THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYBlack, Jane and many others. According to her psychiatrists, these other
personalities emerged as a coping mechanism in response to early
trauma. Before the age of three, Sizemore witnessed her mother badly
injured, saw a drowned man pulled from a ditch and another man sawn
in half at a lumber mill. Her story was made into an Oscar-winning
film in 1957 called The Three Faces of Eve, starring Joanne Woodward. In
2009 Sizemore appeared on the BBC’s Hardtalk interview programme
Measure your personality
Read the following statements, and for each give yourself a score from
1 (that’s not me at all) to 5 (that’s me exactly).- If I see someone upset, it often moves me too
- I enjoy novels
- I like throwing parties
- I sometimes feel very low
- I rarely get anxious
- I’m punctual
- I’m not afraid to insult people
- I like to eat at the same times each day
- I often strike up a conversation with strangers
- I like to plan ahead
- I avoid horror films
- I’d like to do more for charity
- I often wonder about the meaning of life
- I rarely get over-excited about things
- Music is unimportant to me
Scoring
Now tally up your results as follows (to reverse score an item, 1
becomes 5, 2 becomes 4 and so on).
Extroversion: Add your scores for 3, 9 and 14 (reverse scored).
Neuroticism: Add your scores for 4, 5 (reverse scored) and 11.
Conscientiousness: Add your scores for 6, 8, and 10.
Agreeableness: Add your scores for 1, 7 (reverse scored) and 12.
Openness: Add your scores for 2, 13, 15 (reverse scored).A score of 11 to 15 for any trait is high, 6 to 10 is medium, and 1 to 5 is
low. By comparing your scores for the different traits, you’ll get some
sense of how dominant each trait is in your own personality. However,
to get a big-picture feel for what your score means, you’ll need to ask
friends and family to have a go too, so that you can compare each
other’s personalities. Note that this test is just to give you an idea – it
hasn’t been checked for validity or reliability (see p.180).