Recognising the Type A personality

I recently came across this blog about understanding the Type A personality by Elizabeth Scott, a prolific blogger and author on Stress Management. 

According to the blog there are four behavioural characteristics of Type A Behaviour.

• Time Urgency and Impatience
• Free-Floating Hostility or Aggressiveness
• Competitiveness
• Strong Achievement-Orientation

In addition the blog says there four physical characteristics that often accompany TAB:

• Facial Tension (Tight Lips, Clenched Jaw, Etc.)
• Tongue Clicking or Teeth Grinding
• Dark Circles Under Eyes
• Facial Sweating (On Forehead or Upper Lip)

If you look at the first list and know the Humm-Wadsworth components you quickly realise the congruency between a Type A personality and the Politician or P component.  High Ps are driven by the desire to win and are competitive, assertive and impatient.  However recognising a Type A as described in the blog is fraught with issues.  To use physical characteristics as suggested in the blog is really risky.  Constitutional psychology developed in the 1940s, which held that the size and shape of a person's body indicated intelligence, moral worth and future achievement has been discredited.  Dark Circles under the eyes can simply be due to fatigue or aging.  Facial sweating can be caused by being hot or nervous.  Teeth grinding can be due to crooked teeth or sleep apnoea.

However there are more useful clues that can be used to recognise Type A people and they can be summed up by the acronym TOPDOG which stands for Talk-Organisation-Position-Dress-Office-Gambit.  This is a simple framework you use when you first meet someone. First, Talk. What a person says and how it is said are major clues to a person’s temperament.  Typically Type A/Politicians are egotistic and refer themselves constantly.  “I did this, I like that, etc.”  They suffer from I-strain.  They are good with words and articulate and use audio words like listen and hear. 

“What do you do for a living?” would have to be one of the most common conversation starters — and with justification, for the decisions a person makes about the career and organisation can be very revealing about his or her personality. Working at a McDonald’s is very different from working at a bank, which is different again from a firm of lawyers. Even within an industry there can be major differences in the corporate personality and, on the whole, people will tend to work for an organisation that fits their personality. How do you work out the personality of an organisation? Simple, you just need to look at the cover of the annual report, which for many organisations is on their website, typically under investor relations.  Type A people like to work in large organisations, particularly those where the employees wear uniforms. 

Next consider the position of the person you are going to meet.  If the position requires the holder to make decisions, be a team leader and be persuasive it likely that person is a Type A/Politician.  Most managers have a high P component.

Dress and general appearance are key signals of the personality.  Shakespeare said, “The apparel oft proclaims the man” or, the modern equivalent, “I dress to make a statement about myself”.  The dress of the Politician is conservative and blue is their favourite colour.  Maggie Thatcher always wore a blue dress, conservative politicians nearly always wear blue ties.

It is the offices of the aggressive, assertive people which give them away. It is often in the most dominant position in the building and larger than the surrounding offices. Even if the offices are the same size you will see status symbols such as name plates, degrees and certificates on the walls, pictures with famous people and the desk in a dominant position.

Finally, consider the gambit. I have taken this term from the game of chess, where it is used to describe the opening moves. In a similar fashion someone may keep you waiting for a meeting or they might be punctual.  I agree that Type A people are impatient and hate to wait in lines.  They hate wasting their own time but are indifferent to wasting the time of others.  Consequently they are generally the last to arrive at a meeting.  Another clue is how soon he or she first uses your first name.  Type A/Politicians are typically late, do not apologise, and then will address you formally and take some time before using your given name.  They are working out your status.  Another clue is their business cards.  Just as their offices are festooned with qualifications, so are their business cards. 

Emotional Intelligence in Tough Conversations

I was recently sent a link to this video.  Emotional Intelligence in Tough Conversations

The presenter is Susan David Co-Director, Institute of Coaching, McLean Hospital.

I consider this Harvard Business School video as a great example of an emotional intelligence video that can cause more harm than good.

