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alexandra_k: personality psychology is very controversial. in particular, it is very controversial whether people have different traits (such as 'compassionate') that is robustly predictive of their behaviour.

Essentially, you seem to be asking a number of questions:<blockquote>1.) Can we identify characteristics of personality?

2.) Can we group individuals according to those characteristics?

3.) Can we now predict with any degree of accuracy what those groups of people will do in a specific situation?</blockquote>Generally speaking, I think the answer to all of the above is yes but obviously, there's margin for error. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that "personality" is not fixed in stone. Another problem is that no matter how predictable our behavior might be, everyone occasionally steps out of character and behaves in a manner that is "uncharacteristic".

Still... take the attributes of introverted and extroverted. These are fairly easy to identify within others and ourselves. My own experience of the Myers Briggs test -- like Fnordian Slip I've taken it several times over many years -- consistently scores me as introverted but there's less consistency on the other markers.

Can my own behavior be predicted as based on the personality marker of "introverted"? To a certain degree, I think it can. For example, given a multitude of choices as to how I could spend my leisure time, I'm probably going to choose something that lends itself to solitude. If I go to a party, I'm more likely to drift to the periphery of the party's edges (where I'm convinced the conversations are better). If I need to recharge my batteries, I'm probably going to need to be alone or with a very small group of people. I can count my friends on one hand but I would need many hands to count how deep those friendships go. When I do spend time with others they often comment that I am a calming presence -- I'm not exactly the "excitable" type.

On the other hand, I know a young woman who radiates vibrant energy. If she goes to a party, she is the party! If she doesn't have the opportunity to be with people on a regular basis, she becomes enervated and depleted. She has many friends although she may not spend a lot of time with all of them, and she can kick up your own energy levels by several notches simply by being in her presence. She's very much an extrovert and she knows it, just as those around her know it. It's interesting to note that she does have moments of self-chosen solitude just as I have occasional moments of being in the spotlight of center stage, but both of us are less inclined to choose those activities and when we do, we spend far less time there than the other does. Both of us are human beings living our lives but we are responding to those lives very differently.

Now, to return to the topic at hand, consider the experience of psychosis. Some people go through this experience and it's very much an internal experience; others go through it and it's very much an external experience. The current opinion is that the internalized experience of psychosis is one kind of disorder while the externalized experience of psychosis is yet another type of disorder. I suppose I'm being speculative myself when I ask, are these two different disorders or is this simply one experience funnelled through different filters? If we could "give" people the experience of psychosis would introverts present us with one view of psychosis and extroverts present us with a different view of psychosis?

My question is speculative as are any answers produced because this thread is not likely to draw the hundreds of responses that might be necessary to produce a verifiable pattern of consistency. It's not even producing consistency thus far! Of the three responses to date, all respondants report with the personality characteristic of introversion but the applied diagnosis are not consistent.

For what it's worth, I've run the experience up against a few other models. One of them was the Chakra System. In that instance I speculated that psychosis is the equivalent of energy and perhaps, the different behaviors we see in psychosis is related to energy blockages within the chakra system, i.e., an energy blockage at the root chakra might manifest with different symptoms as opposed to an energy blockage at the heart chakra.

I've also played with Clare Grave's Spiral Dynamics model, speculating that the experience (and perhaps, even the result) of psychosis will "look" different dependant upon the "level of human existence" an individual was at when they entered the psychotic state.

None of this is necessarily scientific -- mostly, it's just my own meandering speculative attempts to understand as much as possible the experience known as psychosis in this culture. However, it may be more beneficial to think of oneself as an "introvert" or an "extrovert" as opposed to a "schizophrenic" or "bi-polaric" because there is far less stigma or shame associated with the labels of introversion and extroversion. Me, I'm an introvert and not the least bit ashamed of being one.