If you’re more excited by the idea of a holiday party than a quiet evening reading, you may be an extrovert. If it’s the other way around, you may be an introvert. While those labels can be overly simplistic—most people lie somewhere on a spectrum between the two—they’re still useful in understanding ourselves and those…

If you’re more excited by the idea of a holiday party than a quiet evening reading, you may be an extravert. If it’s the other way around, you may be an introvert. While those labels can be overly simplistic—most people lie somewhere on a spectrum between the two—they’re still useful in understanding ourselves and those…

My aunt Jenny Liang had always been a traditional woman with an extroverted personality. She was married for 42 years, retired for seven years, and had five children and nine grandchildren. She liked to cook, and always smiled at everyone and everything. One day, her personality suddenly changed. Her daughters noticed that their mom no…

My aunt Jenny Liang had always been a traditional woman with an extroverted personality. She was married for 42 years, retired for seven years, and had five children and nine grandchildren. She liked to cook, and always smiled at everyone and everything. One day, her personality suddenly changed. Her daughters noticed that their mom no…

Published in 2022, a PLOS ONE research study performed longitudinal assessments of personality changes in 7,109 Americans, aged 18 to 109, during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is reported that, compared to the pre-pandemic period, people became less extroverted, open, agreeable, or conscientious. What is more astonishing is that these changes were equivalent to about one…

Are marshmallows the key to happiness? They might be—but not in the way that you think. In the classic “Marshmallow Experiment” on delayed gratification, researchers brought hundreds of children—mostly around 4 and 5 years old—into a room and offered them a deal. The researcher said that the child could eat a marshmallow now. Or, they…

This article is part of a series on personality and diseases. There are many personality typing systems, and those various types generally fall into these four categories. We explore the emotional pitfalls of each “type” and explained their causative relationship with disease; it is possible to identify with traits across types, as well as the respective ailments….