14 DAY TRIAL // According to a Wake Forest University (WFU) psychology professor, it could be that the way you see and interact with others is a clear indicator of your own personality. The expert explains that personal traits such as emotional stability and happiness can be derived from analyzing how positively you view others. Your social attitudes are also easy to derive, the scientist and his colleagues say, as is the way others tend to see you.
“Your perceptions of others reveal so much about your own personality,” says WFU assistant professor of psychology Dustin Wood. The expert, who was also the lead author of the investigation, says that he asked a number of volunteers to name the positive and negative characteristics of just three people they met. Using only this data, the scientist was able to derive a lot of information about the person who performed the initial analysis. Details of the investigation appear in the July issue of the esteemed scientific Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Seeing others positively reveals our own positive traits,” Wood believes. He explains that the WFU group found an interesting association between how positive a test subject looked at the person he or she was analyzing, and how other people looked at the test subjects. The correlations were strongest in the case of positive emotions, the team says, revealing that participants adopting a positive attitude were also more likely to rate themselves as being happier and more emotionally stable than their peers who were not as positive.
Woods also seems to believe that adopting a negative attitude can be linked to an individual's risk of developing a series of personality disorders. “A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively. The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders,” the expert says. Colleagues Peter Harms (the University of Nebraska) and Simine Vazire (Washington University in St. Louis) were coauthors on the study, ScienceDaily reports.