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Photo: Pixabay research shows that personality traits can change dramatically during the day.

Write article | Francine Russo

Translation | Peng Rong

Revision | Chestnut

Psychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety to describe the typical thinking, mood and behavior patterns of different individuals. From this point of view, a person's character consists of a series of relatively stable characteristics, which are difficult to change.

There was a previous hypothesis that these traits could be measured by questionnaires that identify typical behaviors, but this assumption has been questioned over the past 20 years. People's behavior will change, not only often, but also every day and every hour. Some people may be cheerful and easygoing at noon, but become negative and rigid at two o'clock in the afternoon. This fluctuation in daily perception and behavior is called intraindividual variability (IIV for short). These fluctuations can be violent, sometimes comparable to personality differences between people (such as extroversion or responsibility), or even greater than personality differences.

Photo Source: Pixabay2004 year, a new field of research has emerged. Peter C. M. Molenaar, a retired professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University, supported the IIV study in a manifesto entitled "this time, bringing humans back to scientific psychology." he used a series of mathematical and physical calculations to illustrate the degree of dynamic change in personality, while questioning the standard methods of traditional psychological tests.

Since the publication of this declaration, IIV has been paid more and more attention. It helps people better understand personality and changes some forms of psychotherapy. Researchers have learned that personality changes when dealing with daily stressful events, such as quarrelling with a partner or being stuck in traffic, will provide an important basis for studying people's long-term emotional and physical health.

Behind this shift is a 20-year study on stress and health. In this study, daily personality changes were observed in more than 3500 adults. David Almeida, a developmental psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues surveyed subjects' stress levels and emotions over the past 24 hours for eight days (and collected a series of physiological measurements). People's stressors include quarrels with family members, work deadlines, overloaded housework, and a series of disturbing daily chores. Among the various human emotions, the researchers asked the subjects about joy, anger, fear and anxiety. They also asked about thoughts related to anxiety, as well as daily behaviors such as exercise and sleep. Over the past 20 years, the same survey has been repeated twice, every 10 years. Almeida said the team concluded: "people's daily experiences are thought to have little impact on health, but they actually have short-term and long-term effects on a variety of emotions, physical states and cognitive abilities."

Some of the personality traits we thought might be short-lived emotions, and the Almeida team calculated the percentage. "We see this short-lived emotion in grumpy people and think,'Oh, this is a grumpy person,'" he said. in fact, half of their grumpiness is personality traits, while the other half may be caused by personality fluctuations. " He points out that people with positive traits such as openness or gregariousness have less personality fluctuations in traits such as irritability or anxiety, with only 30 per cent.

Source: some researchers at Unsplash have done further research to try to understand how much impact a person's environment has on a short-term state of mind. Nilam Ram, a psychology and communication professor at Stanford University, focuses on how personality changes respond to environmental changes on an hourly and daily basis, such as at work, at home, with children, or in a doctor's office. Previously, strong or weak emotional changes were seen as a personality trait in itself. But Ram points out that these mood swings can reflect changes in different aspects of personality over the course of the day, or they can be an immediate response to someone or something.

For example, someone participated in a study in which emotion reports were collected every hour. People with high intra-individual IIV may be seen as emotionally unstable, but mood swings may also indicate that they are experiencing a series of unpredictable events in life, such as those triggered by a noisy and chaotic workplace. In fact, the emotional reports the researchers received from the subjects may be a combination of their environment and their personality, which in part includes their sensitivity to the things around them and the way they regulate their emotions, Ram said.

The magnitude of the current pressure depends on the type of pressure applied. Scientists have been able to measure and assess the impact of certain types of stress. Arguing with your partner tends to cause more mood swings than work deadlines, while work deadlines can be more stressful than disturbing daily chores such as train delays or finding dogs defecating on the carpet.

Researchers usually evaluate a person's IIV at short intervals, such as once a day for a week, or five times a day. Nadin Beckmann, a psychologist at Durham University in the UK, and her colleagues took a different approach. The researchers asked 288 working people a series of questions about their personality at the same time, including whether they were diligent, thoughtful, fragile, moody and so on. The same questions were also asked to five family members, close friends or colleagues of the participants.

Beckmann explained that the immediate state reflects how a particular personality trait emerges when a person reacts to different situations. We know intuitively that the way we think, feel and behave at home is different from how we think, feel and behave at work or when we socialize with friends. The results of Beckmann's research show that personality changes can fluctuate systematically according to the environment. In the eyes of others, a person is more serious at work than at home, and more outgoing in front of friends than in front of colleagues.

