The Emotional Foundations of Personality

by Kenneth L Davis

  Figure 14.2. Molecular structures of the catecholamines, dopamine and norepinephrine, and the indoleamine, serotonin.

  Novelty Seeking

  Novelty Seeking represented the dopamine-promoted “heritable tendency toward intense exhilaration or excitement in response to novel stimuli or cues for potential rewards or potential relief of punishment, which leads to frequent exploratory activity in pursuit of potential rewards as well as active avoidance of monotony and potential punishment” (Cloninger, 1987, p. 574). Thus, Cloninger envisioned people characterized by high Novelty Seeking with words like impulsive, exploratory, fickle, excitable, quick-tempered, extravagant, and disorderly, versus those low in Novelty Seeking being described as reflective, rigid, loyal, stoic, slow-tempered, frugal, orderly, and persistent (p. 575). Compared to the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS), Novelty Seeking seems most similar to the SEEKING scale.

  Harm Avoidance

  Cloninger envisioned Harm Avoidance as the serotonin-promoted “heritable tendency to respond intensely to signals of aversive stimuli, thereby learning to inhibit behavior to avoid punishment, novelty, and frustrative nonreward” (Cloninger, 1987, p. 575). Those characterized by high Harm Avoidance were cautious, tense, apprehensive, fearful, inhibited, shy, easily fatigable, and apprehensive worriers, with low Harm Avoidance types being more confident, relaxed, optimistic, carefree, uninhibited, outgoing, and energetic (p. 576). The Harm Avoidance dimension has many similarities to the ANPS FEAR scale.

  Reward Dependence

  Cloninger’s third biosocial dimension, norepinephrine-mediated Reward Dependence, was the “heritable tendency to respond intensely to signals of reward (particularly verbal signals of social approval, sentiment, and succor), and to maintain or resist extinction of behavior that has previously been associated with rewards or relief from punishment” (Cloninger, 1987, p. 575). He portrayed people who showed high Reward Dependence as “eager to help and please others, persistent, industrious, warmly sympathetic, sentimental, and sensitive to social cues and personal succor but able to delay gratification with the expectation of eventually being rewarded. In contrast, those who are lower than average in Reward Dependence are socially detached, emotionally cool, practical, tough-minded, and emotionally independent in what they choose to do” (576–577). Given a consistent association between the Big Five Extraversion and Reward Dependence (De Fruyt, Van De Wiele, & Van Heeringen, 2000; Zuckerman & Cloninger, 1996), it might be positively correlated with the ANPS PLAY scale. Overall, however, the vast diversity and complexity of brain neurochemical systems (e.g., Panksepp, 2011a) made such “aminergic” simplifications of personality open to debate even at the time they were proposed. Brain biogenic amine systems are surely critical brain arousal foundations of personality, but many other neurochemistries need to be considered in the present era, as well as various learning processes, as Cloninger well recognized.

  Neuromodulator Commentary

  While Cloninger argued for the dynamic interaction of the three temperaments, his attempts to link each to a major neuromodular—dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine—was probably painting with too broad a brush. For example, Ritalin (methylphenidate) as a dopamine stimulant should have a behavioral activation effect. However, counter-intuitively, it is widely prescribed to treat hyperactive children and those diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder making them less impulsive, with many children reporting feeling less playful and having less fun when taking Ritalin. Panksepp et al. (1984) have shown that, while moderate levels of dopamine must be present for play to occur, high levels of dopamine decrease mammalian play, illustrating the complex role dopamine can have on behavior.

  Similarly, serotonin-enhancing drugs are often used as antidepressants. Many selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac (fluoxetine), Paxil (paroxetine), and Zoloft (sertraline), are used to treat depression and act by retaining serotonin in the neuronal synapse, where it can remain active, which is consistent with Cloninger’s predictions. However, the linkage of serotonin levels to Harm Avoidance has received mixed results (Paris, 2005). Further, recent reports suggest that SSRIs are only marginally effective at treating depression (Pigott, Leventhal, Alter, & Boren, 2010). In Chapter 18, we will show how opioids and other pharmaceutical treatments unrelated to the broad neuromodulator serotonin offer the promise of more effective, affectively targeted treatments for depression.

