Personality psychology is the science of personality structure. The field tries to comprehend a person’s primary psychological characteristics and how those tendencies manifest in one’s life. The theories chosen for the analysis belong to the trait theory approach, one of the most important subfields of psychological science. According to the personality trait model, persons have some essential qualities, and the degree and concentration of those traits explain personality variations.
As such, the paper employs the three-dimension theory developed by Eysenck. The three personality measures assess extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Two of the three primary dimensions of personality are anchored in the concept of the connection between average personality and mental conditions (Village & Francis, 2022). The main contribution of Eysenck’s theory lies in its attempt to unite biological and psychological ideas about personality (Claridge, 2018). Next, the essay considers the five-factor theory (or Big Five), which indicates that all persons, regardless of sex, age, or location, possess the same underlying characteristics but vary in the degree to which they manifest (Novikova & Vorobyeva, 2019). The model systematically classifies personality traits based on five fundamental components: agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism. The five-factor paradigm is now widely utilized across the globe to explore the relationships between personality characteristics and many elements of social interaction (Novikova & Vorobyeva, 2019). The paper applies the mentioned theories to analyze Rachel’s creativity and aggression features. While Rachel is a productive and perspective worker due to her creativity, she is socially abstained because of her aggressive desire for control, manipulation, and violence.
The discussion of Rachel’s case might be started with the links with the three-dimension theory of Eysenck. Namely, Rachel fits into the paradigm of the personality with high psychoticism scale. According to Village & Francis (2022), people with high psychoticism scores are more likely to be harsh and brutal, lacking in compassion and empathy. Moreover, they are usually hostile, have a predilection for strange and scary activities, overlook risk, and annoy others (Village & Francis, 2022). These ideas relatively well describe the aggressive part of Rachel’s personality. Knežević et al. (2019) similarly articulate that Eysenck’s P was particularly theorized as a spectrum of psychotic episodes to mental illness that include aggressiveness, correlate with impulsive behavior, resentment, manipulation and sociopathy. However, the authors underline that extraversion dimension also includes openness, enthusiasm, confidence, fanaticism, expressiveness, ambition, and aggressiveness. Thus, the presence of correlated with aggression features in Rachel’s personality indicate that she has a high psychoticism or extraversion score, which might mean mental condition.
The three-dimension theory has some evidence regarding the creativity feature. Similar to aggression, creativity is associated with psychoticism in this model. The psychoticism scale of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire was presented to individuals. Psychoticism and creativity were shown to have a non-significant negative association (Muhammad et al., 2021). The amount of psychoticism and inventiveness in married and unmarried people differed considerably. On the negative extremity, psychoticism is seen as a potential contributing factor to psychosis, crime, and sociopathy, while on the positive extreme, it is associated with creativity (Muhammad et al., 2021). In Rachel’s case, it might mean that her creativity is correlated with the other attributes of psychoticism; the extreme is negative due to Rachel’s inability to stay in a long-term relationship. In research from Snyder and Littlefield (2020), the drive for diverse thought has been found to imitate the exploration of unorthodox approaches to uncover unique experiences. The origins of creative intelligence and the relationship between mental disorders and creativity are also discussed. Thus, the three-factor theory views the presence of creativity along with other features in Rachel’s personality as an indicator of potential mental illness risk.
The features mentioned above of Rachel’s personality could be analyzed through the perspective of the five-factor theory, which borrows some of its concepts from the previous theory but provides a more comprehensive approach to one’s traits assessment. The uncontrolled aggressiveness in the Big Five theory is conceptualized as an indicator of the lack of agreeableness and conscientiousness (Knežević et al., 2019). In research from Dinić and Smederevac (2018), aggression is a characteristic named aggression–hostility. According to the Five Factors hypothesis, neuroticism is associated with aggressiveness, but only when provoked, whereas agreeableness is linked to violence regardless of provocation (Dinić & Smederevac, 2018). This is consistent with findings showing that reactive aggressiveness was associated with high neuroticism and poor agreeableness, while proactive aggression was associated with low cooperativeness (Dinić & Smederevac, 2018). Therefore, the five factors theory, similarly to the three-factors theory, views aggressiveness as a biopsychological phenomenon, which correlates with the inability to integrate and cooperate with people. Applied to the case, it means that Rachel’s desire to be violent towards others comes from her inner feeling that danger is present or that there are no gains in cooperation.
