Question

"The relationship between brain structure and the Big Five personality traits is ______, meaning we do not know if they are responsible for personality, the result of personality, or the result of other unknown variables."

Answer 1

The connection between brain structure and the Big Five personality traits is still not fully understood, it remains undetermined if brain structures are responsible for forming these traits, the result of them, or influenced by other factors.

Step-by-step explanation:

The relationship between brain structure and the Big Five personality traits is complex and not yet fully understood. The Big Five traits—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are believed to be influenced by genetic factors and may have ties to certain brain structures, such as the prefrontal cortex. However, it is not clear whether the brain is responsible for creating these personality traits, if personality traits influence brain development, or if other unknown variables play a significant role in this relationship. This ambiguity is a part of the larger "mind-brain" problem, which discusses the unclear association between our mental experiences and the physical workings of the brain.

Historic cases like that of Phineas Gage suggest that certain areas of the brain are indeed related to aspects of personality. Gage, for instance, exhibited a drastic change in personality after a traumatic injury to his prefrontal cortex. Nonetheless, these observations do not provide conclusive answers to how brain structures influence personality traits. The field of personality psychology, with theories like the Five Factor Model, provides quantitative methods for studying and characterizing personality, yet the biological underpinnings of these traits remain a subject of ongoing investigation.

Answer 2

The correct answer is correlational

The Big Five was born from studies on the Theory of Personality Traits, representing a conceptual and empirical advance in this area, as it described basic human dimensions in a consistent and replicable way.

The Big Five model began to be structured in the early 1930s, when McDougall suggested analyzing personality from five independent factors that, at the time, were called intellect, character, temperament, disposition and humor.

At that same time, in Germany, Baumgarten suggested an analysis of language to understand personality traits. Baumgarten's work had a fundamental influence on Allport who, together with Odbert, examined about 400,000 words from Webster's New International Dictionaire, deriving 4,500 personality trait descriptors, a study that greatly influenced Cattell in his publications in the 1940s. publications by Cattell and Eysenck dominated the literature as the main models obtained through factor analysis.

In Baltimore (Maryland), Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, at the Gerontology research center at the National Institute of Health, started an extensive research program that identified the so-called five major factors: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to new experiences, sympathy and conscientiousness .