"Healthy personality is a mode for a person to human action, guided by intelligence and respect for life, so that personal needs are satisfied and and then that the person will grow in awareness, competence, and the chapters to dear the self, the natural environment, and other people." -- Sidney Jourard

In the l and 60s humanistic thinkers such as Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, Sidney Jourard, Carl Rogers, and Erich Fromm attempted to characterize the healthy personality. While there are some differences in their conceptualizations, there was a general consensus that the salubrious personality consists of:

  • More than positive than negative emotions in daily life
  • Openness and flexibility of emotional expression
  • Trust in one'southward own experience
  • Self-acceptance
  • Resistance to stress
  • Healthy cocky-exclamation
  • Responsibleness and competence
  • Warm, authentic connexion to others

A limitation of these early on theories, yet, is that many of them were not systematically tested. Contempo enquiry even so, has begun to decide the personality profile that leads to optimal health and growth. Ane example is the new Characteristics of Cocky-Actualization Scale that I developed to directly capture the writings of Maslow and tie them to modern inquiry in personality and well-being.

Another contempo line of inquiry has attempted to look at the basic personality traits that characterize psychologically healthy people. In a study led by Jessie Sun, we found that v traits are near strongly related to a wide range of sources of well-beingness (including measures of life satisfaction, self-acceptance, meaning, purpose, and accomplishment).

In a just-published paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Wiebke Bleidorn and colleagues take on the good for you personality fifty-fifty more head on. The researchers defined the healthy personality as the "profile of trait levels optimally suited for psychological aligning." To determine this contour, they asked experts to depict their idea of a psychologically healthy individual using 30 personality facets that have been extensively used and validated [i].

Beneath is the salubrious personality profile that they generated, also every bit a link to an online test where you lot can find out your own score on these traits. It's striking how similar their healthy personality profile is to the ideas that were put forward by the humanistic psychologists in the 50s and 60s, peculiarly Carl Roger's notion of the "fully operation homo".

The Good for you Personality Profile

You can detect out your own score on the healthy personality contour hither. Note that no single trait in the healthy personality profile necessarily indicates a healthy personality. On the contrary, no single trait necessarily indicates an unhealthy personality [2]. We're but talking probabilities based on large samples, and for this specific configuration of traits. The primal conclusion is the extent to which low scores on this profile cake you from reaching your personal goals. With those caveats in mind, the following ten traits course the healthy personality contour:

  • Openness to Feelings

Openness to feelings implies receptivity to one'southward own inner feelings and emotions and the evaluation of emotion as an important part of life. Those with loftier openness to feelings experience deeper and more differentiated emotional states and feel both happiness and unhappiness more than intensely than others. Those with low openness to feelings have somewhat blunted affects and do not believe that feeling states are of much importance.

  • Straightforwardness

Straightforward individuals are frank, sincere, and ingenuous. People who are depression in straightforwardness are more willing to manipulate others through flattery, craftiness, or deception. They view these tactics every bit necessary social skills and may regard more than straightforward people as naive.

  • Competence

Competence refers to the sense that one is capable, sensible, prudent, and effective. Those who are highly competent feel well-prepared to bargain with life. Those with a depression sense of competence in their lives have a lower opinion of their abilities and admit that they are often unprepared and inept.

  • Warmth

Warmth is relevant to issues of interpersonal intimacy. Warm people are appreciating and friendly. They genuinely like people and easily form close attachments to others. People who are low in warmth are neither hostile nor necessarily lacking in compassion, but they are more formal, reserved, and afar in way than those who are high in warmth.

  • Positive Emotions

Those with loftier levels of positive emotions tend to experience positive emotions such as joy, happiness, love, and excitement. They laugh easily and oft, and are cheerful and optimistic. Those with low levels of positive emotions are not necessarily unhappy; they are merely less exuberant and high-spirited.

  • Depression Angry Hostility

Angry hostility represents the tendency to experience anger and negative emotions, such every bit frustration and bitterness. Those with high levels of aroused hostility accept a college readiness to experience anger.

  • Depression Anxiety

Anxious people are shy, fearful, nervous, tensed and restless. Broken-hearted people are more likely to have a variety of fears, as well as free-floating feet. On the other hand, those who are low in anxiety are more than calm and relaxed in their daily lives.

