Personality and Emotional Security

Psychological research on well-being has converged on the three interacting but different broad emotional states that are referred to in this paper as emotional security, loving kindness and satisfaction with life. These states combine and support each other in ways that make them all critical components of both physical and mental health. Emotional security is a sustained psychological sense of safety that facilitates successful management of defensive reactivity. It is the absolute foundation of well-being, making thriving through loving kindness and satisfaction in life possible.

Personality traits are stable but modifiable ways in which people differ in their responses to their lives. Decades of research have focused on finding the origins of personality traits that would account for emotional security. Early personality theorists relied primarily on careful observation and philosophical reflection. Collectively, they proposed common traits that gave a useful picture of persons with healthy personalities. Such individuals were found to maintain high degrees of emotional security through the development of clear identities, self-acceptance, and emotional self-control.
One notable psychologist, Abraham Maslow, developed a theory that remains highly relevant to thriving in life. In an attempt to synthesize a large body of research on personality and motivation, he proposed two types of psychological needs: growth needs and deficiency needs. Growth needs include the needs for belonging and purposeful control of one’s life. Deficiency needs include the needs for survival, safety and self-esteem.

Emotional security is developed and maintained primarily through meeting Maslow’s deficiency needs. According to Maslow, deficiency needs are active when persons perceive a deficiency or threat in their environment or themselves, and subside when they are met. Reaching a sense of emotional security or sustained general sense of physical and psychological safety allows individuals to then respond to growth needs.
Early personality theorists gave us a very noble picture of the positive side of mental health that is holding up well with time. This picture also gave a solid thrust to subsequent personality research conducted with more scientific tools. These tools include animal brain and behavioral studies, valid psychological measurements, human brain imaging techniques, and the identification and measurement of neurotransmitters, peptides, hormones and mirror neurons. The combined research supports the contention that most individual differences in personality can be accounted for by differences in the thriving and self-defense systems. While there are many ways to look at the origins and contributions of personality to emotional security, three well-studied components combine to make powerful contributions to emotional well-being. These components are temperaments, attachment security and learned coping responses.

The Stability of Temperaments

Many scientists refer to personality traits that are shown to have highly significant genetic components as temperaments. For decades researchers documented the existence and nature of a number of emotional, cognitive and behavioral temperaments in people that appear to be biologically based and remain relatively stable over most stages of development. Mary Rothbart at the University of Oregon was the leading theorist and researcher to verify and examine the temperaments that most influence the human state of emotional security.

Her extensive work on the measurement of temperaments led to the conclusion that there are two main types of temperamental reactivity to life. The first, based primarily in fearfulness, is an important component in defensive reactivity and emotional security. It is experienced as the intensity and duration of negative emotional reactions experienced in response to normal life challenges. Rothbart called this personality trait emotional reactivity.
Rothbart discovered that the stable trait of emotional reactivity can change over time, and its expression can vary from one situation to another. Individuals differ remarkably in the defensive emotional intensity with which they respond to any given situation. Many other researchers have documented that emotional reactivity at any point in time is related to the level of stress that has been accumulated to that point.

The second temperament, that Rothbart termed surgency, is based in thriving emotional responses to people and opportunities in life. Consequently, the personality traits that are central to surgency are important positive components of emotional security, loving kindness and satisfaction with life. Collectively, they serve as resources for managing stress and resolving distressing experiences.

Emotional security is highly reflected in our moods. The prevalent mood of each individual seems to seek and maintain a consistent level, based on his temperamental disposition of thriving and defensive reactivity. These stable aspects of personality can be attributed in part to the differences that occur when DNA initially organizes the thriving and defending systems. Each system subsequently makes a separate contribution to emotional security.

The thriving system is organized to promote well-being through positive emotional engagement with people and opportunities. The defensive system is organized to promote well-being by directing constructive responses to real threats. People differ at birth in the effectiveness of these systems, and considerable research indicates that these differences exert influences throughout the lives of individuals. The early emergence and stability of the traits that are produced by these two systems led researchers to call them temperaments. However, Mary Rothbart and her colleagues found that these temperaments are modified by experiences as well. Unfortunately, persons high in temperamental emotional reactivity are prone to avoid many opportunities for thriving life experiences.

Every once in a while a particular line of research produces significant advances in our understanding of people. Personality researchers hit a goldmine with the “strange situation”. It started when infants and toddlers were placed in new situations with their mothers, objects, toys and other children, and then carefully observed. At a specified time their mothers left the room without them. Each child's level of security was measured by observing thriving and defensive reactions.

