Shared signaling system of personality - Assignment Example

Shared Signaling System of Personality Traits Shared Signaling System of Personality This article documents the findings of an investigation which holds that many attributes or traits of personality are signaled on the face of an individual (Ekman, & Rosenberg, 2005). The article further holds that this signaling system can be traced back to the common ancestor of the human and chimpanzees (Freeman, & Gosling, 2010). The ancestor had a signaling system which after many years of evolution is still present among the two species. The study proved this assertion by using participants to identify a certain attribute of a chimpanzee with a neutral face. The participants identified the traits from the chimpanzees’ images with a fairly high degree of accuracy (Kramer, King, & Ward, 2011). The main aims of the study were to prove that indeed many personality traits or attributes of individuals are signaled within their faces. In particular, the study was keen on finding out whether it was possible to identify the personality of an individual or person simply from their non expressive and static face with a high degree of accuracy. The study also aimed at providing substantial evidence to prove that this signaling system is also present in the chimpanzee and is in fact shared between the human and the chimpanzee. The study also aimed at investigating the effects of autism on reading the personality traits of the non expressive and static face of both the human and the chimpanzee (Kramer, King, & Ward, 2011). The methods used in this study were primarily quantitative in nature. The investigators used four separate studies with four different groups of participants. In the first study, using the forced choice methodology, participants were supposed to perceive certain characteristics that relate to extraversion from the chimpanzee with a high degree of accuracy. In the second study, single faces of the chimpanzees were presented and were rated (on a scale of 1-7) for different attributes (active, sociable, sympathetic and dominant). The aim of the third study was to find out if participants were able to distinguish the level of dominance within a group of chimpanzees of the same sex. In the fourth study, the participants were to select the image of the more dominant chimpanzee from the pair that was presented. In the case of the humans, the participants were to select the face of the humans who appeared to be more extraverted. The first study found performance to be accurate on the traits of active and dominant. The trait sociable performed poorly on the correlations results. In the second study, ratings for dominance trait correlated well with the actual dominance (p=0.022, r28 = 0.42) and with an interrater reliability of 0.93 based on Cronbach’s α. In the third study, accuracy was high for both cases. For the males the accuracy was 0.70, with a t29=6.00, p Read More