Review by Choice Review
Author of other books on personality psychology, including Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile (CH, May'06, 43-5574), Nettle (Newcastle Univ., UK) here offers a fun, cute, engaging book about the state of the art in personality research, the "five-factor" personality typology. Preliminary chapters set up the importance of personality and the basic framework of the five-factor model. The author then devotes a chapter to each of the five factors: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. He offers clear, succinct, engaging descriptions of these factors, calling on current research as much as on examples of individuals. Included as an appendix is Nettle's Newcastle Personality Assessor, an inventory that allows one to assess his or her standing on the five-factor model. Although this book appears to be a pop-psych venture (the cover features smiley and frowny faces), the soundness of its underlying research and its extensive endnotes and references give this little book empirical weight. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates, general readers. W. A. Ashton CUNY York College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Psychology has long striven to be a hard science, able to crunch numbers and amass physical evidence. Nettle says that with the recent burgeoning of neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary thinking, the psychology of personality, in particular, is finally getting buff, so to speak. Most of his book on the core concept of human psychology is based on analysis of it by a system assessing five factors or traits, a system into which, the profession now realizes, he says, all similar factorial analyses can be folded. The five factors of personality are extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. Proceeding in the manner of a pop-psych text, Nettle cites clinical cases to illustrate each trait. But then he brings the findings of brain research and human genomic study to bear on behaviors expressive of the trait and applies evolutionary methodology to consider what happens physiologically with each trait, how it happens, and for what effects on natural selection the trait would have developed. Psychology for the general reader is very seldom this substantial and jargon free.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British psychologist Nettle (Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile) defines personality as a grouping of traits, partly genetically inherited, that remain stable throughout one's life. Drawing on his own research and others', he explores what he sees as the five dimensions of personality: extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience. This last, Nettle admits, is the most elusive; while it involves creativity, it also may include "restless unconventionality, supernatural beliefs and psychosis-like experiences"-exemplified by Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. Nettle also delves into evolutionary biology, showing how certain traits that were adaptive in one environment might become nonadaptive in another (e.g., the fight-or-flight response that was necessary for prehistoric humans facing predators is less desirable when manifested as road rage). In emphasizing the genetic component of personality, Nettle concludes, based on twin studies, that within normal families (with no violence or abuse) parenting "cannot have any measurable effect on child personality." But overall, this is a well-researched, accessible, informative and sometimes (in its use of personal anecdotes) entertaining book that ends on a hopeful note: Nettle says that while our basic personalities don't change significantly after childhood, our behavior can. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
