Monday, September 18, 2017

NG, Your Personality Explained

3 levels of personality:
  1. having: personality traits and strengths
  2. doing: personal striving, goals we try to accomplish in our daily life
  3. being: life narrative that we tell ourselves and others to communicate who we are.
In my understanding, these 3 level can be interpreted as core elements, approaches, value system.
psychology professors, Todd Kashdan, book” the upside of your dark side”

1. Having

Each level of our personality offers distinct insights into attaining a life well lived.
Big Five (OCEAN), 5 broad classes of personality traits:
  1. openness: tendency to seek out new experience and knowledge
  2. conscientiousness: excellent impulse control, study for test, plan ahead
  3. extraversion
  4. agreeableness: cooperative, empathetic, trusting, modest, avoid conflict and hostility. Sensitive to other’s feeling.
  5. neuroticism
Big Five are linked to certain kinds of behavior and certain life outcomes. But it can’t predict individual responses to any given situation or describe every subtle variation in human personality. They represent broad categories, not individual life histories.
My score is (O:4, C:6.5, E:1, A: 4, N:6)
High scorer in extraversion enjoy social attention and experience strong positive emotions. They are typically active, talkative, more inclined to take on leadership roles at work. A low scorer is usually quiet,content with isolation and more subdued emotionally. Famous introverts include Bill Clinton, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Bill Gates and J.K. Rowling. Introverts don’t necessarily avoid public notice when they have something to contribute. Some people are able to keep their screen personas separate from their quiet personal life.
A low score on neuroticism indicates an even emotional keel; high scorers are worriers, moody and anxious, respond strongly to negative events and constantly doubt their own actions and abilities. High neuroticism scores are a significant risk factor for depression. Neuroticism is linked to divorce.
50% of personality is attributed to genes, 50% comes from the environment.
Success among top executives at for-profit companies is most strongly linked to honesty and integrity.
Across English-speaking countries, the highest-ranked strengths in the adults were consistently listed as kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude, judgment, love and humor.
The more interested students were also more likely to have high self-esteem, to be more optimistic, and to feel more in control of their futures.
Men are more likely to be distressed by sexual infidelity; women by emotional infidelity.
Moral dilemmas: instinct vs cultural conditioning. Taboos: instinct, cultural conditioning, and social class shape how people view forbidden acts. People tend to base their moral judgments on their first, gut reactions, and then to rationalize those judgements later.

2. Doing

sharing your success with others not only reinforces your sense of well-being, but also strengthens your relationships.
what drives you: achievement, power, intimacy, affiliation. Dives vary from person to person in their potency and in how they are expressed.
autonomous drives: we genuinely want for ourselves
controlled/external drive: goals we strive for in order to please others or to ease our shame or guilt.
Striving a goal out of guilt or out of obedience to others is a recipe for stress and failure. Studies show that people who are conflicted between their strivings and their true values have higher levels of depression and more psychosomatic complaints. They are less likely to achieve the goals and more likely to spend time worrying about them.
Employees who use 4 or more of their strengths at work report greater job satisfaction than those who use fewer strengths. However, 30% of workers can name their strengths and 17% believe they are using their strengths at work.
Kids who set personally meaningful goals in school and find new ways to use their signature strengths become more engaged and more optimistic about their education.
Two approaches:
Promotion prevention
success/fail happy/sad calm/anxious
cultural influence individualistic collectivist, avoid disappointing
focus achievement, growth avoid failure
relationships look for matches avoid mismatches
memory remember promotion scenario more clear remember prevention scenario better
Capitalization: sharing a positive experience with someone else provides an added benefit from a good event. It has unexpected positive effects not just for you in the moment, but for your relationships and for your long-term well-being. Communicating a good event boosts self-esteem, keeps the event memorable, and builds social relationships.
Support from a partner in tough times can give mixed signals: we appreciate the sympathy, but the response might make us feel inferior or unable to cope on our own. The simple perception that you have people to turn to in times of trouble provides some protection against the harmful effects of stress.

3. Being

Each of us has a life story that is shaped by our culture but unique in its details.
We see ourselves as a work in progress, a story in the making. Our narratives have turning points, tory arcs, and familiar themes.They find meaning and redemption in our toughest moments.
False memories may be connected to spreading activation: components of memory are stored in association with one another. Human memory is fallible and prone to such constructions. Eyewitness memories are notoriously inaccurate. In a study of guilty verdicts overturned by DNA evidence, one-third of the convictions were based on 2 or more mistaken eyewitnesses.
How to handle negative events? People who distance themselves from a past problem by viewing themselves in the third person are better able to process the issue and less likely to become upset. Framing an event as a story with a separate protagonist apparently, helps us make sense of problems.
Parents who elaborate about emotions, causes, and explanations in stories develop stronger storytelling skills in their children.
Our life stories are important not so much for their autobiographical details (indeed, our memories are typically selective and skewed), but for the meaning we give them. Putting your experiences down on paper — particular if you’ve been going through tough times — is a proven way to make sense of events and to cope with difficult moments. People who write down their life stories typically look for meaning in their histories.
Narrators typically portray themselves as one of two kinds of protagonists in a traumatic event: brave or caring.
A listener’s response has a strong effect on the storyteller. A storytelling session lasted only half as long when the listener was inattentive, and the storyteller regarded her own story as less significant if the listener was distracted.
Because our vision of our life is shaped by cultural expectations, people from different cultures see their lives in different ways. Western adults had more memories of one-time events, their individual roles in and emotional reactions to those events. Chinese adults had more memories of social and historical events and placed more emphasis on their social interactions. 5 events in common: marriage, the 1st full-time job, having children, beginning school, and parental deaths.
Religiosity seems to enhance positive emotions, particularly hope and optimism. A person’s fundamental belief system can lie at the core of his personality. For some people, religion gives life its true meaning.
Image technology shows people who meditate have decreased activity in the superior parietal lobe, which is connected to orientation in space and time. This may account in part for a meditator’s sense of oneness with the world.

4. Well-being and personality

You can’t mold your personality into a completely different shape, but you can build on inner resources of self-control, grit, and self-compassion to achieve a healthier, more satisfying life.
Grit and talent are slightly negatively correlated — perhaps because gritty people work a little harder in order to succeed.
Self-regulation is a uniquely human trait.
Workers who trained in mindfulness meditation reported feeling less anxious and more involved with their work.
The rule that you shouldn’t discuss personal problems when tired seems to hold true as well.
Many of us are driven by the sharp inner voice of self-criticism and competitiveness. Self-compassion can remove the fear of failure and replace it with acceptance and a willingness to try again. Writing a self-compassionate letter to yourself every day can increase happiness for as long as 6 months.
A self-compassion message:
if you had difficulty with the test you just took, you’re not alone. It’s common for students to have difficulty with tests like this.
Psychopaths are characterized by unusually shallow social emotions, such as guilt or shame. They are impulsive, glib, insincere, and prone to blame others for their actions. They may have a low tolerance for frustration and may break out in violence when thwarted.
Psychopathy has been linked to both childhood abuse and biological genes. Many abusers were themselves abused as children, and they may have learned to bully others in order to gain power or control.
Having similar values is more predictive of a satisfying romantic relationship than having similar personalities.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.