The degree to which children ventured away from their mothers to engage toys and other children in positive ways is the thriving reaction that reflects their level of surgency. The degree of emotional distress exhibited when mothers left the room is the defensive reaction. The children observed in these studies varied significantly in these two reactions, which subsequently became the hallmarks for emotional security in early childhood. Throughout life emotional security is reflected in our responses to two main types of challenges: engaging life opportunities and coping with life adversities.

Many of the children who participated in the early strange situation research were studied periodically over decades, even into middle adulthood. Their levels of security seemed remarkably stable and predicted success in education, relationships, and careers. As a group, children initially high in thriving reactivity and low in defending reactivity were subsequently found to have low levels of reported stress and stress hormones, and mild reactions to the usual stressful situations encountered in life. They overcame initial disappointments quickly and moved on with life in constructive ways, a trait that has since been termed resiliency.

Children initially high in defensive reactivity tended to report high levels of stress throughout life, had high stress hormones and adjusted poorly to normal life challenges. It is important to point out that these trends are found though measuring large groups of individuals over time. They verify that individuals have different genetic temperamental make-ups that influence their defensive emotional reactivity through life. When looking at any one individual, life experiences exert powerful forces to enhance or mitigate temperament, especially experiences with attachment.

Personality Measures Weigh In

Another line of research important to the study of personality and temperaments has been taking place for decades. It started with attempts to measure the personality traits proposed by early theories. A statistical tool called factor analysis allows researchers to look at personality measurements like biologists look at cells in a microscope, identifying component parts. The process identifies the component traits that underlie large numbers of personality measurements on large groups of individuals. It gives a closer approximation of the structure of personality.
The limitation in this procedure is that researchers must specify at the beginning of the analysis how many traits they are looking for. So the procedure has to be applied to searches for different numbers of traits, and the results have to be examined to see which numbers of traits seem to account well for the large number of personality items measured. Fortunately, only two solutions from this line of research have produced excellent results: two traits and five traits. This finding has a wonderful advantage because it gives two different legitimate views of the same thing: the structure of personality.

In the two trait view, the major traits of personality were named “neuroticism” and “extroversion”, both old terms from the earlier years of psychology. When examined closely, neuroticism turned out to be simply the average duration and intensity of negative feelings and moods the individual experiences. Subsequent research has shown that the underlying basis of this trait is what this paper refers to as the individual's level of defensive emotional reactivity.
Extroversion (or surgency) was found to be a combination of one's level of satisfying engagement with life and people, and average level of positive feelings. This finding is entirely consistent with the two behaviors discovered to be so important to security in the strange situation: low negative emotionality and high engagement with people and opportunities. This means that personality at the most basic level is the degree to which a person's life is experienced through the thriving and defending systems. These two systems account for a very large majority of all of the individual differences that theorists and researchers call personality traits.

An important and unexpected outcome of the two trait view is that thriving and defensive reactivity are not simply opposites. Their levels do not have a high negative correlation with each other. Persons that are low in defensive reactivity are not necessarily high in thriving reactivity. Persons that are low in thriving reactivity are not consistently high in defensive reactivity. This supports the idea that mental-emotional positivity and negativity operate over time on the two different systems, even though they affect one another in any given moment. The defensive feelings that move us away from threat, and the thriving feelings that move us toward life engagement, do suppress each other when they are active.

The work on temperaments by Mary Rothbart has essentially been validated by factor analytic research on personality measures. Emotional reactivity and surgency do seem to be the most powerful stable personality traits across the life span for individuals, exerting influence in most of the situations in their lives. Together they explain a great deal of the differences between individuals and the ways they approach life.
The five trait solution in the factor analysis of personality added agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to new experiences and people to the two main traits. Presumably those three additional traits are buried in or overpowered by extroversion when only two traits are identified by factor analysis. This is due to the fact that extroverts as a group are much higher in those traits.

The three additional traits give a good indication of the qualities of surgency that are measured by personality tests and contribute to success and satisfaction in life. They explain how individuals high in surgency thrive in life. Such people are basically agreeable, conscientious and open to new ideas and experiences. Openness means that they are emotionally free to consider new information and alter their perspectives, not that they just try anything. Many scientists believe that these “Big 5” traits represent the most accurate theory and measure of personality. So, there is a great deal of practical implication in these findings that is explained throughout this paper.