Photo Source: Unsplash when researchers quantify people's hourly personality changes, they also begin to assess what this change means in a larger personality picture. Ram says he may associate a person's hourly mood swings with monthly changes in self-esteem. If a person's mood changes a lot, but their self-esteem remains relatively stable, it may be because their temporary emotional highlights or troughs do not affect their level of self-esteem after they have been praised or belittled.

In recent years, Michelle Newman, a research psychologist and cognitive behavioral therapist at Pennsylvania State University, has found that IIV is valuable for conducting research and designing new treatments. In an era when there are no smartphones, she says, patients receiving treatment or subjects in the study fill out a questionnaire to summarize their psychological changes. They were asked to use pen and paper or electronic notepad (such as PalmPilot) to record their feelings every hour. When these tasks are found to be troublesome, people wait until the end of the experiment to record their thoughts and feelings. Newman said: "such a result is worthless!"

Using special apps on smartphones, psychologists can monitor people's emotions and experiences many times a day and observe their mental state more carefully. When studying mood swings in patients with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, Newman used this subtle record of the patient's thoughts and emotions to question the causes of persistent anxiety (the main symptom of GAD) discussed by some early psychologists. The early theory is based on people's summary of their own feelings, that is, that personal anxiety is to eliminate negative emotions. Newman's findings are just the opposite: constant anxiety perpetuates negative emotions.

In one study, she and her colleagues monitored 83 people with GAD for eight days before or after social interactions lasting a minute or more. Scientists have found that people with GAD generally feel better after social interactions, suggesting that these interactions are likely to be pleasant or at least benign. Counterintuitively, she found that people who were less worried before social interaction had more negative emotions, such as anxiety and sadness, after interaction. Those who were more worried before the interaction felt happier or more satisfied after the interaction.

The study confirms Newman's view that anxious people believe that if they worry about a bad outcome (no matter how unlikely it is), instead of making themselves happy or optimistic, they will not be hit hard when bad things happen. These people feel relieved when bad things don't happen, which reinforces their belief that worry "protects" them, she says. Without these detailed records of patients' round-the-clock thoughts and mood swings, the study might not have come to this conclusion.

Photo Source: Unshplash, these round-the-clock data also help psychotherapists develop personalized treatments for patients. Many people don't know or may not remember what caused their anxiety, but therapists can identify the problem by linking higher levels of anxiety to current events. This prompts patients to adopt specific strategies they have previously learned in treatment to deal with anxiety. In the "cognitive reconstruction" approach, for example, patients can compare what they worry about with real events to help patients realize that their fears are unfounded.

Anxious people don't only have negative emotions, but they tend to minimize positive emotions. "We not only need to reduce their negative emotions, we also need to improve their positive emotions," Newman said. "

To increase positive emotions, Newman colleague Lucas LaFreniere, a psychologist at Skidmore College, developed a mobile app called SkillJoy. The app prompts anxious people to focus on a pleasant thing at the moment, such as meeting a friend, telling a joke or listening to a good song, and spend a minute or two really "thinking" about what they are worried about. A recent study found that seven days later, people who used SkillJoy relieved their anxiety.

These studies of mood swings during the day have prompted scientists to think further: is high IIV good or bad for people? Newman's point in this debate is clear. "the change is good," she said. but there is no clear answer as to whether it is related to psychopathology. " The views of other researchers in this field are not so sure. While some studies have linked strong personality volatility to neuroticism, others have not. To a large extent, it depends on people's living environment. A person with a high IIV may have successfully adapted to a turbulent life, while a person with a low IIV may have a predictable, regular life and a more rigid personality, Ram said.

According to recent research by researchers such as Lizbeth Benson, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, people with more emotions are better able to adapt to different situations in their lives, including enthusiasm, determination, sadness and fear. Jordi Quoidbach, an associate professor at Barcelona sad Law School, calls it "emotional diversity (emodiversity)." Benson said the highlight of their study is that people who have experienced severe negative emotions tend to have better mental health outcomes for those with more types of negative emotions.

In the ups and downs of people's daily emotions, some are bad, some are obviously good, and some are emotional highs and lows. For psychotherapists and patients, accepting the existence of such daily mood swings will provide new insights into the long-term goal of psychology, that is, to help us understand ourselves more clearly, so that we can live better and become who we want to be.

Original text link:

Https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/personality-can-change-from-one-hour-to-the-next/

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue)

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