  Cloninger Expands His Theory

  In good novelty seeking fashion, in 1993 Cloninger, Svrakic, and Przybeck explored new personality dimensions to improve Cloninger’s biosocial theory of personality and increased his eighty-item TPQ to include many more items, scales, and scale facets. Cloninger expanded his personality model beyond the biosocial neurotransmitter-based brain systems to a new psychobiological model that included a total of seven personality dimensions. With his new Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), he also added a fourth “temperament” dimension called Persistence, although he did not provide pharmacological or other biological mechanisms for it. In addition to the temperament traits, he also introduced the concept of “character” dimensions, which he hypothesized to be (1) less genetically heritable, (2) maturing in adulthood rather than in childhood, and (3) influencing personal effectiveness through learning around self-concepts. He called his three new character dimensions Self-Directedness, Cooperativeness, and Self-Transcendence, which were thought of as being more cortical, with his original temperament dimensions being more emotional, controlled by subcortical neural systems. In other words, with the character dimensions, his personality system became considerably more cognitive.

  Cloninger conceived of the three character dimensions as corresponding to one of three self-concepts, or “the extent to which a person identifies the self as (1) an autonomous individual, (2) an integral part of humanity or society, or (3) an integral part of the unity of all things” (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 978). The Self-Directedness scale corresponded to the autonomous individual level. Cooperativeness reflected identifying with humanity. Self-transcendence was related to identifying with the universe as an interdependent whole.

  Cloninger also attempted to differentiate between temperament and character dimensions based on the learning and memory systems involved. In addition to expressing inherited behavior biases, temperament personality dimensions relied on presemantic perceptual learning that basically reflected associative learning or classical and operant conditioning. This elementary level of learning required no conscious awareness and was closely related to the concepts of procedural or implicit memory (Bachevalier, 1990).

  The character personality dimensions theoretically reflected conscious experiences and learning abstract concepts. The character dimensions drew on retrievable memories of facts and events. This level of learning is also referred to as declarative or explicit memory (Smith & Squire, 2005; Squire & Zola-Morgan, 1991).

  In any case, the temperament scales became Cloninger’s elementary components of personality. The new character dimensions added higher-level humanistic concepts to Cloninger’s personality model. Beyond more concrete social bonding and nurturing that would reflect more of the primary PANIC/Sadness and CARE systems, he introduced elements to describe how we relate to our world at an abstract, conceptual level, which would seem to be positioned at a more tertiary level of BrainMind organization than the basic inherited foundations of personality. What was missing in Cloninger’s early views was a clear vision of the inherited emotional proclivities in the development of personality, and the recognition that the biogenic amines modulated all of the primal emotions that the ANPS seeks to illuminate. In a sense, Cloninger’s expansive additions, attempting to deal with the fuller complexities of human life (in a sense becoming a “theory of everything”) diluted his initial vision of the fundamental instinctual-neural foundation of personality.

  A CRITIQUE OF CLONINGER’S EXPANSIVE THEORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

  When one probes the o
rigins of Cloninger’s revised and expanded personality test, the TCI, one wonders how far Cloninger has truly extended the science of personality beyond other existing personality assessments and the factor-analytic methods he has criticized. Cloninger openly noted that the temperament scales from his original personality test, the TPQ, “were largely uncorrelated with some measures of social cooperation, such as the Agreeableness scale of the Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness personality inventory, the Aggression scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), and the Hostility scale of the Profile of Mood States” (Cloninger et al., 1993, pp. 978–979). These scales were largely derived from factor-analytic analyses and must be seen as the psychometric basis for his character dimension called Cooperativeness.