Furthermore, it is possible to analyze how creativity factors in Rachel’s personality according to the Big Five theory. Moreover, Kaspi‐Baruch (2017) provided that students completed assessments to measure the factors of relevance and found a strong correlation between the theory factors and features, which verifies the model. Their research indicated that motivational achievement influenced the correlations between the theory’s characteristics and creativity. Individuals with solid extroversion, emotion regulation, and low conscientiousness are the most productive when learning focused. This information is consistent with the previous analysis of Rachel’s aggression, which also indicated conscientiousness. According to the findings of Zare and Flinchbaugh (2018) and Vartanian et al. (2018) meta-analysis, openness, extraversion, and industriousness are all strong predictors of creativity. Individual variations in openness are connected to variances in brain anatomy, notably cortical thinning (Vartanian et al., 2018). Hence, the theory suggests that Rachel’s creativity comes from the desire for achievement and specific brain structure.
Although the theories under discussion use the same biological and psychological approaches, they view creativity and aggressiveness in Rachel differently. The three-dimension theory’s perspective is about the arrangement of several attributes in one personality (psychoticism in this case), the high correlation of which signifies that the individual has a mental illness. The Big Five theory focuses on the interaction with others, motivation, and use of these features. It describes the physical premises of the feature as applicable for the theory-specific factors, as well as outlines mental processes related to the features. These theories lead to different conclusions regarding Rachel, which means that they are not sufficient for describing this personality. The three-dimension theory allows uncertainty regarding the presence of other scales than psychoticism. The Big Five, in its turn, presents openness and agreeability as factors determining creativity, although it does not entirely explain the presence of aggression.
References
Claridge, G. (2018). Psychopathology and personality dimensions: The selected works of Gordon Claridge (1st ed.). Routledge.
Dinić, B. M., & Smederevac, S. (2018). When you say aggressiveness, what do you mean by that? Similarities and differences between aggressiveness/agreeableness scales from personality inventories. Personality and Individual Differences, 134, 314–320. Web.
Kaspi‐Baruch, O. (2017). Big five personality and creativity: The moderating effect of motivational goal orientation. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 53(3), 325–338. Web.
Knežević, G., Lazarević, L. B., Purić, D., Bosnjak, M., Teovanović, P., Petrović, B., & Opačić, G. (2019). Does Eysenck’s personality model capture psychosis-proneness? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 143, 155–164. Web.
Muhammad, K., Nadeem, D. M., & Nadeem, A. (2021). Relationship between psychoticism and creativity. Journal of Professional & Applied Psychology, 2(2), 199–205. Web.
Novikova, I. A., & Vorobyeva, A. A. (2019). The five-factor model. Cross-Cultural Psychology, 685–706. Web.
Snyder, S., & Littlefield, L. M. (2020). Assessment of creativity. The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 503–507. Web.
Vartanian, O., Wertz, C. J., Flores, R. A., Beatty, E. L., Smith, I., Blackler, K., Lam, Q., & Jung, R. E. (2018). Structural correlates of openness and intellect: Implications for the contribution of personality to creativity. Human Brain Mapping, 39(7), 2987–2996. Web.
Village, A., & Francis, L. J. (2022). Psychological type and the three major dimensions of personality: Mapping the relationship between the FPTS and the EPQR-A among clergy and churchgoers. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1–9. Web.
Zare, M., & Flinchbaugh, C. (2018). Voice, creativity, and big five personality traits: A meta-analysis. Human Performance, 32(1), 30–51. Web.