Extraversion but not Depression Predicts Reward Sensitivity: Revisiting the Measurement of Anhedonic Phenotypes
"Neuroticism is strongly related to depression and most other forms of psychopathology, and the negative affect and sensitivity to punishment characterizing Neuroticism is a key component of depression.
Nonetheless, depression is also related to lack of reward responsiveness, reduced positive emotionality, and social withdrawal, all of which are components of low Extraversion.
Though Extraversion is often considered colloquially as primarily related to sociability, a large body of evidence suggests that the defining characteristic of Extraversion is reward sensitivity generally, not mere sociability, such that extraverts typically have more energy and positive affect than introverts even in nonsocial situations."
A cybernetic theory of autism: Autism as a consequence of low trait plasticity
"The Big Five personality traits were originally thought to be orthogonal and the highest level of the hierarchy of traits, but they have proved to show a regular pattern of correlations that reveals two higher-order factors, or metatraits, above them.
Stability represents the shared variance of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and low Neuroticism, and Plasticity represents the shared variance of Extraversion and Openness/Intellect.
CB5T asserts that these two dimensions correspond to the two most fundamental requirements for a cybernetic system to survive in a changing or unpredictable environment.
When faced with unpredictability, goal-directed adaptive systems must have (1) sufficient stability to resist disruption and maintain effective goal pursuit, and (2) sufficient plasticity to adapt their functioning to new conditions.
The unpredicted or unknown is unique as a class of stimuli because it is innately both a threat and an incentive reward, and Stability reflects the necessity of dealing with the threat posed by the unknown, whereas Plasticity reflects the necessity of dealing with its promise.
Although Stability and Plasticity may seem opposed semantically, they are in fact complementary and in dynamic tension with each other.
Research using multiple informants for optimal measurement of the Big Five indicates that the metatraits are uncorrelated in the population.
One must be sufficiently stable in unpredictable situations to be capable of exploration and adaptation, and one must be capable of adapting to the unknown to remain stable over time.
“The opposite of stability is not plasticity but instability, and the opposite of plasticity is not stability but rigidity”. (…)
The first premise is that Plasticity exists early in life (i.e., not only in adults) as a trait reflecting inter-individual variability in the tendency to explore and generate new adaptations.
The second premise is that the development of almost all psychological competencies depends on cybernetic processes directed toward exploration of the unknown.
If these two premises are true, then an extremely low tendency to explore the unknown (corresponding with low Plasticity) could alter the development of a wide range of competencies in a predictable way. (…)
One theory of ASD that emphasizes the role of diminished motivation for social interactions is social motivation theory (SMT).
This promising approach inverts the direction of causality in well-known cognitive models of ASD (e.g., the Theory of Mind model; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), which have traditionally argued that social motivation deficits stem from more fundamental deficits in social cognition.
Instead, SMT argues that a radically decreased level of social motivation and attention during sensitive stages of development will deprive a child of important social inputs that are necessary for developing social cognitive abilities. (…)
In contrast to SMT, however, positing a deficit in Plasticity does not necessitate that people with ASD are entirely disinterested in other people or incapable of affiliative feelings (which are associated with Agreeableness as well as Extraversion in the Big Five).
Rather, they are deterred by the unpredictability that lies in the process of engaging with people to form relationships and build a set of social adaptations, because they do not find the unpredictability sufficiently rewarding to counterbalance its simultaneously threatening quality.
This may explain robust evidence that seems to contradict SMT: ASD individuals often suffer from loneliness and almost universally report the desire for friends."
MBTI & Ideas
“Personality traits and their cybernetic functions”
Cybernetic
“The fundamental premise of CB5T is that any adequate theory of personality must be based in cybernetics, the study of goal-directed, self-regulating systems. (...)
Personality traits are probabilistic descriptions of relatively stable patterns of emotion, motivation, cognition, and behavior, in response to classes of stimuli that have been present in human cultures over evolutionary time. (...)
From a dynamical systems perspective, traits are equivalent to persistent attractor states of the cybernetic system; they indicate states toward which the person will tend to gravitate but do not preclude that person from being in other states.”
Metatraits
“Stability: Protection of goals, interpretations, and strategies from disruption by impulses. Negative pole: Unstable.
Plasticity: Exploration: creation of new goals, interpretations, and strategies. Negative pole: Rigid.”
Extraversion
“Extraversion: Behavioral exploration and engagement with specific rewards (i.e., goals to approach). Negative pole: Reserved.
Aspect 2) Enthusiasm: Consummatory reward sensitivity: enjoyment of actual or imagined goal attainment. Negative pole: Unenthusiastic.”
