Friday, December 26, 2014

100 National Geographic Personality Facts

  1. Your personality at 3 years old predicts your personality at age 26.
  2. Opposites don't attract: In general, people prefer mates with similar personality traits.
  3. Happy people are more likely to help people in need.
  4. Machiavellianism, a manipulative personality style, is measured in units of Machs.
  5. Studies show that people with high self-esteem believe they are more popular than they actually are.
  6. When they are depressed, women are more likely to cry; men are more likely to become aggressive.
  7. People can accurately judge a stranger's personality based on a Facebook profile.
  8. Animals ranging from chimpanzees to fishing spiders demonstrate distinct personalitites.
  9. In an experiment on a college campus, zero women agreed to have sex with a stranger who approached them; 75 percent of men agreed.
  10. More than 500 different words describe emotional states.
  11. In one study, people who were emotionally stable (low in neuroticism) had the strongest immune responses to hepatitis B vaccine.
  12. People high in neuroticism have difficulty telling positive stories about themselves.
  13. Babies begin to exhibit a self-concept, as measured by recognizing themselves in a mirror, at 18 months on average.
  14. Extraverts tend to seek out songs with heavy bass lines.
  15. Close to 20,000 adjectives in the English language describe personality traits.
  16. In one experiment, people who score high and low in extraversion were shown pictures of puppies while receiving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). High-scoring people showed more brain activity than low scorers.
  17. People who score high on openness measures have more vivid dreams than others, and they are more likely to remember their dreams.
  18. A study of U.S. regional variations in personality traits identified the most conscientious state as Florida.
  19. People who do volunteer work typically score high on measures of both agreeableness and extraversion.
  20. Scoring high on neuroticism scales is not the same as being neurotic. To psychologists, neurosis is an old-fashioned term for a mental disorder such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
  21. Upbringing does affect religious and political beliefs as well as health habits. Children are likely to reflect their parents' attitudes, as well as their smoking and drinking habits.
  22. Studies indicate that success among top executives at for-profit companies is most strongly linked to honest and integrity.
  23. Strengths are genetically linked, particularly between father and son and mother and daughter. Parenting also affects some strengths such as love of learning.
  24. After 9/11, American respondents showed increased strengths of hope, faith, and love.
  25. Northern Europeans born in cold months score higher on sensation seeking than those born in warm months.
  26. In men, but not in women, extraversion increases with physical size.
  27. Children as young as five make firm moral judgments.
  28. The propensity to marry or to stay single is strongly heritable.
  29. From adolescence to young adulthood, men's self-esteem increases and women's decreases.
  30. Studies show that birth order has little effect on personality, although it does affect family dynamics.
  31. North Dakota has more extraverts than any other state.
  32. Forgiveness is more characteristic of people who score high on the agreeableness and emotional stability scales.
  33. Men are more likely to be distressed by sexual infidelity; women by emotional infidelity.
  34. Brain scans of people contemplating the trolley problem show that the "fat man" scenario evokes activity in a part of the brain that governs emotional conflict resolution.
  35. During the two World Wars, hard-pressed Germans ate dog meat. Their name for it translates as "blockade mutton."
  36. The belief that you can definitely do what you set out to do is known as self-efficacy.
  37. Psychologist Abraham Maslow theorized that needs form a hierarchy, from most to least basic: physiological (such as the need for food), safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
  38. Power-motivated people experience higher blood pressure and increased muscle tone when they are challenged for dominance.
  39. U.S. presidents with a high need for affiliation were more likely to be involved in scandals.
  40. People who receive supportive responses from their partners send out more positive e-mails afterward.
  41. Women who are more motivated by power tend to have more children.
  42. People who score high in the need for affiliation have stronger immune systems than others do.
  43. Bosses with a high need for power are more susceptible to flattery from underlings.
  44. A study showed that bowlers who rarely smile while facing the pins, despite results, often smile when facing their companions.
  45. People who have internal conflicts between the goals they truly want and those that are imposed upon them are more likely to have stress-related illnesses.
  46. Farmers with a high need to achieve are more productive than other farmers are.
  47. Many people suffering from Huntington's disease cannot recognize an expression of disgust.
  48. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S.-Soviet communications contained strong power imagery in the early stages and more affiliation imagery in the later stages.
  49. Employees who use for or more of their strengths at work report greater job satisfaction than those who use fewer strengths.
  50. People who score high on neuroticism scales are more likely to say that the process of reaching their goals is stressful and usually ends in failure.
  51. Promotion-oriented people approach new relationships by looking for matches; prevention-oriented folks try to avoid mismatches.