Attachment Security

Work on the role of temperaments that began with the strange situation research gave impetus to research on attachment security and care-giver attunement. Secure and insecure children were found as groups to differ in terms of the adequacy of their attachment to their parents. More recent research has found that temperamental emotional reactivity and attachment security make separate and complementary contributions to our general emotional security. Attuned care-giving and secure attachment throughout the life span provides individuals with psychological nutrients that promote maturation of both the thriving and self-defense systems.

Caregivers are attuned when they respond to others with empathy and constructive emotional support. Secure attachment positions individuals to be recipients of loving kindness. The resulting experiences prepare individuals to be secure caregivers and sources of loving kindness. Sustained loving kind care-giving fosters a life of psychological and behavioral self-transcendence in which care for oneself is balanced with care of others.
Allan Shore at UCLA presents considerable evidence that deficient care-giving and trauma in early life undermines critical growth in neurological and psychological structures which subsequently operate the self-defense system. As a group, children with high defensive reactivity compared with children with low defensive reactivity have been found to have mothers who responded poorly to their children’s emotional needs. Insecure attachment and childhood traumas can result in life-long elevated defensive reactivity.

Longitudinal research at the University of Minnesota, more recently expanded and reported by Jeffry Simpson and his colleagues, has demonstrated that that secure attachment in early life sets individuals on paths of social competence in elementary school, close friendships at age sixteen and secure romantic relationships as adults. However, the presence or absence of early secure attachments does not completely overshadow the impact of quality attachment experiences throughout the rest of life. Secure attachments are beneficial whenever they occur in life, and can help reverse trends of chronic defensive reactivity resulting from a history of neglectful or abusive care.

Learned Coping Strategies

Walter Mischel at Columbia University made another monumental contribution to our understanding of personality. His theory and research found that many behaviors previously thought to reflect temperaments are actually stable learned coping responses to given types of situations. Situational cues similar to those from past experiences automatically activate basic feelings, and emotional thoughts are close behind. Coping responses to these situational cues are adopted over time to respond to types of challenging situations. Some responses are adaptive while others are maladaptive.
The “traits” of agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to new ideas and experiences are more likely learned coping responses supported by a high degree of surgency. This is because individuals high in surgency tend to learn and use these coping responses in more situations. However, persons low in surgency may also learn and use these coping responses as well. After all, they have some degree of surgency.

While positive and negative conditions of safety, health, quality of attachment and care-giving can have lasting or permanent effects on emotional security, how we cope with those conditions may be as important. We create our experiences in part through the implementation of learned coping responses and strategies to specific types of challenging and threatening situations, many of which become rather stable aspects of our personalities. Our coping responses either mature or erode the functions of the thriving and defending systems through self-perpetuating processes referred to elsewhere in this paper as spiraling up and spiraling down.

All of the thriving behaviors described in this paper can be combined to form constructive coping strategies that promote thriving experiences that sustain levels of emotional well-being beyond those dictated simply by temperament. However, such defensive coping strategies as denying problems, suppressing defensive feelings and adopting the position of a helpless victim can also become ingrained features of personality. Since our coping strategies are learned, we can replace limiting strategies with more beneficial ones. This is one of the most viable ways to address the need for personal growth.

The Ratio of Positive to Negative Moods

People who are mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy repeatedly report that they are generally happy. Scientists have their own term for happiness, subjective well-being. This reflects the fact that researchers have to rely largely on what people report about themselves, and must believe that these reports are based primarily on common subjective experiences. Fortunately, the degree of happiness reported by individuals is well validated by independent observations, and by the ratings of their happiness by their relatives and friends.

While there is undoubtedly some difference in the criteria each person uses to rate his happiness, research shows that people mainly rate their happiness on the ratio of their persistent positive and negative moods. In other words, subjective happiness is based mainly on the moods people experience while operating primarily in the thriving and primarily in the defending systems. Since we can be low in both positive and negative moods at times, it is possible for us to be only marginally conscious of both thriving and defending emotions at times.

The moods of research subjects have been successfully monitored by using a time-sampling technique. This is accomplished by having a pager devise vibrate at random times over two weeks, and requiring subjects to rate the polarity (positive, neutral, negative) and intensity of their current mood each time. At times we are in moods with such low emotional intensity that they are difficult to accurately rate as positive or negative. In this state we may be emotionally well regulated, but not necessarily thriving.

