9

You Need Your Head Examined

Phrenological diagram of propensities localized in the human brain.

The proposal of phrenology was that traits of personality are localized in specific parts of the brain. Modern psychology includes traits of personality, but not with this kind of localization. Carol Magai and Jeannette Haviland-Jones developed the idea of personality as psychological biography, based on early relationships, and expressed in emotion-based interactions with others. David Kenny showed that our personalities have different aspects. In one aspect we show the same traits to most of the people we are with. In another we can elicit certain kinds of moods from others. A further aspect occurs in the emotions of relationships with specific others.

Phrenology

It’s 1840 and you go to have your head examined. A specialist takes a tape measure to your skull, runs fingers across your head, and notes protuberances and indentations. You receive a diagnosis. Perhaps you are told that your Philoprogenitiveness, love of your children, is well developed. Perhaps you are told you are low on Cautiousness. The specialist is telling you about two powers of the mind, each localized in a particular part of the brain. When a part is well developed it has pushed out a bit on your skull to make a bump. If less developed there is a dent.

The person who examined your head would have been a specialist in phrenology, a system of thinking about the mind and brain that became popular in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 You can see a diagram of phrenological regions of the brain at the opening of this chapter. The inventor of phrenology was Franz Gall. Some of his early studies were conducted on inmates of lunatic asylums and jails. He found a region, at the side of the head, an inch-and-a-half or so above the ear, that was especially well developed in pickpockets. This region contained the organ of Acquisitiveness.

When Franz Gall was a schoolboy, he thought the shapes of the heads of some of his schoolmates showed something about their mental characteristics. As a medical student, he continued to make such observations. Those who had prominent eyes seemed to have good memories. In 1800, after he had qualified in medicine, he was joined by Johann Spurzheim, and the two of them began to lecture all through Europe. Spurzheim was the popularizer; it was he who introduced the term “phrenology.”

Gall’s main work began to be published in 1810. It has one of the most overdeveloped titles of any book in the library. In English, it is, On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts: With Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head. The first volume deals with the whole nervous system, the sensory nerves, the spinal cord, the cerebellum, and so on. It isn’t until volumes 2, 3, and 4 of this work, the last of which was published in 1819, that Gall enters into phrenology proper.

Gall’s head was—of course—examined. A phrenological biographer wrote:

The organs of Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Combativeness, and Destructiveness, were all very well developed in Gall. His Secretiveness was also rather large, but he never made bad use of it. He was too conscious of his intellectual powers to obtain his ends by cunning or fraud.2

Gall proposed that there are thirty-seven mental dispositions, each of which is generated by a specific organ in the brain. By 1840, commentators had started to say this was pseudoscience, and its popularity waned, although phrenological societies and journals continued into the twentieth century.

Here’s a phrenology of the automobile. We open the hood and see a big lump. That must be its Goingness. What about its Stoppingness? Perhaps that’s somewhere down near the wheels. What about other parts—the organ of Speediness, the organ of Economicalness, the organ of Noisiness? Might there perhaps be an organ of Stuckness-in-Traffic? We know that’s not quite right. To understand how cars work, we need to know about the functions of such parts as ignition systems and pistons and camshafts.

Despite this, historians such as John van Wyhe have argued that Gall’s influence was important. In his multi-volume book, Gall proposed that the brain is the organ of the mind, that it is not homogeneous but an aggregate of functions, each localized in a specific part of the brain. We now accept that the brain is the organ of mind, and also that specific parts have specific functions. Two hundred years ago many thought that those who were mentally ill were possessed by evil spirits. Phrenology was one of the influences that helped people realize that some of the inmates of insane asylums might be suffering from diseases of the brain.

Now if someone says, “You need to have your head examined,” that person isn’t just referring back to an outmoded system, but is being rude. The person is telling you that some propensity is overdeveloped and that you should recognize it so that you can suppress it. The idea of diagnosis and self-therapy helped make phrenology popular. Although some phrenological propensities had peculiar names, the idea of psychological functions was appealing, and the proposal that they are produced by the brain made them seem objective. At the same time, the message of hope in phrenology was inviting. You could improve yourself by developing or diminishing a propensity. This kind of thought would, one hundred years after Gall’s lectures on phrenology, become central to the practice we recognize as psychotherapy.

