(2017-01-18) Youand Your Therapist Can Change Your Personality

You (and Your Therapist) Can Change Your Personality (cf Personality Test). In an analysis of 207 studies, published this month in the journal Psychological Bulletin, a team of six researchers found that personality can and does change, and by a lot, and fairly quickly. But only with a therapist’s help. (Imagine that.)

Therapy, this analysis found, seems to be especially effective at decreasing neuroticism, a trait that “not only disposes you to anxiety and other negative emotions, but to spending lots of time ruminating about all those feelings,” as my colleague Drake Baer has put it. Past research (not to mention common sense) has suggested that people’s personalities generally tend to mellow as they get older; in particular, neuroticism tends to decrease with age.

Brian Little, a personality psychologist at the University of Cambridge and author of the A-plus 2015 book Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, who draws a distinction between what he calls biogenic traits and sociogenic traits. According to Little, biogenic personality traits are genetically programmed, and, therefore, fixed; sociogenic traits, on the other hand, tend to be more malleable. “The authors do not claim, nor have they shown, that what I call the biogenic aspects of personality have been influenced by clinical intervention,” Little said in an email. “But they have shown that there are measurable changes in the ways we present ourselves to others (and to ourselves) — closer to what I think of as the sociogenic features of personality.”