certain things that really don't bother me and things that bother me a lot.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, where do you draw the line between sort of a trait and a pathological trait? So is excessive agreeableness dependency? And dependency is pretty good, you know, knowing how to depend on other people is survival trait, it helps the group. But in extreme, maybe it becomes one of the pathological personality traits, which are compulsivity, detachment, negative affect, psychoticism, disinhibition, antagonism, and submissiveness.
00:18:32
Speaker
So at what point does being agreeable turn into unhealthy dependency or submissiveness, which would make someone prone to becoming victimized? And then how do you discuss that with someone? Because a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and it's hard to swallow. That's tough feedback to get. Even for someone who's saying, I really want to change. I know I have problems. Tell me what they are and help me out. Even when they're ready, willing, and maybe able.
00:18:59
Speaker
But I do think that that is part of why the therapeutic relationship is so important because people who want to change and come to therapy, you know, really to try to change certain things about themselves, it's important to look at that and to get feedback from someone. I mean, most people, it's good to like your therapist and to feel that he or she likes you too, but that's not always.
00:19:24
Speaker
the case. And there are definitely times where you have to give feedback that's uncomfortable, but it would be even more uncomfortable if this were like a social situation. You know, you can be pissed off at your therapist, but it really doesn't affect anything else in your life.
00:19:40
Speaker
like there are people who think that being quote unquote brutally honest is characteristic of a healthy relationship, but you're speaking to needing to feel safe, you know, first, or I've heard the expression in disaster work, people have to know that you care before they care what you know. And in terms of emotional states, you know, everyone is familiar with positive and negative emotion, but researchers, and this is kind of, it makes sense intuitively, but there's a third emotion, which is social safeness. And if you don't feel socially safe, then
00:20:09
Speaker
any readiness for change is going to be contextualized very differently.
Therapy Models and AI Approaches
00:20:13
Speaker
Now that might be different though than if say you're doing a computer-based assessment where there's not another person on the other side or even doing some kind of you know AI-based therapy where you're not so self-conscious about what the other person thinks about you. There's some evidence that that kind of frees things up or if you're in a cognitive behavioral therapy model
00:20:32
Speaker
where the therapist positions themselves much more as a kind of a nuts and bolts consultant, though the relationship is still important, it's decentered. I think sometimes therapists can worry too much about feelings, which maybe seems ironic.
00:20:47
Speaker
as far as not wanting to, like wanting to protect the patient, you mean? Right, right. If it might lead to some kind of avoidance of addressing a problem, yeah. Yeah, I think there is definitely a time and a place to bring certain things up. But I also think when you talk about like the CBT model or AI or whatever else it is, I sort of look at it like so many people, we're talking about personalities, we're talking about interpersonal
00:21:13
Speaker
relationships that it seems to me, and I know that you have probably a lot more expertise in the AI area, but being able to play out some of these issues real time, like the rupture and the repair and all of that seems like it would be a really important component in enacting some sort of change.
00:21:35
Speaker
I agree. There's different pathways to change and the direct experience with another human being who is well-equipped to navigate those ruptures and those repairs, there's a strong case to be made that that offers something unique. I think generally treatment works well when it's kind of multi-factorial. You try different things together because we don't really have one way of planning treatment that we know will work for a given person.
00:22:02
Speaker
No, but I'm actually curious. I've never asked you this, but in your, you know, when you work with people, do you set like goals and kind of revisit them over the course of treatment? It's a possibility. It's something that I want to have available. I do often talk about personality in structured ways, not necessarily using diagnostic approach, but something more like we talked about today. Like this is how psychologists talk about personality. Yeah.
Can Personality Be Changed Through Intervention?
00:22:29
Speaker
And one of the new things I did find while looking through the research for this article I'm writing is about changing personality traits, which really was fascinating to me. First of all, let's see, who are these researchers? If anyone wants to look it up, the research group is Hudson and Roberts.
00:22:48
Speaker
And first of all, they asked people, they kind of said, here are the five personality traits. Do you want to change any of them? And at least 87 percent of people said they wanted to change at least one of the traits. So the low end was extraversion. Eighty seven percent of people said they wanted to be more extroverted. And ninety seven percent of people said they wanted to be more conscientious. And then they did a couple of studies and they've done a bunch of them to show, well,
00:23:13
Speaker
If you try to change your personality, will it change? The answer was yes. They designed a 16-week intervention where they asked people to rate their personalities based on these traits, define what their change goals were, and then define specific behaviors. They checked in every couple of weeks, saw how they progressed on those specific behaviors, and found that their personalities, at least over that course of four months, did change on those dimensions.
00:23:41
Speaker
And some personality traits change over the course of life anyway, like people tend to get more emotionally stable and they tend to get a bit more agreeable and extroverted. People don't tend to become more open or more conscientious, I think. And some of it is genetic, about half of it is genetic in twin studies. Very, very interesting. And I know we're sort of wrapping up now, but I think
00:24:08
Speaker
What surprised me about what you said is the 16 week intervention, because I think a lot of times in therapy, we allow that process to take years and years. And that, you know, maybe as that research comes down the pipeline and people
00:24:23
Speaker
will come to therapy wanting to change something, the interventions or the treatment plan can look a little bit different. I like how that research might inform some of our treatment. Yeah, it's complicated because obviously it's very effortful. In some sense, you have to be conscientious enough to do that, but it involves deliberate practice and identifying not just goals, but behaviors and the steps that you need to take and then practicing them.
00:24:53
Speaker
So it's very effortful. But it's often not part of therapists approach, at least psychodynamic therapists, where it's more organic and open ended. Well, thanks, I hope.
00:25:04
Speaker
Uh, this was helpful. And if you guys have any more questions about personality, uh, you can feel free to reach out either send us a message.
Podcast Feedback and Disclaimer
00:25:13
Speaker
Hello at doorknobcomments.com or you can follow us on Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please, uh, feel free to rate and review. We would love it. Thanks very much. Happy new year, depending on your listening to this. And I hope your year is going well. If you're listening to it after the new year. Okay.
00:25:42
Speaker
One disclaimer, this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of psychiatry or any type of medicine. It's not a substitute for professional and individual treatment services and no doctor-patient relationship is formed. If you feel that you may be in crisis, please don't delay in securing mental health treatment.