Big five personality traits: Who are you?

Mental Health Training

An individual’s personality traits define how they perceive the world around them. It is a set of characteristics and features that cause them to think, feel, and behave in a particular way.

Personality traits are characteristic of enduring behavioural and emotional patterns rather than isolated occurrences.

Although all aspects of your personality stem from both nature and nurture, many models of personality types attempt to explain why we are the way we are.

People have probably been fascinated by personality traits since the first Homo sapiens roamed the earth. The first profound personality test was created in 1915, during the First World War.

Robert Woodworth’s “Psychoneurotic Inventory” was the forerunner of personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs test.

Such personality qualities seem more consistent over time, being heavily loaded genetically. Five of the most studied factors that genetically influence someone’s personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism.

Whereas, personality traits are the most common way we tend to describe human behaviour in people. According to Goldberg's five factors of personality, OCEAN model. We all have a combination of the five traits.

(Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) or you could use the mnemonic CANOE instead, depending on your nautical preference.

It is important to note that each of the five primary personality traits suggested could represent a range between two polar extremes with the Jungian dichotomy.

For instance, extraversion represents a continuum between extreme extraversion and extreme introversion. In the real world, most people lie somewhere in between.

The five factors are not necessarily traits in and of themselves, but factors in which many related traits and characteristics fit.

For example, the factor agreeableness encompasses terms like generosity, amiability, and warmth on the positive side and aggressiveness and temper on the negative side. All of these traits and characteristics (and many more) make up the broader factor of agreeableness.

For example, those with the extraversion trait are described as outgoing, talkative, and gregarious. Conversely, introversion is a preference for solitary or limited social situations. It’s worth noting, though, that most people are ambiverts - enjoying their own company occasionally and social experiences at other times.

This is a tendency to be reliable, self-disciplined, and organized. Somebody high in conscientiousness may be a perfectionist, stubborn, and obsessed with neatness to an extreme degree, while those at the other end may be careless, undisciplined, and impulsive.

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