Personality

Modern psychology tells us we each have enduring dispositions: traits of personality. In the manner suggested by those who developed the test questions asked by Binet and Simon, these traits are detected from the pattern of answers to questionnaires. You are given such statements as: “You are emotionally stable, not easily upset,” or “You are talkative,” and then asked to rate these statements on scales that range between “Strongly disagree” and “Strongly agree.” People who strongly agree with the first of these statements will get a high score on Emotional Stability. People who strongly agree with statements such as the second will get a high score on Extraversion.

Emotional Stability and Extroversion are traits in a system that has become standard: the Big Five test of personality developed in the 1980s by Paul Costa and Robert McCrea.3 The other three traits are Agreeableness, meaning sociability and friendliness; Openness to new experience, including fantasies, emotions, and aesthetics; and Conscientiousness, which includes being dutiful and striving for achievement. This last trait, Conscientiousness, made it into the Big Five from Gall’s list of thirty-seven powers of the mind.

It follows from Darwin’s idea of variation, and from his idea that mental abilities are inherited along with physical characteristics, that personality may have genetic foundations. Based on studies of identical (monozygotic) twins who share 100 percent of their genes, and non-identical (dizygotic) twins who share 50 percent of their genes, Melissa Moore and colleagues have found that the genetic component of each of the Big Five traits of personality is around 50 percent, with a component of almost the same size that is unique to the individual’s own experience of the world.

Personality traits have an emotional quality. One can even think of them as long-term moods. Low Emotional Stability is a tendency toward anxiety and sadness; Extraversion involves cheerfulness; Agreeableness is warmth and friendliness; Openness involves eagerness: Conscientiousness includes a tendency to earnestness and disapproval.

There have, of course, been studies to see how the Big Five traits are represented in the brain.⁴ Here, research has not shown very clear results. Low Emotional Stability, in which people tend to take a negative view of events, with tendencies toward anxiety disorders and depression, has been considered to involve areas of the brain such as the amygdala. Extraversion is associated with brain systems that mediate reward.

In comparison with the forty-seven propensities suggested by Gall, the idea of having only five traits may seem stingy. But Colin DeYoung and his colleagues have proposed that each trait has two facets. Low Emotional Stability is Volatility and Withdrawal, Extraversion is Enthusiasm and Assertiveness, Agreeableness is Compassion and Politeness, Openness is Intellect and Openness, Conscientiousness is Industriousness and Orderliness.

If you wonder whether a self-report questionnaire method is valid, in 1988, Costa and McCrea published a study in which they report on 167 people who answered the Big Five questionnaire and also had their spouses rate them on the scales of Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Openness.5 The spouses agreed fairly closely with those to whom they were married. In this same paper the researchers reported on how constant 983 people’s Big Five personality traits were over six years. For both men and women the stability of their ratings on all five scales was high, after the age of thirty. Before the age of thirty, although there is stability there is also change, as has been shown by Brent Roberts and Daniel Mroczek. They found that between the ages of about twenty to thirty, people on average became more self-confident and warmer toward others. They also tended to increase their Emotional Stability and their Conscientiousness.

Costa and McCrea start an article with this question. “How will you feel two months and three days after your 78th birthday?”⁶ You might say you would feel old, or that it would depend on circumstances. Costa and McCrea say that you are likely to be wrong: more likely you will feel much as you do today. Emotionality and mood have continuity with childhood temperament. They will have pervaded your life so far, and are likely to pervade it in the future.

Personality, Character, Biography

A different way of understanding people is in terms of character, as depicted in novels. In “The art of fiction,” Henry James wrote, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”7 This also applies to biography, and it is closer to the mental models we make of people we know, and of ourselves, than are traits of personality.

Rather than being about general tendencies such as “You are talkative,” character in biography and fiction is about how a person handles particular circumstances. Famous among biographies is Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey, in which he gives accounts of the lives of famous people from the century previous to his own, which emphasize features that were rather different than the myths that had circulated about them. In it he recounts, for instance, how in the first part of her life Florence Nightingale was active as a nurse, working with soldiers in the Crimean War, where she became known as “The lady with the lamp.” Much less widely known was that after the war she became formidable and effective in her promotion of public health measures in the army and in civil society in Britain. At the age of forty-five she moved into a house in South Street, near Park Lane, in London, where she stayed for another forty-five years, going out very little, and spending much of her time in bed. There she engaged in the development of statistics and epidemiology, and was visited by dignitaries from the government and abroad.⁸

A fascinating advance of modern times, which combines personality, character, and biography, is the work of Carol Magai and Jeannette Haviland-Jones in their study of three psychotherapists, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls. The authors analyzed the three men’s emotional expressions as they each interviewed a psychotherapy client, Gloria, in the first film made of psychotherapy.⁹ They also analyzed themes as they had appeared in the three men’s academic work, together with autobiographical and biographical writings. Their theoretical approach is developed from Freud’s idea that it is from our relationships with parents that we develop a certain set of emotional modes of being, which become habitual, and form the bases of our character and our interactions with others.

