Week 11 Personality, Motivation and Emotion

Today’s lecture topic was on Personality, Motivation and emotion.  The main question pondered on this topic was Why do different people have different motivational and emotional states even in the same situation?  As put by James Neill: some people may go to a party and consider it a really fun experiences, where as other individuals may find this type of social situation to be very distressing and avoid it.  The differences in treatment of situations, such as parties, can be attributed to personality traits.   Traits determine how people react to certain situations.  As outlined by Reeve (2009) people are usually categorised as either sensation seekers or sensation avoiders.  Seeking/avoiding can be appreciated by either a continuous spectrum or distinguished by two categories, you are either one or the other.  In consideration of most labels that are attributed in psychology I prefer the notion of spectrums rather than attaching a distinct label.

Research has indicated that there are five main personality traits called The Big Five these being Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Openness.  The table below gives a basic outline of each. 

The most important factors are Extroversion and Neuroticism.  This is because they have been linked to happiness.  It is thought that those who are deemed as very happy are higher in extraversion and lower in neuroticism and those who are less happy are higher in neuroticism and lower in extraversion.  As I heard this statement I thought, well may as well give up life now as I’m an introvert and thus will never be happy! But this is not true, as I find things in my life that make me happy.  Reading the text book further it indicates that there are two types of happiness – hedonic and eudaimonic.  Hedonic is what most people think of as happiness where as eudaimonic concerns self realisation, ie engaging in meaningful pursuits and doing things that are worth while.  This is what happiness means to me.  This makes me think of my friend who is in Sales, we were discussing depression one day and he said that he doesn’t understand how anyone can suffer depression as he doesn’t let anything upset him.  I suspect that he would be high on extraversion and would generally be always happy.  Neuroticism and introversion may have many negative connotations attached to them, but what about all the great things that neurotic or introverted people do or are! Maybe neurotic/introverted people are more intelligent or more creative!

Whilst on holidays recently I was reading a book on happiness, called The Happiness Trap (Harris, 2007).  Harris discusses that happiness is not an emotion that should be constant, which most people think, like most emotions such as sadness, anger or fear it comes and goes.  People may misconceive that if they are not happy all of the time then something must be wrong with them. Harris certainly makes some interesting points, but his book is definitely aimed at pursuing happiness through eudamonic menas, thus it is aimed at helping introverts and neurotics.

Arousal

Arousal level is the function of how stimulating the environment is.  Performance is best when arousal is moderate, if arousal is too low then people seek to increase arousal levels as it assists in increasing performance.  If arousal levels are too high then people become distressed and anxious and may try to decrease arousal levels.  An interesting study was conducted by Heron to determine what under-arousal would do. Prolonged underarousal conducted in a sensory deprivation experiment had many detrimental effects such as inability to think clearly, hallucinations, decline in problem solving abilities and not surprisingly irritability.
In our tutorial we did some surveys on sensation seeking.  Surprisingly my sensation seeking was quite high. I found this surprising because I am an extrovert and do not consider myself a high risk taker.