I'm making an announcement today, and I suppose you might regard it as an advertisement

So I'm warning you to begin with because I don't want you to waste your time if you're not

interested in listening to a description of the newest thing that we've created so we

Just put up a website called understand myself calm, and it's a personality assessment for individuals

And it's based on a personality model that was developed in my lab about

Ten years ago by dr. Colin D. Young and

Lean dr. Lena quilty dr. De young is now a professor at the University of, Minnesota

And it was based on some ideas that I had been developing with another former student of mine dr.

Daniel Higgins who's a partner with me and this enterprise along with my former graduate supervisor dr. Robert Peel from McGill University?

It's based on the Big Five personality model which measures extraversion

which is a positive emotion dimension and is associated with gregariousness and

enthusiasm and assertiveness and sociability and that sort of thing and

A trait called neuroticism which is basically negative emotionality

Which is associated with a proclivity towards anxiety and emotional pain?

Agreeableness which is compassion and politeness and so agreeable people are I would say broadly speaking rather maternal in their orientation

They tend to care more for others than for themselves

They're more cooperative than competitive whereas so-called disagreeable people are more competitive and more

Brusque I would say and perhaps more straightforward and more able to stand up for themselves as well

Conscientiousness is another one of the dimensions. That's orderliness and industriousness and

the last dimension is opens to experience which is a combination of interest in ideas, which is often known as intellect and

Interest in aesthetics and which is associated

let's say with creativity and that's the dimension that's also most highly correlated with IQ we developed the big five aspect scale in an

Attempt to take the big five so that's extraversion neuroticism agreeableness conch justice and openness to experience

Which are the canonical dimensions of personality?

We developed the big5 aspect scale in order to break down those big five traits each of them into their two most

Statistically robust sub components and we call those aspects

And that's actually become a pretty popular personality model the scientific paper which announced that

statistical division has accrued about

750 citations which is an awful lot of citations by the way for a scientific paper it makes it into a kind of classic

Especially because it's only also only had ten years to accrue

Citations and a citation is when some other scientist refers to the paper in one of their papers by the way

anyways

I've been working over the last couple of years to generate really detailed

personality reports on each of the big five traits and the ten aspects at about seven different levels of

Specificity ranging from extremely low to extremely high, and we think we've produced what might be the most comprehensive and accurate

Personality reports that are currently available you answer a hundred questions in order to complete the personality survey

The questions themselves are actually public access or you could call them open source

They were derived from Lew Goldberg's IP IP international personality item pool

They're the consequence of many many decades of attempts to

Define a set of phrases that most

comprehensively and also most concisely captures the variation in human personality and

So you can find those questions many places on the line, but the reports themselves and the comparison sample of approximately

10,000 people are

Proprietary and constitute the central element of value in in our offering essentially and what we're hoping is that people can use this

personality test site to develop a much deeper understanding of themselves so that they know what they're like especially compared to others and

That they can also compare themselves to anyone else for example who might have taken the test and see the thing about

Personality is that the differences between people actually run quite deep

There's a lot of individual variability, so there are people who are extreme extraverted

They want to spend every moment of their time

Socializing with other people and there are people who are very introverted, and they want to work alone

And they find interactions with with large groups of people or even small groups sometimes quite tiring

And they have to spend a lot of time recovering they tend to be much more quiet. They're not necessarily

Shy because that shyness is more

Consequence of variation on the second dimension neuroticism and so people are high in neuroticism I feel much more anxiety and emotional pain

per unit of uncertainty and stress than people who are very low in neuroticism who are

Often known as emotionally stable and who tend to be quite imperturbable

Agreeable people as I mentioned before are warm and compassionate and and very much care for other people

but are also likely to be taken advantage of and to feel a certain amount of resentment whereas disagreeable people are tough and straightforward and

competitive and out for victory, but can also be somewhat self-centered and harsh and then

Conscientious people are hardworking and dutiful conscientiousness is a really good predictor of long-term life success especially in

Academic attainment where it's second only to IQ and also in managerial and administrative

jobs that require attention to detail and a fair bit of

Responsibility let's say and routine work

Open this to experience

That's the creativity dimension and some people are extremely high and openness to experience

And they want to do nothing but discuss ideas and and spend their time in creative and artistic pursuits

And other people are more conservative because low openness is associated with conservatism

And they're not really interested in novel ideas, and they don't think abstractly that often

And they're they're not out for new experiences or flights of fantasy or imaginative

Exercises or any of that thing there are a lot more concrete and practical

Now the reports that we've prepared not only provide you with information about all of the aforementioned big five traits

They also break each one down into its dual aspects. So there's actually 15 different sources of information

that are contained in the reports and so for extraversion you get a

Description of the degree to which you're assertive, which means forthcoming let's say in public and willing to put your opinions forward

And enthusiasm which is a more pure marker of positive emotion and the capacity to look forward to and enjoy

events and situations

Spontaneously and with neuroticism you learn about the trait aspects

withdrawal and volatility and withdrawal is the tendency to be

Stymied or or stopped. Let's say by fear to be frozen in some sense like a prey animal and

Volatility is an aspect

That's associated with irritability and the tendency to be easily rubbed the wrong way

Let's say and to react emotionally to that and then for agreeableness

There's two aspects and one is compassion, which means pretty much what it says

it's the ability to embody the feelings of others and to react in a caring manner to that and

politeness which seems to be something like

respect for authority and social conventions

and so one of the things you see for example is that liberals are higher in compassion and

Conservatives are higher in politeness even though. They're both

Aspects of trait agreeableness conscientiousness breaks down into two aspects as well, which are quite interesting

One of them is industriousness which is associated with diligent hard work

and the ability to stay task focused without distraction and to work hard and

orderliness which seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity and which is a pretty good predictor of

conservative belief

As it turns out that some elements of conservative belief are associated with higher than normal levels of or higher than average

Let's say levels of disgust sensitivity and the final trait

Division in two aspects is that of openness to experience and it can be divided into openness proper?