  • Low Depression

Those who are loftier in the trait depression are more likely to feel depressive affect in their daily lives. In particular, they are prone to feelings of guilt, sadness, hopelessness, and loneliness. They are hands discouraged and often down-hearted. Those who are low in low rarely experience such emotions, but they are not necessarily cheerful and lighthearted (it depends on a person'due south Positive Emotions score).

  • Low Vulnerability to Stress

Those who are high in vulnerability to stress feel unable to handle the everyday demands of life. Those who accept a low vulnerability to stress perceive themselves as capable of treatment themselves in hard situations and often accept a salubrious feeling of trust in their adaptive abilities.

  • Low Impulsivity

Impulsiveness refers to the inability to control cravings and urges. Desires or yearnings (for food, cigarettes, possessions) are perceived by those scoring high in impulsivity as being so potent that the private cannot resist them, although they may later on regret the behavior. Those who are depression in impulsivity find information technology easier to resist such temptations, having a high tolerance for frustration and the capacity to postpone gratifications. The term impulsive is used by many theorists to refer to many dissimilar and unrelated traits. Therefore, this particular use of the term should not be confused with spontaneity, adventure-taking, or rapid conclusion fourth dimension.

What Does the Healthy Personality Predict?

The researchers found that the healthy personality contour was not merely the opposite of personality disorders [3], nor was it the same as normative functioning [iv], suggesting that the healthy personality profile is worth studying in its own right.

The researchers looked to see whether the profile they generated could be used to assess healthy personality performance at the private level. To determine this, they used personality scores collected from seven contained samples and compared the similarity of individual personality test scores with the prototypical salubrious personality contour identified by the experts.

They found that the healthy personality tends to exist most pronounced in eye adulthood, and scores were relatively stable across a 5-twelvemonth menstruum. There was besides a substantial genetic component to the healthy personality: 43% of the differences in the cocky-reported healthy personality scores and 30% of the differences in the peer-reports were explained by genetic influences (the remaining variation mostly reflected nonshared environmental influences).

Looking across a broad range of outcomes of healthy psychological performance, they found that the healthy personality profile was associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, salubrious self-esteem, cocky-sufficiency, a clear and stable self-view, optimism, and the ability to resist impulses, regulate beliefs, and focus attention when desired. On the flipside, the healthy personality was negatively related to aggression (specially hostility and anger) and exploitativeness.

Interestingly, the salubrious personality profile was positively related to the grandiosity aspect of narcissism and ii aspects of psychopathy: boldness and stress immunity. This finding emphasizes the demand to look at the total motion-picture show of a person'southward personality before assessing psychopathy, equally some particular aspects of psychopathy in isolation tin be an indication of good for you personality functioning!

Taken together, this research suggests that the salubrious personality can exist understood every bit a particular configuration of normal personality traits. It'due south heady that there is such confluence with a number of other recent research investigations (see here and here), and how well all of this enquiry dovetails with the ideas put frontward by the humanistic thinkers in the 50s and 60s. Don't forget to take the Healthy Personality Scale here. Also, You tin can read more well-nigh the scientific validation of the scale here.

Good luck on your own journey of health and growth!

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Note: All trait descriptions in this article were adapted from this sample report.

Footnotes:

[i] The proficient raters included scholars with expertise in trait psychology as well equally experts in the field of positive psychology. They too asked two groups of undergraduate students to carry ratings. They found a hit agreement among all of these groups in regards to what a healthy personality entails, suggesting that there is a normally understood definition of the healthy personality.

[2]For instance, it's quite possible to exist a more introverted and reserved person-- scoring lower in warmth and positive emotions-- and nevertheless have a healthy overall personality contour.

[iii] While the healthy personality profile was not merely the opposite of personality disorders, the healthy personality profile did show a particularly strong negative relationship to deadline personality disorder. This is interesting because that deadline personality disorder has been considered the core of unhealthy personality functioning. The good for you personality was not merely the opposite of deadline personality disorder, however. While impulsivity was a key feature of borderline personality, reduced levels of impulsivity were non the largest indicator of the healthy personality, suggesting that healthy people have a certain caste of spontaneity in their actions.

[four] While the salubrious personality was not identical to normal functioning, there was still a strong relationship between the 2. As the researchers point out, the stiff correspondence between healthy and normative personality functioning is consistent with Carl Jung's assertion that balancing different extremes (which should average to the norm) is central to healthy personality performance.