Neuroticism
“Neuroticism: Defensive responses to uncertainty, threat, and punishment. Negative pole: Unflappable.
Aspect 1) Volatility: Active defense to avoid or eliminate threats. Negative pole: Even-tempered.
Aspect 2) Withdrawal (anxiety, depression): Passive avoidance: Inhibition of goals, interpretations, and strategies, in response to uncertainty or error. Negative pole: Self-assured.”
Openness/Intellect
“Openness/Intellect: Cognitive exploration and engagement with information. Negative pole: Unimaginative.
Aspect 1) Intellect: Detection of logical or causal patterns in abstract and semantic information. Negative pole: Unintellectual.
Aspect 2) Openness to Experience: Detection of spatial and temporal correlational patterns in sensory and perceptual information. Negative pole: Imperceptive.”
Conscientiousness
“Conscientiousness: Protection of non-immediate or abstract goals and strategies from disruption. Negative pole: Unreliable.
Aspect 1) Industriousness: Prioritization of non-immediate goals. Negative pole: Undisciplined.
Aspect 2) Orderliness: Avoidance of entropy by following rules set by self or others. Negative pole: Disorganized.”
Agreeableness
“Agreeableness: Altruism and cooperation; coordination of goals, interpretations, and strategies with those of others. Negative pole: Selfish.
Aspect 1) Compassion: Emotional attachment to and concern for others. Negative pole: Callous.
Aspect 2) Politeness: Suppression and avoidance of aggressive or norm-violating impulses and strategies. Negative pole: Belligerent.”
Source: DeYoung, Colin G. "Cybernetic big five theory." Journal of Research in Personality 56 (2015): 33-58.
See also: Carl Jung: “Your idea that the probability concept in mathematics corresponds to the archetype was most illuminating. In fact, the archetype represents nothing else but the probability of psychic events.”
DeYoung, Colin G. “Cybernetic big five theory.” Journal of Research in Personality 56 (2015): 33-58.
“Conscientiousness appears to be relatively specific to the problem of governing behavior across long time spans or according to the relatively arbitrary explicit rules that are a function of the complexity of human cultures.
Conscientiousness has been extensively characterized in terms of its consequences for various life outcomes.
It is typically the best predictor, after intelligence, of both academic and occupational success,
and it is also a good predictor of health and longevity, apparently because it predicts avoidance of risky behaviors and engagement in preventive health behaviors.”
——
“Two studies have found Conscientiousness to be associated with volume of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region crucial for maintaining the activation of abstract goals and for executing planned action based on abstract rules. (...)
In one situation, Conscientiousness might encourage suppressing an emotional reaction to a minor threat in order to pursue a non-immediate or abstract goal.
In another situation, however, it might amplify attention to a very similar threat, if the latter was likely to interfere with the larger goal.
Similarly, Conscientiousness should suppress reward-seeking that is a distraction from larger goals but encourage reward-seeking that furthers those goals.”
——
“Industriousness involves self-discipline and the tendency to work hard and effectively without being distracted before tasks are completed.
Orderliness involves neatness, perfectionism, and attention to rules.
Note that the rules that govern orderly people are set not only by others but also by themselves and include rules of conduct and organization that may be, but need not be, shared with other people.”
DeYoung, Colin G. “Cybernetic big five theory.” Journal of Research in Personality 56 (2015): 33-58.
“Openness/Intellect describes individual differences in cognitive exploration, the tendency to seek, detect, appreciate, understand, and utilize both sensory and abstract information.
In cybernetic terms, this trait corresponds to individual differences in the processes of interpretation that allow sensory feedback to be transformed into a model of the world,
which can then be used to detect discrepancies between the current state of the world and the desired state,
as well as to identify potentially goal-relevant stimuli in the environment and to predict what strategies might be most effective in pursuing any given goal.”
——
“People high in Openness/Intellect have more complex and extensive interpretations of the world than people low in the trait, and they are therefore likely to use more creative and innovative strategies to pursue their goals.
At the core of Openness/Intellect are curiosity, imagination, creativity, and innovation; these traits involve both the motivation and the ability to create new interpretations of the world.”
——
“Intellect reflects intellectual engagement with abstract and semantic information,
whereas Openness to Experience reflects engagement with sensory and perceptual information and thus involves aesthetic interests and fantasy proneness. (...)
Intellect is the aspect that encompasses IQ, and it has also been associated with working memory—manipulation of information in conscious attention—which appears to be the cognitive process that most contributes to intelligence.
Openness, in contrast, has been linked to implicit learning, automatic detection of patterns in sensory experience.”
DeYoung, Colin G. “Cybernetic big five theory.” Journal of Research in Personality 56 (2015): 33-58.