  He also pointed out that individual self-acceptance and self-esteem, key elements of the Self-Directedness character dimension, “were not well explained by the TPQ” (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 979). He cited the Alienation scale of the MPQ and the Repression factor of the Minnesota Multiphasic Psychological Inventory as scales predicting positive self-regard and the acceptance of individual responsibility, including the capacity to admit to unflattering statements about oneself. These scales form the foundation of Cloninger’s Self-Directedness character dimension, along with Julian Rotter’s Locus of Control scale, which Cloninger cited in his discussion of Self-Directedness (Cloninger et al., 1993).

  The story is the same with Auke Tellegen’s MPQ Absorption scale, which Cloninger reported was not correlated with any of his four temperament traits (Cloninger et al., 1993). In a description of Self-Transcendence, Cloninger described the “absorption” that leads to “identification with things outside the individual self” (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 982). Again, the MPQ Absorption scale may largely form the basis of Cloninger’s Self-Transcendence scale.

  Cloninger was able to report a factor analysis of the twenty-five facets that made up the seven scales of the TCI, in which the facet loadings were mostly consistent with how he “rationally” defined the facets (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 986). However, this is not really surprising, because the material for the TCI character dimensions seems to have been drawn from sources that derived their scales using linear factor-analytic techniques, such as Tellegen’s MPQ and Costa and McCrae’s NEO.

  CLONINGER ON FACTOR ANALYSIS

  Cloninger has argued strongly that factor analysis is not capable of deriving adequate personality scales. He sees factor analysis as a linear statistical procedure that limits attempts to describe the human personality, which is greatly influenced by dynamic, nonlinear factors (Cloninger, 2004). Consequently, he prefers to rationally define personality scales based upon his research into the underlying causal structure of personality. He writes, “Factor analysis of individual case descriptions can only determine the minimum number of measured dimensions, and cannot decompose their underlying causal structure. Extrastatistical information is needed to specify the structure of the underlying biologic and social variability in personality traits. In other words, descriptive data about individual behavior are not sufficient to permit any strong preference among alternative ways of summarizing personality traits” (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 976, italics in original).

  We are in full agreement with the idea that factor analysis by itself is not adequate to specify the biological systems inherent in the BrainMind and manifested as personality. Panksepp did not derive his blue ribbon affective neuroscience emotions from a statistical analysis of descriptive data. Each of his foundational subcortical emotions reported in Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998a) was solidly supported with experimental brain research, such as deep brain stimulation, in which a simple electrical stimulus to a particular region of the subcortical brain produced clear, unambiguous emotional action patterns that were accompanied by diverse affective feelings, which may be foundational for the developmental complexity of the higher-order MindBrain organizations that Cloninger moved on to, without ever conceptualizing the fundamental emotional infrastructure of higher mental tendencies.

  CRITIQUE BY FARMER AND GOLDBERG

  Unfortunately, in the current personality research climate, psychometric criticism is likely to emerge for assessments that do not meet the requirements of the factor-analytic community. And, it is along these lines that Richard Farmer and Lewis Goldberg, two Oregon personality theorists, carefully analyzed Cloninger’s TCI using their own large independent data set of TCI data (Farmer & Goldberg, 2008b). In their factor analysis of TCI facets, they were able to confirm much of the same TCI structure that Cloninger had reported earlier (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 986), but they were able to derive only six interpretable factors. As with Cloninger’s data, in their statistical analysis not all facets fell on the predicted factors. Unlike Cloninger, their Harm Avoidance and Self-Directedness facets combined to form a single factor. They were largely able to verify the Persistence, Novelty Seeking, Self-Transcendence factors and all but one of the Cooperativeness facets loaded together on the same factor. Like Cloninger, Farmer and Goldberg found the Reward Dependence facets did not load together.

  When analyzing the TCI items rather than facet scores, Farmer and Goldberg were again unable to interpret seven factors or to separate Harm Avoidance and Self-Directedness into separate factors. Also, Cloninger’s Novelty Seeking items split up and did not form a clear factor. However, most of the Reward Dependence items sorted onto the same factor, with similar clarity for the Cooperativeness, Persistence, and Self-Transcendence items.

