Child Neuropsychology

I have been reading an excellent book on personality research called Personality: What makes you the way you are by Daniel Nettle. It is written for the non expert and is easy to read and full of interesting observations. In the UK the psychology of personality has not been very influential on clinical practice. Most Clinical Psychologists do not assess personality, particularly in children and young people. In addition the study of personality has not featured on many university courses and certainly was not part of my undergraduate degree. However, recently I have began to take an interest in this area of psychology because it makes a lot of sense clinically. The children and young people I see have clear personality traits which fit with the current research. Having read Daniel Nettles’ book I believe that there will be a renaissance in personality assessment and understanding over the coming years. There are three key facts driving this, which are:

1. Researchers studying personality using factor analysis have come to a consensus that there are five main personality factors, which are:

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Conscientiousness

Openness

Neuroticism (emotional stability)

2. The behavioural genetics work fits with the five factor model and also suggests that these traits have a large genetic component.

3. There is increasing interest in the neuroscience of personality. The five factors are associated with different neural pathways e.g. Neuroticism (amygdala, hippocampus and R dorsolateral prefrontal cortex); Conscientiousness (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex); Extraversion (mid brain dopamine reward systems).

Given the genetic and neuroscientific evidence it would make sense to consider personality when looking at development, emotional and social difficulties in childhood.

There are lots of thought provoking issues raised in the book but I will highlight three that I think have major implications:

Firstly behavioural genetics studies have shown consistently that shared family environment i.e. parents, have little to no effect on development of adult personality (not sure what the Freudians make of this!).

Secondly that multivariate analysis shows that children’s personality seems to affect the way parent’s treat them rather than the other way round.

Thirdly : Personality seems to predict quite strongly, certain life experiences. For example high scores on Neuroticism predicts higher likelihood of divorce and low scores on conscientiousness predicts early death. Nettle argues that personality assessment together with IQ are two of the strongest predictors for how you will do in life. It is important to note that the genetics of IQ and personality account for about 50% of variance and environment is also important. There are ways of course that you can alter your environment to influence your life course. However, I think that it is likely that without intervention the genetic biases we all have will lead us in certain directions.

If you want to find out what your personality is there is a online test at the personality project website where you can take an anonymous personality test as part of an online research study. More information on personality can be found at the main personality project website.