“All other things being equal, Extraversion will predict who is more motivated by the possibility of attaining a given reward and who gets more enjoyment out of a reward when attained.
The theory that Extraversion reflects reward sensitivity is reasonably well supported.
A number of the traits that fall within Extraversion, including drive, the tendency to experience positive emotions like joy, and excitement seeking, are clearly conceptually linked to reward sensitivity.”
——
“Assertiveness, reflecting the tendency toward drive, social status, and leadership, is a reflection of wanting—that is, motivation to attain desired goals.
Enthusiasm, reflecting the tendency toward gregarious social interaction and positive emotions, reflects wanting to some extent but is primarily a reflection of liking, the enjoyment experienced on receiving or imagining a reward. (...)
The functional interdependence of liking and wanting helps to explain the coherence of Assertiveness and Enthusiasm within the broader trait of Extraversion.
People who like things more intensely are more likely to want them intensely and to pursue them assertively.”
——
“The CB5T perspective on Extraversion is largely congruent with existing modern (i.e., non-Jungian) perspectives.
It posits that Extraversion is a strongly social trait because many human rewards are social (and the human reward system has undoubtedly evolved to be particularly responsive to social rewards),
but also that Extraversion is not exclusively social and applies to all rewards (with the possible exception of the reward value of information, which is posited to be associated with Openness/Intellect).”
——
“CB5T does suggest, however, that the label ‘‘Detachment’’ may be more accurately descriptive of low Extraversion than is ‘‘Introversion’’.
People who score low in Extraversion are not necessarily turned inward; rather, they are less engaged, motivated, and energized by the possibilities for reward that surround them.
Hence, they talk less, are less driven, and experience less enthusiasm.
They may also find levels of stimulation that are rewarding and energizing for someone high in Extraversion merely annoying or tiring (or even overwhelming, depending on their level of Neuroticism).
Their reserved demeanor is not likely to indicate an intense engagement with the world of imagination and ideas, however, unless they are also high in Openness/Intellect.”
Cybernetic Big Five Theory (Colin G. DeYoung, 2015)
"The fundamental premise of CB5T is that any adequate theory of personality must be based in cybernetics, the study of goal-directed, self-regulating systems.
Cybernetic systems are characterized by their inclusion of one or more goals or reference values, which guide the work carried out by the system.
(In psychology, the term ‘‘goal’’ is sometimes reserved for conscious representations of goals, but the term is more general in cybernetics, and many goals are not conscious.)
Further, all cybernetic systems receive feedback, through some kind of sensory mechanism, indicating the degree to which they are moving toward their goals.
Finally, they are adaptive and adjust their behavior, based on feedback, to pursue their goals.
Cybernetics is a useful, and perhaps even necessary, approach to understanding living things. (…)
The first of the five principles is that personalities are ‘‘individual variations on a general evolutionary design’’.
In many ways, all people are fundamentally similar, reflecting the species-typical, evolved design of the human organism.
Understanding this design is a crucial step toward understanding the variations that constitute personality. (…)
Personality traits are probabilistic descriptions of relatively stable patterns of emotion, motivation, cognition, and behavior, in response to classes of stimuli that have been present in human cultures over evolutionary time.
This definition has at least three important features.
First, it equates traits with the tendency to be in certain emotional, motivational, cognitive, and behavioral states.
This equation is consistent with the work of Fleeson (2001), who has described traits as ‘‘density distributions of states’’ and has used experience sampling to show that people’s average levels of states associated with a given trait are highly stable from week to week and correspond well to trait scores on standard questionnaire assessments of personality. (…)
The hierarchical structure of traits highlights another way in which they are probabilistic: Although the lower-level traits grouped within a higher-level trait are correlated, they are not perfectly correlated.
A high score on a higher-level trait, therefore, indicates high scores on some, but not necessarily all, of the lower-level traits to which it is related.
Thus, the same score on a given trait can be achieved in substantively different ways, relying on different combinations of subtraits.
Much personality research in the second half of the 20th century was focused on organizing traits into a hierarchy based on empirical data.
By the 1990s, a remarkable degree of consensus had arisen that five broad factors account for most of the covariance among more specific traits.
CB5T involves a hierarchy of traits built around these Big Five personality dimensions, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness/Intellect.
The Big Five emerge from factor analyses of ratings of adjectives in many languages as well as from existing personality questionnaires not designed to measure the Big Five.
Further, they appear to be applicable across the lifespan, even in childhood.
