HANS EYSENCK’S 3 TYPES OF PERSONALITY

Hans Eysenck’s types of personality gives way to the three dimensions of personality that we shall discuss in this post. Hans Eysenck (1916–1997) was born in Berlin, Germany, and emigrated to England in 1934, after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Eysenck planned to study physics at the University of London but was told that he lacked the requisite academic background.

Discouraged, he asked university officials if there was any other science in which he could major. Eysenck recalled, “I was told there was always psychology. ‘What on earth is that?’ I inquired in my ignorance. ‘You’ll like it,’ they said. And so I enrolled in a subject whose scientific status was perhaps a little more questionable than my advisers realised”. More than 40 years later, the highly successful and productive Eysenck was asked if he had ever regretted his career choice. Often, he noted, but admitted that he was resigned to it.

Over the course of a long, productive career, Eysenck published 79 books, including some for the general public, and 1,097 journal articles. At the time of his death, he was the world’s most frequently cited psychologist. He developed several personality assessment devices including the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Maudsley Medical Questionnaire, and the Maudsley Personality Inventory. His work has been pivotal in supporting the role of inheritance in the description of personality.

THE DIMENSIONS OF PERSONALITY

Eysenck and his wife, Sybil (Ph.D., University of London), together developed many of the questionnaires used in their research. The Eysenck Personality Inventory required 12 years of joint research and 20 factor analyses. The result of their efforts is a personality theory based on three dimensions, defined as combinations of traits or factors. The three personality dimensions are as follows.

E—Extraversion versus introversion

N—Neuroticism versus emotional stability

P—Psychoticism versus impulse control (or superego functioning)

Extraversion/ introversion

Neuroticism

People high in neuroticism show greater activity in those brain areas that control the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. This is the body’s alarm system, which responds to stressful or dangerous events by increasing breathing rate, heart rate, blood flow to the muscles, and release of adrenaline. Eysenck argued that in neurotics, the sympathetic nervous system overreacts even to mild stressors, resulting in chronic hypersensitivity.

This condition leads to heightened emotionality in response to almost any difficult situation. Indeed, neurotics react emotionally to events other people consider insignificant. According to Eysenck, these differences in biological reactivity on the neuroticism dimension are innate. People are genetically predisposed either toward neuroticism or toward emotional stability.

Psychoticism

People who score high in psychoticism are aggressive, antisocial, tough-minded, cold, and egocentric. Also, they have been found to be cruel, hostile, and insensitive to the needs and feelings of others. In addition, they are reported to have greater problems with alcohol and drug abuse than people who score low in psychoticism.

Paradoxically, people who score high in psychoticism can also be highly creative. The research evidence tends to suggest a large genetic component. Men as a group generally score higher than women do on the psychoticism dimension. This finding led Eysenck to suggest that psychoticism may be related to male hormones. He also speculated that people who score high on all three dimensions may be apt to display criminal behaviour but cited only modest empirical support for this idea.

In Eysenck’s view, society needs the diversity provided by people characterised by all aspects of these three personality dimensions. An ideal society affords each person the opportunity to make the best use of his or her traits and abilities. However, some people will adapt to the social environment better than others will. The person high in psychoticism, for example, typified by hostile and aggressive behaviours, may become emotionally disturbed, or exhibit criminal tendencies, or channel the aggressive traits into a socially acceptable enterprise such as coaching college football.

THE PRIMARY ROLE OF HEREDITY

To Eysenck, traits and dimensions are determined primarily by heredity, although the research evidence shows a stronger genetic component for extraversion and neuroticism than for psychoticism. Eysenck did not rule out environmental and situational influences on personality, such as family interactions in childhood, but he believed their effects on personality were limited.

His research design involved comparisons of identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins. The studies showed that identical twins are more alike in their personalities than are fraternal twins, even when the identical twins were reared by different parents in different environments during childhood. Studies of adopted children demonstrate that their personalities bear a greater similarity to the personalities of their biological parents than of their adoptive parents, even when the children had no contact with their biological parents. This is additional support for Eysenck’s idea that personality owes more to our genetic inheritance than to our environment.