However, people who rate themselves as very happy at the beginning of such studies tend to report themselves to be in positive moods when sampled about 85% of the time. This research also demonstrated that general happiness is more related to the frequency of positive moods than the intensity of those moods. Thriving, even at consistent low levels of positive emotional intensity, contributes directly to happiness.

For the purpose of psychological studies, general happiness in life can be reliably determined by a simple quotient that takes both positive and negative moods into account. This process has been scientifically developed and verified, and used with great success in research. This measure has 10 statements that the individual can endorse as being basically like himself, yielding one point for each statement endorsed. Five statements, ranging for marginally positive to extremely positive, reflect the intensity and duration of positive moods. Five statements, ranging for marginally negative to extremely negative, reflect the intensity and duration of negative moods. The happiness quotient is calculated by dividing the positive mood score (zero to five) by the positive and negative mood scores combined. This results in a total score that increases with positive moods and decreases with negative moods.

Any score below .50 indicates that the individual is likely to be found by a variety of other criteria to be unhappy and emotionally unhealthy. This means that he or she is living defensively more than half the time. A score of .70 is consistent with a general state of happiness, and a score of .80 is consistent with a general state of thriving. A close examination of how this quotient works reveals that individuals can be happy and thrive at low levels of positive moods if they have very low levels of negative moods.

The first way to create and maintain one’s happiness quotient is to lower one’s defensive reactivity by managing stress and resolving distress. Remember Maslow’s principle: safety needs are met before growth needs. The other two ways are to grow in loving kindness and in self-determinism. To do this we must be able to react to life challenges through our thriving systems. Inability to accomplish this undermines our happiness, and consequently our physical and emotional well-being. In the next section we explore how thriving practices enhance lives and prevent stress and distress. In a later section we examine how living defensively poses perils with serious negative consequences.

Biological Measures of Stress, Distress and Emotional Regulation

While stress and distress are highly related, understanding their separate contributions to how we responses to our lives is incredibly useful in research and everyday life. Jim Blascovich at the University of California, Santa Barbara and his colleagues have expanded the earlier work of Richard Lazarus described in the last section to help make this distinction. Their research has demonstrated that there are measurable differences in human responses to challenges versus threats.

Stress is the response of the sympathetic nervous system that creates sufficient autonomic arousal to respond to physical and mental challenges. When stress is acute, arousal subsides when a challenge is sufficiently met. When stress is chronic, sufficient intervals of relative relaxation are not experienced. Over time chronic stress from challenges becomes distressing. In research, stress is most often measured by self-report, baseline levels of the stress hormone cortisol and by changes in cortisol levels in response to exposures to challenges.

Distress is the response to threats that also activates the sympathetic nervous system and ultimately elevates cortisol levels. It also can be acute or chronic, subsiding after peaking or lingering for an indeterminate period of time as components of distressing life themes. Distress is measured in research primarily by self-report, baseline levels of amydala activity and changes in amydala activity in response to threats. Like challenges threats are also stressful. Unlike threats, realistic challenges do not result in significant changes in amydala activity. What we perceive as unrealistic challenges may represent conscious or unconscious threats.

In the last section threat appraisal was described in some detail. While there is significant involvement of the mind and other areas of the brain, threat appraisal is performed in large part biologically by the amydala-prefrontal cortex circuit. The amydala provides an automatic threat alarm and the prefrontal cortex regulates the intensity and duration of the alarm. It is this alarm that is the foundation of every type of distress.

The activity of the automatic threat alarm is referred to as emotional reactivity and the control of the resulting intensity and duration of the alarm is called emotional regulation. Research has demonstrated that increased activity of relevant parts of the prefrontal cortex usually corresponds with reductions of amydala activity, cortisol levels and self-reports of reduced distress. The prefrontal cortex operates largely through the functions of language and reasoning, and it is these functions that are presumed to be the main tools of reflective appraisal of situations.

These typical patterns of brain activity and stress hormone secretion allow researchers to compare patters of emotional reactivity and regulation when subjects respond to threatening tasks. It is common to find distinctly different patterns during the same task completed under different instructions. Some research instructions require subjects to respond to threats with maladaptive coping strategies while others require subjects to use adaptive coping strategies. The fact that the vast majority of subjects can follow instructions to use both maladaptive and adaptive coping strategies provides important proof that we can intentionally choose different ways to react emotionally to our perceived threats. Researchers are continually demonstrating the power of the intentional mind to regulate distress.

.