psychological explanations - eyesenck's theory

• extraversion

  • outgoing people who enjoy risk and danger because their nervous systems are under aroused
  • bored, easily outgoing
• neuroticism

  • refers to people with a negative outlook who get upset easily. Their lack of stability is due to an overactive response to threat (fight or flight)
  • negative emotional states, anxiety, stress, depression
• psychoticism

  • refers to an aggressive, anti-social person who lacks empathy
  • this may be related to high levels of testosterone 
  • aggressive, impulsive, egocentric, not concerned for the welfare of others
• introversion


  quiet, pessimistic, reserved
• stability


  • passive, careful, thoughtful, controlled, peaceful
• normality

  • stable, considered, balanced
• biological basis

  • extraversion- determined by overall arousal levels in a person’s nervous system, they seek external stimulation to increase their cortical (brain) arousal
  • introverts seek to avoid over stimulation
  • neuroticism- determined by the level of stability/reactivity in the sympathetic nervous system how a person responds in situations of fight/flight
  • a neurotic person reacts and gets upset very quickly. At the opposite end of this dimension, the stable person has a more unreactive nervous system- they are calm under pressure
  • psychoticism- this has been linked to higher levels of testosterone, which means that men are more likely to be at this end of the spectrum than women
  • arousal- extroverts seek more arousal and therefore engage in potentially more dangerous activities
  • neurotics are unstable and therefore prone to overreact in situations of threat
• conditioning

  • conditioning normally prevents any wrongdoing after childhood
  • punishment, therefore, reduced the chances of that behaviour being repeated (operant conditioning)
  • Eysenck claimed that people who were high in extrovertism and neuroticism were less easily conditioned and therefore do not learn to avoid anti-social behaviour
• research support

  • Zuckerman (1987)- a critical look at three arousal constructs in personality theories- optimal levels of arousal, strength of the nervous system and sensitivities to signals of reward and punishment
  • 0.52 correlation with MZ twins and neuroticism +.51 for extraversion
  • 0,24 correlation with DZ twins and neuroticism +.12 for extraversion
• personality is not consistent

  • a person may not be lively and anxious all the time
  • people can change depending on the context
  • Mischel and Peake (1982)- family, friends and strangers were asked to rate 63 students in a variety of situations and found almost no correlation between traits displayed. Some regularities were found but only when the situation was the same
  • therefore, we simply don’t have one personality
• personality test isn't reliable

  • they don’t reflect reality as they might not have been suitable to give only a yes or no response
  • they then may pick the most socially desirable response, which may not be truthful
  • we tend to select the most desirable response
• Dunlop et al (2012)

  • carried out research on criminal and non-criminal personality
  • they found that both extroversion and psychoticism as well as lying were good predictors of delinquency
  • however, this study was only using friends and students of the researcher and was an assessment of minor offences only