Psychology

Attachment Theory

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John Bowlby, after writing Maternal Care and Mental Health for the WHO, in addition to Harlow proving the existence of a certain kind of love with rhesus monkeys, other scholars also studied other directions. Among them, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, and Erik Hesse brought Attachment Theory.

Ainsworth designed a non-harmful Strange Situation experiment. The process involves children playing in an unfamiliar environment, during which a guardian or stranger enters the room, and then observing the child’s reaction to study the child’s attachment to the guardian. The results revealed the following four types:

Secure Attachment (B): Children will regard the guardian as a “safe base”. When the guardian leaves, the child will become uneasy until the guardian returns. And the child will only interact with strangers when the guardian is present.

Anxious-Avoidant Attachment (A): Children will avoid or ignore the guardian. Children rarely show emotional changes when faced with the guardian’s departure and return. Later studies found that the child’s heart rate still has obvious changes, but it may be because past attachment behaviors were rejected, so this can avoid rejection again. (It’s like becoming tsundere)

Anxious-Ambivalent/Resistant Attachment (C): Children will show distress before separating from the guardian, and become clingy and difficult to comfort when the guardian returns. Some researchers have found that children who have been abused in childhood are more likely to form ambivalent attachment. And as adults, they are more likely to have difficulty maintaining close relationships.

Disorganized Attachment (D): Situations that cannot be classified into A, B, or C attachment are considered D. However, the original research on psychological trauma caused by mother-infant separation was later extended to adults and became the commonly used relationship and attachment theory.

Adult Attachment (friendship, love, etc. ) has some differences from child attachment. Adult attachments are called Secure Attachment, Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment, Avoidant Attachment and Fearful-Avoidant Attachment.

Although attachment theory oversimplifies interpersonal relationships, it may still have some effect as a cheat sheet for improving communication and empathy. Psychologists also use attachment theory as the basis of Emotionally Focused Therapy to solve emotional and relationship problems between individuals, couples, or families.

16Personalities

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16Personalities.com is probably the most powerful website promoting MBTI, because the test is fast, provides free results, and has a well-designed webpage. But you may have heard sayings like “online tests are inaccurate” or “16P is not MBTI”.

In fact, you can see some clues from the 16P website. The model tested is called NERIS Type Explorer, which does not mention MBTI. On the website, you can also find the theoretical introduction “Our Framework“, which clearly states that the NERIS model is not the MBTI model, but only borrows the four-letter naming model and replaces Jung’s theory with the Big Five personality traits, so 16P is actually a reskin of the Big Five…

This can also be seen from the 16P test results. The 16P results have 5 letters/dimensions. For example, INFJ-T stands for Introvert, iNtuition, Feeling, Judging, and Turbulent. Compared to the standard MBTI four letters, there is an additional identity trait (Assertive or Turbulent), which is actually to be compatible with the Big Five personality dimensions.

The Big Five originated from the research of many scientists and has been calibrated through questionnaires. It is an experience-based scale. Therefore, the Big Five has long been used in personality assessment, and its scale is called NEO PI-R. The validity of the Big Five has been partially proven. The main criticism is that participants may be dishonest, leading to distorted results, and that the scale is too complex for those with lower education or lower intelligence to understand.

Interestingly, the personality traits of the Big Five and MBTI do have some connections. Research shows that the agreeableness of the Big Five corresponds to the judgment method of MBTI, and conscientiousness corresponds to the coping style… They can roughly correspond and have many similarities. Therefore, the designers of the 16P website came up with this way of蹭热度.

P.S.: The Big Five tested by gledos is RLOAI, according to the conversion table written by fantasydeity, it can be transcribed as INFJ-T, so it seems that it is indeed a reskin.

P.S. 2: Regarding the online test of the Big Five personality traits, you can go to the open source bigfive-test.com for testing. It is recommended to use Traditional Chinese or English, because the Simplified Chinese translation is too poor, which makes gledos biased to SLOEI, that is, ENTJ-T.

P.S. 3: Conversion algorithm: [E, I, T, -A, J, P, F, -T, N, S] => [S, R, L, C, O, U, A, E, I, N].

Emotional Empathy and Cognitive Empathy

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Empathy, sympathy, and compassion are all Chinese translations of empathy, but there are some differences in the translations of different psychological works. Therefore, the emotional/cognitive empathy in the title can also be written as affective/cognitive empathy.

Psychologists call it empathy to put themselves in the shoes of others. However, in later studies, it was found that this ability is composed of different components, the main ones being emotional empathy and cognitive empathy.

Emotional empathy is like putting others into your own body, with three levels: feeling the pain of others and expressing sympathy or pity; absorbing the pain of others and feeling uncomfortable and anxious; absorbing the body language, facial expressions and various details of others, so as to know what others are thinking.

Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is putting yourself in the position of others, that is, thinking from another person’s perspective. It is using your own scale to measure the environment of others, so you may not be able to obtain similar feelings. Usually, cognitive empathy and emotional empathy work together to become the underlying engine of empathy function. It’s just that different people have different strengths in the two types of empathy.

