Personality and the Senses

When people think of Psychology, one of the first words that usually pop-out is the term personality. In this case, why not connect this concept with sensory perception? Luckily that is exactly what Ilona Croy and her team did in their 2010 paper entitled "Agreeable Smellers and Sensitive Neurotics - Correlations among Personality Traits and Sensory Thresholds". In their research they investigated on several of the more common senses such as smell, touch, and taste and one other less common, which is trigeminal (I would expound on these later). Generally, their study showed that agreeable people tend to have a better sense of smell, significantly enhanced trigeminal sensitivity in neurotic people, and an enhanced pain tolerance in highly conscientious people.

The personality dimensions of NEO-PI were used to determine the correlations between personality traits and sensory thresholds. It is a scale crafted by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae back in the 1970s when they were researching on how personality changes with age (Burger, 2011). The NEO-FFI that was used in the research conducted by Croy and her coworkers is an updated, shortened version of the original NEO-PI. It still consists of the five dimensions - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism and their respective facets.

OCEAN and Facets

As for the senses studied by the researchers, they focused on chemosensory perception like olfactory, gustatory, and trigeminal. Olfactory is the sense of see while gustatory is for taste perception. Trigeminal, on the other hand, is a less common chemosensory channel that is closely associated with the perception of pain and temperature information in the skin (Purves, Augustine, Fitzpatrick, Hall, La Mantia, & White, 2012). More generally, it is responsible for the burning/stinging sensation typically felt when eating spicy foods or when detecting fires.

In the actual experiment, the researchers initially asked each participant to answer the NEO-FFI questionnaire before subjecting them to threshold testing. In order to prevent visual cues from prompting responses, each participant was blindfolded before starting the chemosensory testing procedure. Stimuli used for the tests include Carbon Dioxide for trigeminal, Phenyl Ethyl Alcohol for the olfactory, Citric Acid and Salt (NaCl) for the sour and salty tastes of the gustatory, and a small, continuous electrical signal for the pain perception.

After all the number crunching of the data collected from a total of 126 healthy subjects (41 men, and 85 women), and the necessary corrections the researchers found out that there is a small, but significant positive correlation between agreeableness (people perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm, and considerate (Burger, 2011)), and orzo detection sensitivity. This means that although the effect is small, people who score higher in that dimension or the personality test tend to have more sensitive noses as compared to people who scored low in agreeableness. In addition to this, the same trend is found in neuroticism (characterised by anxiety, fear, moodiness, worry, envy, frustration, jealousy, and loneliness (Burger, 2011) and trigeminal chemosensory detection sensitivity. Conversely, there are no significant patterns found between extraversion, and openness to any of the perception taste used in the experiment.

Image Sources:

NEO-FFI

- http://www.psihoterapeutul.ro/wp-content/gallery/neo-ffi/neoffi2.jpg

5 Dimensions

- http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/psychology-research-methods-core-skills-and-concepts/section_09/ef2ea72504412c1ca95aadcd08ca6c14.jpg

References:

Burger, J. M. (2011). Personality (8th Edition ed.). Belmont, California, United States of America: Cengage Learning.

Croy, I., Springborn, M., Lotsch, J., Johnston, A. N., & Hummel, T. (2011). Agreeable Smellers and Sensitive Neurotics - Correlations among Personality Traits and Sensory Threshold. (H. Matsunami, Ed.) PLoS ONE , 6 (4).

Purves, D., Augustine, G., Fitzpatrick, D., Hall, W., La Mantia, A.-S., & White, L. (2012). Neuroscience (5th Edition ed.). Sunderland, MA, United States of America: Sinauer Associates, Inc.