What drives you: emotions and personality

Philip Brandner -

Finding your Passion

Young woman and her mother in an open field jumping.

What are emotions?

Emotions are designed to drive behavior1. Any living organism has two basic behaviors. Approach and avoid. Preferably, you want to approach good things, like food, and avoid bad things like predators. How could you make an organism do these things?

With positive and negative emotions. Food triggers a positive feeling and danger elicits a negative feeling. Over time the organism will learn to approach food and avoid predators.

We might have a more sophisticated set of emotions than an amoeba, but the same basic principles apply to us. Emotions are an ancient system designed to drive our behavior. You might sometimes disagree with your own emotions but they are the core to understanding what drives us.

The Neuroscience of emotions

How does evolution bake these emotions into us? By using the brain. Evolution can direct the development of our brains via genes. Over millions of years, this has led to the development of emotional systems in our brains. We have an emotional system of pleasure, fear, anger, and so on.

Basic emotional systems seem to be universal in all humans and many mammals2.

What is personality?

Personality is a stable way of perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting in the world. In the past psychologists thought of personality in the form of types. This person is type A and this person is type B. We now know that there are no types; only personality traits3.

Traits are dimensions of personality. Every person's character can be broadly described using five personality traits:

Each of us has a score on all of the five dimensions. You might be high on one and low on another. Most people are somewhere in the middle. In technical terms: personality traits are normally distributed.

Extraversion spectrum population distribution.Extraversion spectrum population distribution.

These Big 5 personality traits are stable across your life, exist across many cultures around the world, and predict real-life outcomes; like divorce rates, mental health problems, job satisfaction, and how you behave.

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3 steps to a new career

There are only three steps to take charge of your career path.

  1. Take the personality career test
  2. Unlock your career matches
  3. Find a meaningful career

How do emotions shape your personality?

Can we find a relationship between emotions and our personalities? Yes. Almost all of the big 5 personality traits have an emotional basis4. Some people think human personality has developed from basic emotional systems5.

Extraversion is related to pleasure and play. Agreeableness is driven by empathy. Conscientiousness is (probably) driven by shame and disgust. Openness is driven by curiosity and awe. And neuroticism is driven by fear and sadness6.

Personality can be understood by their underlying emotional drives. They are not separate. Personality is the key puzzle piece between your behavior and your emotions.

The relationship between genes, the brain, emotions, and personality.

Finding your fuel - what drives you?

But why should you care? Because by understanding your own personality you are able to infer your unique combination of emotional drives. You can discover what fuel your mind is running on - what drives you at your core.

If you are high in Neuroticism, fear might be a core emotion in your life. This might sound quite negative and it can be, but it can also be your fuel. Fear of missing out, and fear of not being good enough have motivated many great people to achieve extraordinary things.

You might be more driven by reward, power, and status. Which is common for people with high Extraversion. Nothing wrong with wanting money and status. If you know this is what you value, why not admit it and go for it? More power to you (pun intended).

If you are more like me you are high in Openness and driven by curiosity. I enjoy discovering and learning new things. It motivates me and provides a deep sense of accomplishment.

People high in Agreeableness are often driven by empathy and care for others. They gain meaning and motivation by helping others and collaborating closely with other people to achieve a common goal.

We developed our own career test based on cutting-edge science. Take a look at our scientific personality career test:

References

  1. Charles Darwin (1872): The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
  2. Jaak Panksepp (1988): Affective Neuroscience. In Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology 2nd edition.
  3. Robert McCrae (2020): The Five-Factor Model of Personality: Consensus and Controversy. In Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology 2nd edition.
  4. Rainer Reisenzein et al. (2020): Personality and Emotion.
  5. Colin DeYoung (2015): Cybernetic Big Five Theory.
  6. Montag & Panksepp (2017): Primary Emotional Systems and Personality: An Evolutionary Perspective.