Here is a sketch of Magai and Haviland-Jones’s portrait of Carl Rogers. He was one of six siblings in a well-off Christian family. He was unwell as a child, sufficiently so that his parents gave him a lot of attention. The family atmosphere was affectionate, but anger was forbidden. Rogers attended university and soon afterward started a long and, for the most part, happy marriage. He also started an extraordinarily successful career, in formulating a mode of psychotherapy that has become known as counseling. Those he knew found him gentle and lacking in anger, though he got into disputes with colleagues in psychiatry. It was probably to escape these conflicts that, during his career, he moved his place of employment several times.

Magai and Haviland-Jones write that he had a good relationship with his parents, perhaps especially his mother:

Yet, his interactions with other social partners could be fractious … Rogers could also be painfully shy, and yet he was drawn to people and even did group encounter therapies. He often made others the center of his existence. He was also often in conflict with others, but he was not a particularly “angry” or hostile man.10

It was as if Rogers longed to recreate, for himself and his clients in therapy, the warm and close relationship that he had as a child with his parents. But his makeup also included a great deal of shame that seems to have been fostered by a mother who was keen to point out shortcomings. Throughout his life he maintained his longing for closeness with others, but he remained shy. When he spoke there were many “ums” and “ers” and his non-verbal signals were also of shame. The therapy he pioneered could be thought of as escape from shame, with the goal of attaining closeness and self-acceptance.

In the film with Gloria, Rogers showed a great deal of interest, but with eyebrows slightly slanted to express sadness. After the session Gloria said that with Rogers she was her more lovable self, and to her surprise she found it possible to talk openly with him about sex. The character who was Rogers, then, included an invitation to Gloria to express a certain aspect of herself, her more loveable aspect. After the session, Rogers spoke to the camera and said he felt the session had gone well. Magai and Haviland-Jones draw attention to a moment when he said, “When I’m able to enter into a relationship, and I feel it was true in this instance.” Magai and Haviland-Jones write that, as he said this, his voice rose and that:

He was being spontaneous here and the excitement and proud pleasure mounted. At the height of this juncture, the configuration of his face changed into a more open and unguarded one, and at this point we see the only “pure” prototypic interest expression (brows raised and arched) of the whole film. Furthermore, what happened next is even more revealing. The raised brow lasted only a flicker of a second before the muscles controlling the outer brow were drawn into play to pull the outer corners down, thus creating the sad brow.11

Magai and Haviland-Jones speak of how Rogers seemed to experience an instant of excitement here, but the emotional structure of his character would not enable him to dwell on it, because it is shameful to express self-satisfaction or pride.

Magai and Haviland-Jones had spotted an incident which, although small, reveals something central to Carl Rogers’s character. In his novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust had put this idea as follows:

The features of our face are scarcely more than expressions that have been made so often that they have become fixed by habit. Nature, like the catastrophe of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has immobilized us in a habitual movement.¹²

Personality derives from the temperament with which each of us is born, which has a large genetic component. It’s an individual matter. Yet much of our life is social. So, is there an association between individuality and sociality? In a study in which people were given personality-questionnaire-type descriptors from individuals, and asked how each one would behave in particular circumstances, participants were able to make mental models of the people they imagined.13 All the same, generalizations of personality are a long way from the specifics of mental models we make about our loved ones, friends, and acquaintances. How might traits of personality and habits of emotional engagement with others, of the kind depicted in biographical incidents, be brought closer together?

Social Relations

Traditional ideas of personality are generic and free of social context. She is talkative, he keeps to himself. David Kenny and his colleagues proposed a social relations model in which people affect each other and are affected by each other. One kind of influence is the actor effect. It’s the style in which a person expresses herself or himself generally with other people. One person is typically warm and friendly to others, another is generally assertive. Another aspect is the partner effect, which is what a person elicits from others. One person might tend to cheer people up. Another may make them irritable. In the film with Gloria, Carl Rogers elicited from Gloria aspects of her more loveable self. Another kind of effect occurs only in specific relationships, in a way that is different from what occurs in other relationships. This is called the dyad effect. In one dyad we may spend a lot of time laughing, in another we may be more earnest. To estimate dyad effects, actor effects and partner effects that occur across all relationships are subtracted out, and the remaining effects include those that are distinctive to particular relationships.