Although the Big Five traits were initially assumed to be independent and, thus, the highest level of the hierarchy, they are, in fact, regularly intercorrelated such that there exist two higher-order traits, or metatraits, which we have labeled Stability and Plasticity. (…)
Regarding the universality of the Big Five, CB5T ascribes it to the fact that these traits reflect individual variation in the parameters of a set of cybernetic mechanisms that is present in every intact human brain.
The specific values of these parameters for a given individual at a given time are influenced by experience as well as by genetic endowment, but this does not contradict the universality of the mechanisms themselves. (…)
Extraversion: Behavioral exploration and engagement with specific rewards (i.e., goals to approach).
Neuroticism: Defensive responses to uncertainty, threat, and punishment.
Openness/Intellect: Cognitive exploration and engagement with information.
Conscientiousness: Protection of non-immediate or abstract goals and strategies from disruption.
Agreeableness: Altruism and cooperation; coordination of goals, interpretations, and strategies with those of others. (…)
The CB5T perspective on Extraversion is largely congruent with existing modern (i.e., non-Jungian) perspectives.
It posits that Extraversion is a strongly social trait because many human rewards are social (and the human reward system has undoubtedly evolved to be particularly responsive to social rewards), but also that Extraversion is not exclusively social and applies to all rewards (with the possible exception of the reward value of information, which is posited to be associated with Openness/Intellect).
CB5T does suggest, however, that the label ‘‘Detachment’’ may be more accurately descriptive of low Extraversion than is ‘‘Introversion’’.
People who score low in Extraversion are not necessarily turned inward; rather, they are less engaged, motivated, and energized by the possibilities for reward that surround them. (…)
Whereas Extraversion is most obviously related to the beginning of the cybernetic cycle, Neuroticism is most obviously related to its end, goal comparison, when the current state is compared to the desired state.
This comparison process leads either to a match, indicating goal attainment, or a mismatch, indicating that the goal is not yet attained. (…)
This account implies that the human cybernetic system continually makes comparisons of the current state not only to a desired state but also to a predicted state, including aspects of the current state that are not obviously relevant to a currently operative goal.
In other words, violation of our expectations about the world we perceive increases psychological entropy and is potentially threatening, just like failure of an action to reach its goal.
CB5T specifies that Neuroticism is a function of the parameters that determine whether any increase in psychological entropy triggers a defensive response.
People high in Neuroticism tend to experience negative emotion in response to frequent perceptions that they are not in the state they would like to be in. (…)
At the core of Openness/Intellect are curiosity, imagination, creativity, and innovation; these traits involve both the motivation and the ability to create new interpretations of the world.
This raises the point that most traits have both motivational and ability components, with the former reflecting how likely the system is to attempt to carry out a particular function, and the latter how likely is it to succeed.
This point is particularly salient in relation to Openness/Intellect because it is the only Big Five trait to show a consistent and substantial positive association with IQ, and CB5T considers intelligence to be a facet of Openness/Intellect. (…)
Conscientiousness is most obviously related to the first three stages of the cybernetic cycle.
Higher Industriousness should be associated with the likelihood of activating long-term rather than short-term goals, as well as selecting more effective strategies for meeting those goals, and then resisting distraction while carrying out action.
Orderliness should be associated with the likelihood of activating goals and selecting strategies that conform to rules.
Additionally, however, one would expect the process of goal comparison to differ with Conscientiousness such that those high in the trait should be more likely to generate an error signal based on inadequate progress toward a long-term or rule-based goal.
The final Big Five trait, Agreeableness, represents the general tendency toward cooperation and altruism, as opposed to exploitation and lack of concern for others.
Whereas the other four Big Five traits are posited to reflect cybernetic mechanisms involved in the pursuit of goals in general, Agreeableness reflects variation in a set of mechanisms that exist because human beings are social animals whose survival depends on coordinating their goals, strategies, and interpretations with those of others."
#009 - Because it help us think differently (litteraly)
The last issue of Rotman magazine is dedicated to Thinking about Thinking (part two). It offers a series of articles and essays dealing in great part with emerging tools, thought processes, philosophies, and cognitive research on how to adapt and evolve to operate in today's fast and complex business environment. Jordan Peterson, Colin DeYoung and Joseph Flanders, argue in their piece on ill-defined problems that the "cognitive abilities" required to address wicked problems are in part different from standard problem solving.
In their own words the skills required to solve ill-defined "wicked" problems are "more loosely associative, non-linear and holistic." These stand in contrast with the more linear and analytical skills emphasized by our education system (at any level) and the great majority of organizations. Attempting to define a problem of cultural significance demands a different kind of thought process, one that truly exercises the whole brain and that at the very least will help us expose the limitations of the binary thinking (e.g. style or substance, profits or society) that keep holding us back.
