What are you like ?

And what’s likely to kill you ?….a post in two halves.

Here’s a post with a really quite cheerful message (honestly folks) and an oddly common cause or reason to the outcome of the question, the short answer is that for many people, what their parents are like in terms of temperament and personality has a big bearing on what they are like and that whatever killed their parents could well be what also finishes them off – with some notable exceptions of course. An easy and predictable get-out clause here would be that if your parents smoked and then died of either lung disease, heart disease or some form of cancer then it doesn’t necessarily mean that you also will die of the same disease – unless you also smoke.

The argument has always been the one of nature vs nurture compounded by the everyday idiocy of which poisons people choose to ingest, be that smoking, alcohol or other ‘recreational’ drugs – nowadays we might even add the mental poisons which people ingest via social (antisocial) media and other internet platforms. The short answer, the TLDR if you will is that something like 50% of what makes you what you are you have inherited from your parents : I will do my best to explain this aspect with a brief explanation of your psychological traits.

Part the first….what are you like, in other words what is your personality and how would you know ?

If you think of a person, any person will do, you can, most likely, give some description of their personality by using some simple descriptive terms : you might say that subject X is sociable and likeable while subject Y is a bit of a loner while being very hardworking when it comes to his or her job – you’ve just started to describe somebody in terms of their psychological traits and this can be done with a high degree of accuracy and has been shown to be reliable, consistent and predictive. In brief, traits are consistent over time as they formed roughly by the age of 8, reliable in that they give a reliable outcome that doesn’t change unless something major has happened to that person (as is the case with me and my several strokes, which is basically a brain injury) and knowing a persons traits would help you predict what job or profession would suit them the best.

In the field of psychology the use of traits to determine personality is within the branch of study known as psychometrics and along with a test of intelligence (IQ test) can tell you much of what you might want to know about a person. Just to add that the standard model used is called the Big 5 model as it measures just 5 traits although modern versions are a bit more subtle in that each of the 5 traits are also broken down into 2 factors – thus we can measure or self measure to a greater degree of subtlety than when the Big 5 model was first worked out. Where the Big 5 model fails us slightly is that it doesn’t describe the negative or dark personality traits such as psycopathy, sadism and manipulativeness (Miachavellianism), rather it focuses on normal (normative) traits.

Most people are a bit surprised when a persons personality can be adequately described with only 5 traits plus a measurement of their IQ, some will say that there must be way more than 5 personality ‘types’ although to suggest that traits are either/or is to misunderstand that each of the traits represents a scale from 0 to a hundred. Being at one end the low end) of the trait spectrum for just one trait makes me a very different person than the one at the high end – and that’s just a measurement of one trait – and there are 5 normal ones to consider. Other people are shocked when I claim that the Myers Briggs test, which many have been subjected to, is hopelessly unreliable and has no predictive value : just go and take an online test with a modern version of the Big 5 test and read through the available report and you will see what I mean.

When I took the online, Big 5 based, personality test, much of what I found I either already knew or could take a good guess at : I did however learn a few new things that I didn’t know about, I already knew that as individuals go i’m one of the introverted, even asocial types that Carl Jung wrote about but at the same time I was surprised to learn how high I came up the measurement of openness which basically determines how much of a creative streak we have – for me that mostly explains why I like making things and why I have a continuous itch to scratch when it comes to writing.

When it comes to our personality traits it seems that 50% of what we are we inherit from our parents, in my case my late father was an almost asocial introvert so I guess that’s where that one comes from and my late mother had a major creative talent with her embroidery and quilting hobby. It is apparently much the same with our physical health in that we are likely to suffer the same kind of health problems as they did : in the case of my parents both of them had skin cancer and both of them suffered a series of minor strokes at some time (it killed my mother) and I assume that I am just as likely to end up with it, especially since iv’e spent so much time running around naked in the outdoors.

On a slightly more serious note many people get skin cancer and few die of it, along the same lines many older men get prostate cancer and die with it rather than because of it. My mother was only diagnosed with having small strokes years after the first incident in which she temporarily lost her balance and it was only diagnosed because the consultant decided to have an MRI scan done. The upshot of that is that she lived with the problems that those strokes created for many years and was still completely lucid when she died from a skin tumor that had invaded the structures around one of her eyes. With some forms of soft tissue (organ) cancer it is possible to say that the risk is higher in the presence of certain genes and the future of medicine might be to do more genetic testing although with things such as bowel cancer the best early diagnosis and treatment might well be via a simple procedure such as a colonoscopy and removal of dangerous polyps.