Jon Rasbash, Jennifer Jenkins, and colleagues studied 687 non-divorced families and step-families that each included two parents and two adolescents, to observe actor effects, partner effects, and dyad effects, as well as to see whether a certain kind of relating was distinctive to particular families. The design included analyses of genetics, so in the non-divorced families there were monozygotic and dizygotic twins as well as non-twins, and in the step-families there were full-siblings, half-siblings, and genetically unrelated siblings. Each pair (for example mother-father, mother-older-child, mother-younger-child) was video-recorded for ten minutes as they conversed to resolve two issues that they had agreed were problematic between them. Problematic issues included actions toward themselves and toward other family members, chores, sharing, homework, money, in-laws.

The researchers focused on emotional Negativity and Positivity, which were coded from video recordings: from what was said, tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures. Negativity included irritation, disapproval, criticisms, and hostility. It was exhibited in harsh parenting, sibling rivalry, and marital conflict. People who have high scores on this measure have been found to have lower well-being both as they remain in a family and when they leave it. These effects can last a lifetime. Positivity included warmth, affection, and closeness. High scores on this measure are associated with fewer disorders in children as they grow up.

In this study, a statistical analysis called multi-level modeling was used to distinguish actor effects, partner effects, dyad effects, and family effects. Actor effects derive from scores of emotional Negativity and Positivity expressed by a person across all relationships in the family. Partner effects derive from scores when the person, with each particular other, elicits a particular kind of emotion from all these others. Dyad effects (when actor and partner effects are subtracted out) are distinctive to particular relationships: for a sibling, for instance, when just with the other sibling, or just with the mother, or just with the father. Family effects are those common to all family members.

As you can see from figure 15, as actors, the fathers and adolescent children in the study by Rasbash and his colleagues expressed more Negativity (irritation, grumbling, criticism, and the like) and less Positivity (warmth and affection) than did the mothers. Overall, actor effects—which in this model are closest to traditional personality measures—were stronger for Positivity and explained 28 percent of variance (technical term for differences among people in the study) than for Negativity, which explained 20 percent of the variance. Actor effects were larger than partner effects, but a substantial partner effect was found for Negativity, and explained 9 percent of the variance.

Figure 15. Mean amounts of Negativity and Positivity of actor effects in family members, as found by Jon Rasbash, Jennifer Jenkins, and colleagues. Data source: Table 1 of Rasbash, J. Jenkins J. M., et al. (2011). A social relations model of observed family negativity and positivity using a genetically informative sample. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 474–491. Drawn by Keith Oatley.

An important finding was that around 50 percent of the variance in Negativity and Positivity was due to dyad effects: specific combinations of each pair of participants (a certain father and his fifteen-year-old daughter, a particular pair of step-siblings, and so on).

In addition to these, in this study and others, Jenkins and her colleagues have found substantial family effects in which the emotional atmosphere of each family influences all its members in the same way.14 Leo Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina by writing that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Putting this in statistical terms, there is more variability among unhappy families, and this has been confirmed.

As to genetics and environment: for Negativity expressed by the adolescent children in the study by Rasbash, Jenkins, and colleagues, some 35 percent was due to genetic factors and 19 percent due to the shared family environment.

So, unlike what one might believe from standard theories, such as the Big Five, personality is not all in one lump. We each have an emotional style (actor effect) but we also tend to elicit certain kinds of emotions from others (partner effects). We each tend to be affected by the family in which we live (family effects), and we are different in our relationships with the different people we know (dyad effects).

What about the most celebrated dyad effect in industrial societies: falling in love and starting to live with someone? Lisa Neff and Benjamin Karney found from questionnaires and observed interactions in two samples of newly married people that both members of each couple were taken up in a strong positivity with their partner. Although they did not use methods based on actor and partner effects, we can say that Neff and Karney’s finding was that newly married people were in a distinctive kind of dyad effect. They call it “global adoration.” To some of the people in this study, it would come as a surprise to find that the person with whom they had started to live had what one might call a personality with an idiosyncratic way of being and acting (an actor effect), as well as characteristics (in a partner effect) that elicited from them particular kinds of emotion that were not necessarily of adoration. After the positive global sense of the other, only some of the newlyweds attained accurate perceptions of specific attributes of their new loved ones. On average, the wives, but not the husbands, were able to construct accurate perceptions of such specific attributes to improve their supportiveness toward their spouses and make it more likely that the marriages would last.