Cross-cultural research demonstrates that Eysenck’s three personality dimensions have been found consistently in more than 35 nations in America, Europe, Australia, azia and Africa. The confirmation of the same three personality dimensions in diverse cultures is further evidence for the primacy of inherited factors in the shaping of personality.

FACTORS INFLUENCING PERSONALITY

The factors affecting personality we will consider in this section, emerge from the considerations of various theorist of personality. Let us consider the following agents governing our personality.

The Genetic Factor

There is strong evidence that many personality traits or dimensions are inherited. These include the Eysenck’s dimensions of psychoticism, neuroticism, and extraversion.

This is one reason why the trait approach, with its emphasis on the impact of heredity, remains vital today and may be the fastest growing area of personality research. What remains to be determined is precisely how many inherited factors, traits, or temperaments there are.

No matter what number of traits there may be, however, not even the most ardent proponent of the genetics approach argues that personality can be explained fully and totally by heredity. What we inherit are dispositions, not destinies; tendencies, not certainties. Whether our genetic predispositions are ever realised depends on social and environmental conditions, particularly those of childhood.

The Environmental Factor

Every personality theorist acknowledges the importance of the social environment. According to Adler that personality is influenced by our birth order i.e. position in the family relative to our siblings. We are exposed to varying parental and social situations as a function of the extent of the age difference between siblings or whether we have siblings at all. In Adler’s view, these different home environments can result in different personalities.

The culture and time period in which we are reared as well as the vastly different social environments to which boys and girls are exposed as children show their effects on personality. Usually, the female inferiority develops from the way girls are treated in a male-dominated culture. She suggested that women raised in a matriarchal culture might have higher self-esteem and different personality characteristics.

Allport noted that although genetics supplies the basic raw material of personality, it is the social environment that shapes the material into the finished product. Cattell argued that heredity is more important for some personality factors than for others but that environmental factors ultimately influence every factor to some extent.

Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development are innate, but the environment determines the ways in which those genetically based stages are realised. He believed that social and historical forces influence the formation of ego identity.

Maslow and Rogers contended that self-actualisation was innate but recognized that environmental factors could inhibit or promote the self-actualization need. Large-scale societal events such as wars and economic recessions can restrict life choices and influence the formation of self-identity. More ordinary life changes (becoming parents, getting divorced, and changing jobs) can also affect personality.

Our jobs can also influence our personality. High-status jobs are likely to increase our positive emotionality (well-being, social closeness, and feelings of achievement) and decreased in negative emotionality (aggressiveness, alienation, and stress). The researchers concluded that “work experiences have the potential to modify basic personality dispositions” .

Finally, ethnic background and whether we are part of a minority or majority culture, helps determine personality. members of minority groups develop an ethnic identity as well as an ego identity and have to adapt to both cultures. The success of this adaptation affects personality and psychological health. For all these reasons, then, it is impossible to deny the impact of diverse environmental and social forces on personality. The most significant way in which that impact is exerted is through learning.

The Learning Factor

Evidence is overwhelming that learning plays a major role in influencing virtually every aspect of behaviour. All of the social and environmental forces that shape personality do so by the techniques of learning. Even inherited facets of personality can be modified, disrupted, prevented, or allowed to flourish by the process of learning.

Skinner (based on earlier work by Watson and Pavlov) taught us the value of positive reinforcement, successive approximation, superstitious behaviour, and other learning variables in shaping what others call personality, but which he described as simply an accumulation of learned responses.

Many aspects of personality that have scientific evidence to show that they are learned, such as need for achievement. In addition, considerable research has documented that learning will influence self-efficacy (Bandura), locus of control (Rotter), learned helplessness, and optimism versus pessimism (Seligman). These concepts appear to be related to a broader notion: level of control. People who believe they have control over their lives are high in self-efficacy, have an internal locus of control, and are not characterized by learned helplessness (which involves lack of control).