In the video Susan lays out four steps to improve your emotional intelligence:

1. Recognise emotions

2. Use emotions to facilitate thinking

3. Understand the cause and the outcome of emotions

4. Manage emotions to lead to better outcomes.

The problem with this model is that it says it is the transient emotions that are important. Also in the video there is no reference to a lexicon of emotions.  I believe that what is essential in lifting your Emotional Intelligence is an understanding of temperament, which is that part of the personality that is genetically based and is what determines our habitual emotional response.  All of us have core dispositional traits and that it the mixture of these traits with some being dominant and others weak that makes each of us unique. The model that I have found most practical at explaining temperament is the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale.  This model says we are all slightly insane and as I get older I am more and more relaxed about this hypothesis. The model also says we have seven core emotional drives based on the seven most common forms of insanity.  Thus it provides a lexicon of core emotions.

As an example of what can go wrong Susan argues that to increase your emotional intelligence you should develop mood task matching.  When considering the task, work out what is the best mood to generate the best result.  For example she suggests that in some situations when dealing with people, some initial chit-chat beforehand will lead to a better outcome.  I completely agree with this concept but you need to be able recognise the dominant temperament components of a person.  For Movers, Hustlers and Doublecheckers initial social chit-chat is almost mandatory.  However if you engage in social chit-chat with Normals, Artists, Politicians or Engineers your sociability may have a negative effect.  If you cannot differentiate between the various temperament components in the first 60 seconds your social skills (and hence your emotional intelligence) will be regarded as low.

Where are the core emotional drives located in our brain?

If there is one meme that occurs in the Emotional Intelligence world it is that the centre of our emotional drives is in the limbic system and in particular the amygdala.  This Youtube video and others on the same page are typical examples of the meme in action.  The Amydala Hijack was first popularised by Daniel Goleman in his defining book Emotional Intelligence.

There have been some dissenting views including this blog by yours truly.  One question raised in the blog still holds:  While it is easy to see that the various sciences: biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics, etc., are products of the rational neo-cortex brain it is difficult to see how the arts: poems, novels, plays, dances, paintings, etc., are products of the amygdala.  I can understand how the fight or flight response is generated there but not vast range of artistic creations

Finally I have read a neuroscience paper that supports the countervailing view. The paper is Distributed neural system for emotional intelligence revealed by lesion mapping and the authors are Aron K. Barbey, Roberto Colom, and Jordan Grafman.  To quote from the paper: “Together with cognitive intelligence, emotional and social intelligence form important components of general intelligence. One of the major differences between the two is that the former is thought to relate primarily to higher order mental processes like reasoning, while the latter focuses more on perceiving, immediate processing and applying emotional and social content, information and knowledge. It has also been suggested that another fundamental difference between the two may be that cognitive intelligence depends primarily on the prefrontal cortex, whereas emotional and social intelligence is more limbically tactical for immediate behavior suited more for survival and adaptation  However, thus far these theories are supported more by supposition than by empirical findings.” (my italics).

For their study the authors used 152 American Vietnam War veterans who had suffered brain damage from penetrating brain damage (shades of Phineas Gage).   The authors used a comibination of neuro-imaging lesion analysis, IQ testing, and EQ testing to develop a model of where our emotional drives are located.  The conclusion of the authors was that while historically, cognitive and emotional processes have been viewed as separate constructs their present study provides neuropsychological evidence that emotional and psychometric intelligence share neural systems and networks and that the orbitofrontal cortex plays a critical role.

This conclusion solves the problem of the location of the artistic drives noted above.  It also supports the Humm Wadsworth model.  This model proposes that our temperament is driven by our position on the spectrums of seven common mental illnesses (autism, depression, mania, neuroticism obsessive-compulsion, paranoia, and psychopathy) which would occur in the cerebral cortex and not the limbic system.

Why Core Memories and Not Core Emotions – A Review of Inside Out.

