From Epiphenomenon to Biologically Important Phenomena

Abstract

Personality psychology was witnessing its own revolution. Theorists began to move away from consideration of whether traits exist or not (everyone began to agree that they do), to an exploration of their biological nature—although it was still uncommon to see personality discussed in biological psychology textbooks (for an exception, see Corr, 2006). Hans Eysenck ploughed his own, somewhat lonely, furrow from the early 1940s (1944, 1947) to launch his 1967 fully fledged biological theory of personality (for a summary, see Corr, 2016). This was soon followed by the seminal work of one of Eysenck’s students, Jeffrey Gray, who coopted sophisticated learning theory, neuropharmacology, and brain techniques to develop a true neuropsychology of emotion, motivation, and personality (Gray, 1970, 1972, 1987). This work culminated in the characterization of the Behavioral Inhibition System model of anxiety (Gray, 1982; Gray & McNaughton, 2000). Gray’s general approach—which, itself, traces its origins to Pavlov (Gray, 1964)—has proliferated in personality psychology and is now a major scientific force (see Corr, DeYoung, & McNaughton, 2013). During this period, there was also an explosion of research on the “Big-Five” model of personality and it is now increasingly studied from a neuroscience perspective (e.g., Allen & DeYoung, 2017)—this fact is attested by the first paper published in this journal by Nicola Toschi and colleagues which is on the functional connectome of the five-factor model of personality. In addition to these significant advances, we now know that personality differences have important implications for a wide range of behaviors, including clinical disorders, occupational choice/performance, judgment and decision making, health behavior—including personality contributions to mortality (e.g., Bogg & Roberts, 2004; Calvin et al., 2017)—and much more besides. These advances have influenced related fields, some of which are of widespread relevance to society (e.g., behavioral and neuroeconomics; for an overview, see the edited book by Reuter & Montag, 2016). Board member observes: “One important issue Personality Neuroscience might be able to tackle is finally to make it clear that personality might not necessarily come together in some neat mechanistic way in the brain and that trying to reduce it to collections of ‘traits’ based on factor analysis is not helpful.” Opinions differ on such matters and this is a health state of affairs.