The two are relatively balanced in ordinary people, and one may be dominant, but as long as you think deeply, both engines can be used. However, patients with autism spectrum disorders often have higher emotional empathy, but lower cognitive empathy. Some theories believe that the main difference between patients with autism spectrum disorders and normal people is that the difference in empathy configuration is too large, leading to mutual incomprehension.

P.S. There are also differences in empathy configuration between different genders and regions. Women’s cognitive empathy scores were significantly higher than men in 36 regions, and similar in the other 21 regions.

MBTI

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MBTI is a personality type / psychological type based on Jung’s psychology, re-created by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, mother and daughter. Since Jung’s theory has long been considered unscientific, and the Myers mother and daughter did not have psychological qualifications, MBTI is often evaluated as pseudoscience.

However, the personality types measured by MBTI may be surprisingly consistent with the status quo, which cannot be explained by the Barnum effect. For example, INFJs extremely hate making mistakes, so they often use ambiguous words such as “maybe”, “probably”, and “perhaps” when speaking to prevent themselves from making mistakes. In addition to this, there are other various characteristics:

Strong adherence to one’s own principles and fair rules; very willing to help others, but repelling others from helping oneself; amazing insight, easy to discover other people’s lies and concealments; unwilling to see others suffer, even those considered villains; maintaining a safe social distance from others, but this distance easily makes others feel alienated; hating rote memorization, needing principles, such as documentaries introducing the thoughts of scholars at the time; perfectionism; more mature than peers; often asking “why?”; no motivation for things outside of interests; often daydreaming about deducing the future and thinking about complex issues, etc.

It is difficult to say that these traits and phenomena can be arbitrarily applied to anyone, so MBTI can at least allow people with various different ways of thinking to realize the differences between their own way of thinking and others, and that there are many same people using similar ways of thinking. This makes the approximately 2% of INFJs no longer feel lonely and worried about being misunderstood.

P.S.: It is usually inaccurate for minors to test MBTI, and adults also have a high possibility of misjudgment. The accuracy rate of the ordinary scale on the website is 50%, and it is only 85% with the help of officially certified administrators. (From Bone Bro Says) And the difference is only psychological characteristics, not directly related to ability.

It’s like in the game Deadlock, the same hero can equip various inclinations such as meat, physical, and soul power. Although some heroes will have lower efficiency in equipping meat, it is up to you to decide how to play, not the developers, right? Life can also be off-track.

Sensory Processing Sensitivity

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The following text is from the paper “Current Situation of Sensory Processing Sensitivity of Chinese College Students: Gender and Cultural Differences” by Ye Tong, He Ziqiao, and Chen Chaonan, under the (CC BY 4.0) license.

Sensory processing sensitivity is a personality or temperament trait proposed by Aron et al. in 1997. Individuals with high sensory processing sensitivity are called Highly Sensitive Persons (HSP).

Highly sensitive people are very sensitive to both internal and external stimuli, including environmental sensitivity, social sensitivity, emotional sensitivity, and physiological sensitivity. This highly developed nervous system has both advantages and disadvantages. Highly sensitive people are more likely to perceive details in the environment; but at the same time, they are also more vulnerable to environmental “invasion” – easily feeling upset and exhausted in highly stimulating environments. She uses DOES to describe highly sensitive people, D (Depth of Processing) refers to processing information more deeply, O (Over-stimulation) refers to being easily affected by over-stimulation, E (Emotional Reactivity) refers to stronger emotional reactions, and S (Sensing of Subtle) refers to being more likely to perceive details. Therefore, how to leverage the strengths of high sensitivity and avoid the shortcomings of high sensitivity is a lifelong topic for highly sensitive groups.

The results of this study show that there are significant differences in sensory processing sensitivity between Chinese and American college students. Compared with American college students, Chinese college students generally have higher sensory processing sensitivity, especially in the “detail processing” dimension. This may be due to the difference in the acceptance of “sensitivity” between Eastern and Western cultures. Studies have shown that cultural background has an impact on the development of children’s temperament types. In Western societies, “sensitivity” may be labeled with negative connotations such as “introverted”, “shy”, and “reserved”; but in Eastern societies, the same “sensitive” coping styles may have different evaluations. For example, in a collectivist cultural background, shyness is more conducive to teamwork, and shy individuals are also considered to have higher leadership abilities.

In addition, there are also gender differences in sensory processing sensitivity. Chinese female college students generally have higher sensory processing sensitivity than Chinese male college students; however, in a German community sample, the sensory processing sensitivity of German women is lower than that of German men. This may also be due to the different expectations and requirements of society for male and female genders in different cultural backgrounds. Studies have shown that individuals are influenced and pressured by sociocultural factors and tend to make judgments and behaviors that conform to the social environment. For example, in the Eastern cultural background, girls are often considered gentle, quiet, shy, timid, and sensitive; while boys are considered bold, cheerful, reckless, and careless. This different attitude towards “sensitivity” also affects the development of individual personality.