By whatever name self-efficacy, internal locus of control, or optimism, control is determined by social and environmental factors. It is learned in infancy and childhood, though it can change later in life. specific parental behaviours can foster a child’s feeling of being in control. Thus, the notion of control is a learned dimension of personality for which parental behaviour is paramount.

The Parental Factor

Although Freud was the first theorist to emphasise parental influences on the formation of personality, virtually every theorist echoed his views. Recall Adler’s focus on the consequences for a child who feels unwanted or rejected by his or her parents.

Such parental rejection can lead to insecurity, leaving the person angry and deficient in self-esteem. Horney wrote from her own experience about how lack of parental warmth and affection can undermine a child’s security and result in feelings of helplessness.

There is a great deal of evidence showing that children of parents who are described as authoritative (that is, warm but firm in their child-rearing practices) are more competent and mature than children of parents described as permissive, harsh, or indifferent. Researchers have noted that “authoritative parenting is associated with a wide range of psychological and social advantages in adolescence, just as it is in early and middle childhood … the combination of parental responsiveness and demandingness is consistently related to adolescent adjustment, school performance, and psychosocial maturity”.

Considerable research also suggests that praise from parents can promote a child’s sense of autonomy, realistic standards and expectations, competence, and self-efficacy, and can enhance intrinsic motivation to achieve. And just as positive parental behaviours have positive effects on children, negative parental behaviours have detrimental effects.

What happens when parents are not the primary caregivers, that is, when parents share child-rearing responsibilities with day care workers, friends, or family members while they work outside the home? In a national longitudinal survey of more than 15,000 children ages 3 to 12, no significant problems with behaviour or self-esteem were found when the mothers took a job outside the home. The researcher concluded that caregiving by someone other than the child’s mother had no negative impact on the variables studied.

The Developmental Factor

Freud believed that personality was shaped and fixed by the age of 5 and that it was difficult thereafter to alter any aspect of it. We accept that the childhood years are crucial to personality formation, but it is also clear that personality continues to develop well beyond childhood, perhaps throughout the entire life span.

Theorists such as Cattell, Allport, Erikson, and Murray viewed childhood as important but agreed that personality could be modified in later years. Some theorists suggested that personality development is ongoing in adolescence. Jung, Maslow, Erikson, and Cattell noted middle age as a time of major personality change. The questions concerning how long does our personality continue to change and grow, has become a highly complex issue.

A study of 392 U.S. college students over 30 months showed that they became more open, agreeable, and conscientious during that time. The researchers noted, “These results are consistent with the notion that personality changes more in early adulthood than after the age of 30. A study of 32,515 people ages 21–60, conducted over the Internet, showed that conscientiousness and agreeableness increased through early and middle adulthood. Conscientiousness increased most strongly in the 20s; agreeableness increased most strongly during the 30s. A study of 921 people in New Zealand (ages 18–26) showed that personality changes during those years demonstrated an increasing level of psychological maturity.

What these studies confirm is that personality changes as we grow into adolescence and early adulthood (a finding you may already have observed in your own case). All such cultural and personal challenges leave their mark on personality. One personality theorist has suggested that personality can be described on three levels to explain its continuing development in adulthood. These levels are dispositional traits, personal concerns, and life narrative.

Dispositional traits are inherited personality characteristics found to remain stable and relatively unchanging from about age 30 on.

Personal concerns refer to conscious feelings, plans, and goals; for example, what we want, how we try to achieve it, and how we feel about the people in our life. These feelings, plans, and goals change often over the life span as a result of the diverse influences to which we are exposed, such as the examples noted above. All of these situations can mean changes in our feelings and intentions, yet the underlying dispositional traits (such as our basic level of neuroticism or extraversion) with which we confront these life situations may remain relatively unchanged.

Life narrative, implies shaping the self, attaining an identity, and finding a unified purpose in life. We are constantly writing our life story, creating who we are and how we fit into the world. Like personal concerns, the life narrative changes in response to social and environmental demands. As adults, we add to and rewrite our narrative with each stage of life and its differing needs, challenges, and opportunities. In sum, then, this view holds that the underlying dispositional traits portion of personality remains largely constant, while our conscious judgments about who we are and who we would like to be are subject to change. That idea leads to another factor the theorists have considered, that of consciousness.