  52. When shown a vague object in a phone, promotion-oriented people come up with more explanations for what it might be than prevention-oriented people do.
  53. Women who had positive emotional expressions in their college yearbook photos reported greater well-being and more satisfying marriages 30 years later.
  54. The simple perception that you have people to turn to in times of trouble provides some protection against the harmful effects of stress.
  55. Children who are blind from birth have the same facial expressions as those who can see.
  56. Eyewitness memories are notoriously inaccurate. In a study of guilty verdicts overturned by DNA evidence, one-third of the convictions were based on two or more mistaken eyewitnesses.
  57. People with strong power motives create narratives with themes of agency, such as mastery and status.
  58. Famous events leading to flashbulb memories include the Lincoln, Kennedy, and Olof Palme assassinations; the explosion of the shuttle Challenger; and the O.J. Simpson trial verdict.
  59. Parents who elaborate about emotions, causes, and explanations in stories develop stronger storytelling skills in their children.
  60. Psychologists find that narrators typically portray themselves as one of two kinds of protagonists in a traumatic event: John Wayne (brave) or Florence Nightingale (caring).
  61. People with depression have vaguer memories than other people. They often merge similar events into one generic occurrence.
  62. People tend to recall the most events from the period between the ages of 10 and 30.
  63. Religiosity seems to enhance positive emotions, particularly hope and optimism.
  64. Studies of children between the ages of 3 and 12 show that they have an intuitive theism that spurs them to see the hand of supernatural agency in the natural world.
  65. Grit and talent are slightly negatively correlated-perhaps because gritty people work a little harder in order to succeed.
  66. Self-regulation is closely linked to the personality trait of conscientiousness.
  67. When their willpower is depleted, people with low self-esteem become even more negative about themselves than usual.
  68. People whose mothers valued academic success, and who were later primed with the concept of mother before a test, performed better on that test.
  69. Terror management theory is a study of the basic conflict between our desire to live and our awareness of death.
  70. Money is a poor predictor of well-being. Above the poverty level, income does not correlate with happiness.
  71. There are more male psychopaths than female psychopaths.
  72. About 40 million American adults have an anxiety disorder.
  73. Self-regulation is a uniquely human trait.
  74. Workers who trained in mindfulness meditation reported feeling less anxious and more involved with their work.
  75. The values of benevolence, self-direction, and universalism are most highly valued across most cultures.
  76. Losing control of drinking leads to guilt, which leads to poorer self-regulation, which leads to more drinking.
  77. People with poor self-control learn better from rewards than they do from punishments.
  78. Self-compassion is distinct from self-pity. Self-pitying people focus on themselves, while self-compassionate people focus on their connection to others.
  79. Spellers who scored high in the personality trait of openness to experience performed worse than others at the spelling bee.
  80. In a group of adults with similar educational levels, grit steadily increased with age and was particularly noticeable in people over 65.
  81. Gritty people are less likely to change their careers frequently.
  82. Self-compassionate people are high in the traits of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
  83. People who are self-compassionate find compassionate images soothing; those who are self-critical find them alarming.
  84. Some studies show that women have slightly lower levels of self-compassion than men do.
  85. Personality disorders are often marked by poor social judgment, such as misinterpreting how other people behave.
  86. Age may be the best treatment for psychopathy. Antisocial behavior decreases dramatically after age 40.
  87. Men consistently value power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, and self-direction more than women do.
  88. Having similar values is more predictive of a satisfying romantic relationship than having similar personalities.
  89. In general, people believe that their own futures are brighter than those of their peers.
  90. Nineteenth-century phrenologists believed that a bulging area at the top of the skull indicated benevolence.
  91. Hostility-one component of a "type A" personality-is a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease.
  92. The most common source of stress in daily life is concerns about weight.
  93. Great apes, dogs, and baboons perform well on tests of self-control.
  94. Women experience affection and joy much more often than men do.
  95. Hypermasculinity-excessive shows of strength or bragging about accomplishments-is a symptom of histrionic personality disorder.
  96. Seventy percent of Hindu Indians, but only 13 percent of American women, agree with this statement: "It is immoral for adults to disobey their parents."
  97. Inspection time-the time it takes to discriminate between lines of different lengths-is related to general intelligence.
  98. Up to 13 percent of people in Western countries experience extreme shyness during their lifetime.
  99. Surveys show that narcissistic disorders are the least common personality disorder-but this may be because narcissistic people don't acknowledge the problem.
  100. Researchers have identified 11 tactics of manipulation, ranging from charm to regression.

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