Reading psych

Study Notes

Personality traits predict life outcomes, including mortality, divorce, and success.
Personality traits can change with therapeutic interventions.
Personality traits affect health, relationships, education, and career success.
Social and environmental factors influence health and development along with personality.
Personality traits predict life outcomes better than socioeconomic status (SES).
Personality traits predict outcomes by indirect pathways. Students with higher cognitive abilities achieve higher educational attainment and better job opportunities.
Women are more receptive to aesthetic experiences, scoring higher in warmth (agreeableness) and openness to experience.
Men tend to be more assertive and less open, scoring lower on openness to experience and neuroticism.
Personality traits like agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism (the Big Five) show changes during adolescence and adulthood.
Scores on neuroticism and extraversion tend to decrease with age, while agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience increase until around the 20s.
These trait changes are thought to be related to biology and shared in all humans.
Neuroticism is generally linked to personality disorders.
High extraversion is associated with happiness.
High openness to experience can correlate with social and political liberalism.
Low agreeableness can be associated with substance use disorders.
Conscientiousness is linked to higher job performance.

Personality traits can be changed through interventions.
Emotional stability is the area where personality changes are most evident during therapy.
Patients with anxiety disorders show the most improvement during therapy.
Patients with substance abuse disorders demonstrate less improvement from therapy.
Effects of therapy don't diminish over time, but only a small percentage of people exhibit significant trait changes.