  Perhaps the biggest problem in the Farmer and Goldberg analyses was that Harm Avoidance and Self-Directedness loaded together on the same factor whether analyzing TCI facets or items. In other words, Farmer and Goldberg could not distinguish between Harm Avoidance as a temperament trait and Self-Directedness as a character trait. Statistically, these two Cloninger dimensions looked like they were measuring the same thing and that Farmer and Goldberg, at best, could only account for six personality dimensions when examining Cloninger’s TCI.

  While a Big Five factor analysis also lumped together all three of the ANPS negative emotions, as we described in Chapter 2, Cloninger had claimed that Self-Directedness and the three character measures did not measure emotional traits and were more cortically dependent. Thus, Farmer and Goldberg’s finding that Harm Avoidance and Self-Directedness formed a single factor suggested that temperament and character dimensions shared a common underlying basis. Accordingly, perhaps there weren’t distinct temperament and character domains in the human personality. In our view, it is likely that both emerge from the way basic emotional strengths and weaknesses interact with developmental and life time learning experiences.

  Farmer and Goldberg (2008a) further pointed out that Cloninger’s claim of serotonin being specifically related to Harm Avoidance and not to character dimensions has often not been supported by outside research. Both Harm Avoidance and Self-Directedness were found to be strongly related to serotonin activity (Peirson et al., 1999), and Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness but not Harm Avoidance were strongly associated with a genetic polymorphism that modulates serotonin (Hamer, Greenberg, Sabol, & Murphy, 1999). Similarly, cognitive-behavior therapy outcomes (Dalle et al., 2007) and recovery from drug dependencies (Borman et al., 2006) have been associated with changes in both temperament and character dimensions. These findings contradicted Cloninger’s prediction that pharmacological treatments would modify temperament traits with psychotherapy influencing character traits and specifically that “cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques may facilitate learning self-directed behavior” (Cloninger et al., 1993, p. 988).

  Indeed, more recently Cloninger himself has softened his claim that, in contrast to the temperament dimensions, character dimensions were not genetically determined and only influenced by environment. Cloninger has conceded that data from twin studies show that “Each of the character dimensions shows moderate heritability and associations with multiple candidate genes . . . and little or no ef
fects of environmental influences shared by siblings reared together” (2004, p. 46).8 Cloninger later elaborated: “To my surprise, we found that the heritability of character was as great as that of temperament. This important finding suggests that the popular dichotomy in science between the neurobiological and psychosocial paradigms of human personality is not well justified” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 297). Thus, another of the three hypotheses Cloninger initially claimed distinguished his character dimensions from his temperament dimensions was not supported.

  Cloninger has also backed away from his claim that character dimensions would mature in adulthood rather than childhood. He conceded that “the amounts of increase in character with age are small on average and negligible after middle age” (2004, p. 47). With that finding, all three of the pillars Cloninger hypothesized would separate character traits from temperament traits have failed to be confirmed.

  CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE CLONINGER PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL THEORY

  There is substantial evidence that Cloninger’s temperament and character dimensions do not represent distinct personality domains. Perhaps most telling from an affective neuroscience perspective is that both sets of dimensions exhibit significant genetic heritabilities and seem to correlate with emotions. Because we believe that there are no inherited functional “modules” in the neocortex (e.g., it is well established that even cortical vision is learned) and that all known personality dimensions have a basis in subcortical brain affective systems (or the regulation of subcortical brain emotion systems), Cloninger’s lack of evidence for additional neocortical personality characteristics beyond conscientiousness strongly supports the affective neuroscience theory of personality. Although we should not exclude the possibility of the future identification of novel neocortical personality traits in addition to those regulating subcortical primary emotions, multivariate genetic analysis suggests that Cloninger’s seven personality dimensions were most likely linked to the affective dynamics of the various evolved subcortical brain emotional systems (Ando et al., 2004).