#mbtiideas

"My posture emerges from the most important (and most politically uncongenial) research discovery in the field of personality of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

This rock-solid finding disillusioned an entire generation of environmentalist researchers (me included), but it is true that most personality traits are highly heritable, which is to say that a person may have genetically inherited a strong predisposition to sadness or anxiety or religiosity.

Dysphorias often, but not always, stem from these personality traits.

Strong biological underpinnings predispose some of us to sadness, anxiety, and anger.

Therapists can modify these emotions but only within limits.

It is likely that depression, anxiety, and anger come from heritable personality traits that can only be ameliorated, not wholly eliminated.

This means that, as a born pessimist, even though I know and use every therapeutic trick in the book about arguing against my automatic catastrophic thoughts, I still hear the voices frequently that tell me, “I am a failure” and “Life is not worth living.”

I can usually turn down their volume by disputing them, but they will always be there, lurking in the background, ready to seize on any setback. (…)

So one thing that clinical psychology needs to develop in light of the heritable stubbornness of human pathologies is a psychology of “dealing with it.”

We need to tell our patients, “Look, the truth is that many days—no matter how successful we are in therapy—you will wake up feeling blue and thinking life is hopeless.

Extraversion but not Depression Predicts Reward Sensitivity: Revisiting the Measurement of Anhedonic Phenotypes

"Neuroticism is strongly related to depression and most other forms of psychopathology, and the negative affect and sensitivity to punishment characterizing Neuroticism is a key component of depression.

Nonetheless, depression is also related to lack of reward responsiveness, reduced positive emotionality, and social withdrawal, all of which are components of low Extraversion.

"In fact, Little and some others say the key to a healthy personality may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality from one situation to another.

“The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something, it’s more like rigidity across situations,” Kathryn Paige Harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me.

A good personality, in this view, is one that can rise to the occasion.

It’s someone who can deliver the maid-of-honor speech and arrive at her appointments on time, even if she isn’t a “natural” extrovert or conscientious type.

A person like this, who is willing to flex her personality to meet the demands of the moment, is called a “high self-monitor,” according to psychologists.

A “low self-monitor,” meanwhile, is someone who remains true to themselves, no matter what situation they’re in.

(The lingo is a bit confusing, but you can think of a high self-monitor as constantly scanning themselves— monitoring—to be sure they’re saying and doing whatever’s expected of them.)

A high self-monitor who is introverted, when faced with a big work presentation, might practice it relentlessly for weeks, trying to overcome her natural shyness.

An introverted low self-monitor might, in the same situation, decline to give the presentation at all.

Being a high self-monitor allows you to shape-shift when necessary, without rearranging your entire personality.

I found this to be an uplifting take on personality change: that it can be temporary, but still valid.

"If we look at how they process their experience — at whether they prefer the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic channel for their mental processing — we see that they typically prefer the visual channel.

This is the channel that is the least connected to the physical body as well as the one in which mental processing happens the fastest.

As a result, people who do this survival pattern have a fast rhythm of thought, movement, and speech.

They can rapidly process new information, work out all the possibilities and options, and see the implications.

They are able to connect the dots and get to conclusions faster than other people.

However, if they don’t lay out how they got to a conclusion, others who aren’t able to follow them are likely to become frustrated and impatient.

This rapid thinking also leads them to talk faster than the average person.

From the outside, it often looks like the motor inside them simply runs faster than it does in most people. (…)

The mind chatter of those caught in the leaving pattern is “Gotta get away,” and when they go into pattern, their attention does actually go away from their body and from personal, present moment experience.

This means that they lose touch with the sensations in their own body that would help them figure out “what I feel” and “what I want.”

It also disconnects them from the resources that could help them get out of their distress — both the resources already within them and the resources of others that they could ask for help.

For them, however, the internal experience is not that they themselves went away, but that the resources went away.

"The horizon is the line of awareness.

It is so according to the most obvious logic of symbolical significance; for it differentiates the two most fundamental types of awareness.

Above the horizon is everything that can be perceived by the senses; below the horizon is the realm of this interior awareness, which Jung rightly calls “intuition.”

Intuition is the faculty of awareness through which we perceive inner facts. Sensation is awareness of the not-self, of others.

As the Ascendant is the seed-point of the lower hemisphere, it takes on necessarily the meaning of pure self-awareness; the Descendant, being the seed-point of the upper hemisphere, is the symbol of awareness of others.

Thus intuition and sensation are seen as two complementary factors, related respectively to East and West.

One becomes aware of one’s own existence as an “I” by an interior process which is intuition, whereas sensation is the result of an awareness of outer causes attributed to sense-impressions.

A true sensation is not a mere impression, but is rather the result of the combination of a sense-impression and of our particular sense of self.

A photographic plate receives impressions similar to those received by our retina; but the visual sensations which correspond to these impressions contain, besides the latter, our own particular capacity to react to stimuli.

A cybernetic theory of autism: Autism as a consequence of low trait plasticity

"The Big Five personality traits were originally thought to be orthogonal and the highest level of the hierarchy of traits, but they have proved to show a regular pattern of correlations that reveals two higher-order factors, or metatraits, above them.

Stability represents the shared variance of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and low Neuroticism, and Plasticity represents the shared variance of Extraversion and Openness/Intellect.

CB5T asserts that these two dimensions correspond to the two most fundamental requirements for a cybernetic system to survive in a changing or unpredictable environment.

When faced with unpredictability, goal-directed adaptive systems must have (1) sufficient stability to resist disruption and maintain effective goal pursuit, and (2) sufficient plasticity to adapt their functioning to new conditions.

The unpredicted or unknown is unique as a class of stimuli because it is innately both a threat and an incentive reward, and Stability reflects the necessity of dealing with the threat posed by the unknown, whereas Plasticity reflects the necessity of dealing with its promise.

Although Stability and Plasticity may seem opposed semantically, they are in fact complementary and in dynamic tension with each other.

Research using multiple informants for optimal measurement of the Big Five indicates that the metatraits are uncorrelated in the population.

One must be sufficiently stable in unpredictable situations to be capable of exploration and adaptation, and one must be capable of adapting to the unknown to remain stable over time.

“The opposite of stability is not plasticity but instability, and the opposite of plasticity is not stability but rigidity”. (…)

The first premise is that Plasticity exists early in life (i.e., not only in adults) as a trait reflecting inter-individual variability in the tendency to explore and generate new adaptations.

The second premise is that the development of almost all psychological competencies depends on cybernetic processes directed toward exploration of the unknown.

If these two premises are true, then an extremely low tendency to explore the unknown (corresponding with low Plasticity) could alter the development of a wide range of competencies in a predictable way. (…)

One theory of ASD that emphasizes the role of diminished motivation for social interactions is social motivation theory (SMT).

This promising approach inverts the direction of causality in well-known cognitive models of ASD (e.g., the Theory of Mind model; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), which have traditionally argued that social motivation deficits stem from more fundamental deficits in social cognition.

Instead, SMT argues that a radically decreased level of social motivation and attention during sensitive stages of development will deprive a child of important social inputs that are necessary for developing social cognitive abilities. (…)

In contrast to SMT, however, positing a deficit in Plasticity does not necessitate that people with ASD are entirely disinterested in other people or incapable of affiliative feelings (which are associated with Agreeableness as well as Extraversion in the Big Five).

Rather, they are deterred by the unpredictability that lies in the process of engaging with people to form relationships and build a set of social adaptations, because they do not find the unpredictability sufficiently rewarding to counterbalance its simultaneously threatening quality.