Which is essentially a dimension of creativity and aesthetic sensitivity so preference for engagement?

activities that are associated say with fiction or drama or art and

intellect which is an index of interest in ideas and

Abstraction and philosophical concepts and that sort of things so the report produces a very high resolution

Representation of personality and there are very interesting

Differences at the aspect level that are worth

Concentrating on we try to develop a personality test that isn't designed to make you feel good yourself

Although it might you know it depends on your personality but to give you the most accurate and straightforward description of who you are

That's possible so that you can use the genuine information. That's provided in order to maybe organize your life also

understand the difference between

Yourself and other people because you know we often think that the reason that we don't share the same viewpoint is because we have differences

of opinion

but it actually goes a lot deeper than that because

You're very

Perceptions are dependent on the variability in your personality and so it isn't only that people differ in their opinions they differ very much in

How they see the world how they actually perceive the world because your personality

Constitutes a kind of template or filter through, which you organize your perceptions and so

It's very important to understand that there is substantial

Personality variability in the world and that you're often talking with people who see things differently

Than you and a good example of that is the divide between

let's say left-leaning people and right leading people because the left-leaning people tend to be very high and openness to experience and

Relatively low in conscientiousness especially in the aspect of orderliness whereas the conservative types tend to be very high in

conscientiousness especially orderliness and

Relatively low and openness and so those are fundamentally different

Orientations in the world and you could say that the more conservative types the more right-wing types

Are much more concerned with the preservation of tradition and tend to believe that things that have been done the?

Tried-and-true manner in the past are the most reliable

Whereas the people who are on the Left who are more radical are more concerned with the fact that?

The environment shifts radically and rapidly and unpredictably and so we have to be willing to shift with it and so

Those are both valid viewpoints because every element of lived experience has an orderly element and a chaotic element

Let's say and you have to be prepared for both and the purpose of

straightforward political dialogue between people of different personality types is to help determine on an ongoing

Basis how much we should be relying on tradition and how much we should be attempting to transform ourselves

and there's no permanent solution to that problem because things stay the same and

And they do that at different rates at different times so dialogue is unbelievably important

Which by the way is why I'm such an advocate

Let's say for free speech because it's the mechanism that keeps people of different types speaking instead of fighting, so it's really important, so

Anyways the website is called understand myself calm

And you can go there and sign up for the personality test it'll be delivered to you pretty much immediately

After you fill out the questions each question is posed as a phrase

Take you about 15 minutes to

complete the questions

you can only do it once and the reason for that is is that the

Norms that we compared you against so that would be the self reports of the 10,000 other people

Against whom you're compared they were only allowed to do it once and so we have to maintain

Stringent control over that to maintain the validity of the test, and I would say don't do it when you're hungry

Don't do it when you're tired

Don't do it when you're feeling down or in a bad mood about yourself or feeling

Self-critical and don't do it when you're likely to be interrupted or distracted you want to take it seriously

And you want to think about your answers now you're supposed to answer as you are typically not as you'd like to be

And you know you don't want to be either too hard on yourself, or too

good to yourself you want to be as accurate as possible because then you'll benefit most from the

feedback and

Then the last thing I would say is that we've some of you know about this already

but we've also developed a set of interventions called self authoring and that's available at self authoring calm and

What self are thering can help you do is?

reconfigure certain elements of your behavior and perhaps over the long run your personality so

the self authoring suite helps you write an autobiography and and detail out the

Both positive and negative experiences of your past so that you can capitalize on the positive

experiences and figure out how to duplicate them and maybe put the negative experiences to rest and we feel that that's a good way to

reduce

trait neuroticism over the long run and the evidence for that is that writing programs of this sort tend to improve people's mental health and

decrease their negative emotion so and and

stabilize them

So so if you take the personality test and you're not how

for example with your scores on trait neuroticism you feel that you would benefit from some additional emotional stability then the

past authoring program from the self authoring suite might be something worth considering and then

With regards to the other personality traits um the present authoring program at self authoring com is also a personality

exercise of a sort, but what it helps you do is

Center on your

Virtues and your faults using a Big Five model again so that you can identify

What's good about your personality and figure out how to capitalize that on that in the future and so that you can identify?

Where your major weaknesses are and figure out how to rectify those and so that's useful for general personality?

work

I would say and then the last one which we've done the most research on is called future authoring and the future authoring program

Helps you think about your life

and we think about it as an adjunct to conscientiousness perhaps over the long run and

Also as an exercise that could increase positive and decrease negative emotion bias by helping you establish your goals and also

Stabilizing your view of the world so in the future authoring program