Look at the two photographs: would you choose the beach or the mountains
for a vacation? Psychologists believe the choice reveals your personality.
Past research showed that extroverts need ‘affiliation’ – i.e. being with
and talking to people – and ‘exhibition’ – i.e. getting attention from and
entertaining people. Introverts need less affiliation and exhibition. Extroverts
like people bustling around. Introverts function better in specific office
spaces with fewer visual and audio distractions.
Most of the previous research focused on social situations rather than
physical surroundings. Psychologists at the University of Virginia said that no
study had looked at extroversion and introversion in connection with natural
environments. Hence they conducted a series of five experiments.
The university psychologists found that extroverts and introverts preferred
different landscapes for their vacations. Extroverts preferred wide-open
spaces, including the beach, while introverts preferred the woods, forests, and
mountains. The majority of people choose a photograph of the beach.
Researchers think that woods and mountains are great places for solitude
and self-reflection, which suits introverts, and beaches offer interactions
with more people, which suits extroverts.
In another experiment, researchers analyzed a database of 613,000 people across
America to see whether extroversion and introversion were associated with
different American states. Researchers found that residents in mountainous US
states were more introverted than residents in flat states.
Does living in the mountains make people more introverted or do introverts
gravitate towards mountainous regions? Researchers did another experiment. They
sent groups of students into flat open areas or forested secluded areas on the
University campus and analyzed their feelings of extroversion or introversion.
Researchers found that the terrain resulted in different levels of
happiness for extroverts and introverts. Introverts were more stressed in open
spaces than when they were surrounded by trees. But overall geography does not
change personality. This last experiment was a short study so the researchers
would like to conduct more research on the effects of geography on extroverts
and introverts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/06/what-your-vacation-choices-say-about-your-personality/
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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