The Consciousness Factor

Almost every personality theory we have described deals explicitly or implicitly with conscious (cognitive) processes. Even Freud and Jung, who focused on the unconscious, wrote of an ego or conscious mind that perceives, thinks, feels, and remembers, enabling us to interact with the real world. Through the ego, we are able to perceive stimuli and later recall an image of them. Jung wrote about rational functioning, making conscious judgments and evaluations of our experiences. Adler described humans as conscious, rational beings capable of planning and directing the course of our life. We formulate hopes, plans, and dreams and delay gratification, and we consciously anticipate future events.

Allport believed that people who are not neurotic will function in a conscious, rational way, aware and in control of the forces that motivate them. Rogers thought people were primarily rational beings, governed by a conscious perception of themselves and their world of experience. Maslow also recognized the role of consciousness; he proposed cognitive needs to know and to understand.

Kelly offered the most complete theory based on cognitive factors. He argued persuasively that we form constructs about our environment and about other people and that we make predictions (anticipations) about them based on these constructs.

We formulate hypotheses about our social world and test them against the reality of our experience. Based on everyday evidence, it is difficult to deny that people construe, predict, and anticipate how others will behave and then modify or adapt their behaviour accordingly.

Bandura credits people with the ability to learn through example and vicarious reinforcement. To do so, we must be able to anticipate and appreciate the consequences of the actions we observe in others. We visualize or imagine the results of our reinforcements for behaving the same way a model does, even though we may never have experienced those consequences personally. Thus, there is widespread agreement that consciousness exists and is an influence on personality. However, there is less agreement on the role or even the existence of another influence, that of the unconscious.

The Unconscious Factor

Sigmund Freud introduced us to the world of the unconscious, that murky repository of our darkest fears and conflicts, forces that affect our conscious thoughts and behaviours. Psychologists have found some evidence to support Freud’s notion that thoughts and memories are repressed in the unconscious, and that repression (as well as other defence mechanisms) may operate at the unconscious level. Along with the cognitive movement in psychology has come not only an interest in conscious processes but also a renewed interest in the unconscious.

Recent research confirms that the unconscious is a powerful force, perhaps even more pervasive in its influence than Freud suggested. However, the modern depiction of the unconscious is not the same as Freud’s view. Contemporary researchers focus on unconscious cognitive processes and describe them as more rational than emotional.

The rational unconscious is often referred to as the nonconscious, to distinguish it from Freud’s unconscious, his so-called dark cauldron of repressed wishes and desires.

One method for studying the nonconscious involves subliminal activation, in which various stimuli are presented to research participants below their level of conscious awareness. Despite the research participants’ inability to perceive the stimuli, their conscious processes and behaviours can be activated by those stimuli. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from such research is that people can be influenced by stimuli they can neither see nor hear.

Although the unconscious is an ongoing research topic in psychology today, many of the personality theorists who followed Freud ignored it. We may suggest that the emotional unconscious as Freud envisioned it, the startling idea that signalled the formal beginning of the study of personality, remains the least understood factor and still very much what it was in Freud’s time, mysterious and inaccessible.

And so it is with the study of personality, as we have seen throughout this book. There are diverse ways to define and describe personality, and each theory we have discussed has contributed another part of the answer to that vital question. We have spanned the viewpoints from Sigmund Freud and his emphasis on anxiety, the unconscious, and a life of fear and repression to positive psychology and the characteristics of the happy personality. And we have covered many other ideas in between, all of which have added to our understanding. But there are more possibilities to consider, more to be learned, and no doubt new approaches will be presented, new theories as yet unimagined.

Your formal coursework in this field may be ending, but the attempt to understand personality is not. Although it is true that enormous progress has been made in charting personality and detailing the factors that shape it, the challenge for psychologists remains active and dynamic, a thriving area of study. Perhaps the question, what is personality, is the most important of all, for it reflects the attempt to understand ourselves.