You cannot claim to be a blogger on Emotional Intelligence and not blog about Pixar’s latest film “Inside-Out”.  The film is getting terrific reviews.  I saw the film last Friday afternoon (30/7/15) and it is brilliantly creative.  Indeed some are describing it as the best film Pixar has ever made.
The film is about an eleven-year old heroine, Riley, who has lived her life in Minnisota, where she stars in ice hockey and collects a memory bank filled with joyful events.  But then Riley is forced to move across the country, where she finds herself insecure, unhappy and out of control.  In a few days she resolves these issues.  As a plot the film is simple.  What is different is that nearly all the film takes part in Riley’s head.   
In the film five emotions — personified as the characters Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness and Joy sit around a console in ‘Headquarters’ and grapple for control of Riley’s mind. They control the way Riley feels, and therefore thinks and acts demonstrating that emotions are crucial in the life choices we make.  In the film Joy and Sadness get ejected from ‘Headquarters’ and undergo a journey back to the centre of her control system via various parts of the brain: Abstract Reasoning, the Dream Factory, the Memory Dump, the Train of Thought, etc..  The sequences are simply brilliant.  Meanwhile Anger, Fear and Disgust are now in charge and lead Riley into an impulsive set of self-destructive actions.
In the beginning Riley’s personality is principally defined by Joy.  Sadness gradually takes control of Riley’s thought processes about the changes she is going through. This is most evident when Sadness adds blue hues to the images of Riley’s memories of her life in Minnesota. It guides Riley to recognize the changes she is going through and what she has lost, which sets the stage for her to develop new facets of her identity.
The film has a number of messages:
First, the search for happiness is not our ultimate life goal. We are best served by living from the inside out, using our emotions to inform our wishes and our choices to create a balance between intellect and emotion.  Emotions can organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking.  Since the Ancient Greek Philosophers the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.

Second, emotions can organize our social lives.  Anger moves social collectives to protest and remedy injustice.  Sadness prompts people to unite in response to loss. We see this first in an angry outburst at the dinner table that causes Riley to storm upstairs to lie alone in a dark room, leaving her dad to wonder what to do.  It is also Sadness that leads Riley to reunite with her parents.  So another key message it that you should embrace sadness rather than try to bury it with positive thinking. 

A major theme of the film revolves around the concept of ‘core memories’.  The core memories are objects of major importance in Inside Out.  Memory is represented as a series of rolling balls, coloured by the prevailing emotion at the time they occur.  Like all memory balls, core memories represent past events of Riley's life. However, they have a much greater importance than usual memories. They represent key moments that have defined Riley's current personality. Core memories appear brighter than any other memory and power each Island of Personality.  Core memories are usually stored in the centre of Headquarters in a dedicated circular tray, from which they emit a beam of light through a glass tube all the way to their respective Island of Personality.  In the film these core memories get separated when Joy and Sadness are ejected from ‘Headquarters’ and subsequently are carried around by Joy in a bag.

The question I have is about emotions.  Paul Ekman, who was the scientific consultant to Pixar, has put forward the hypothesis that there are six core emotions: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, Joy and Surprise.  In addition he has stated our identities are defined by specific emotions, which shape how we perceive the world, how we express ourselves and the responses we evoke in others.  Other people have said there are only four arguing that the difference between anger and disgust and between surprise and fear were socially, not biologically, based.

I would argue that your dominant core emotions are driven by your temperament – what you are genetically born with.  Based on a study of 11,000 identical twins nature is around twice as important as nurture.  I have found the Humm-Wadsworth model of seven core emotions the most practical tool for people to use and once understood (takes a day) dramatically lifts their emotional intelligence.  This is the key to emotional intelligence, understanding your core emotions compared to your transient emotions.  If you want to learn about the Humm download a free white paper on using Emotional Intelligence in either selling or management .  http://www.emotionalintelligencecourse.com/eq-free-white-papers/

My e-books available in Kindle format explain the technique in more detail.

The film is also described as suitable for people between 4 and 94.  I would quibble with the lower limit.  In the film I saw there were two children aged between 4 and 6 who found some of the sequences quite frightening.  Eight would be my lower limit.

Finally watch the credits at the end.  There is a whole swath of simple 10 second scenes where you visit the ‘Headquarters’ of different characters (including a dog).  They are very funny and very perceptive.