Proof that I'm an INFJ - Biofeedback

[La Sagna]

I am just completing a university psychology personality course. As part of the course you can get bonus points if you help them with their research by doing some personality scales, including one that measures your responses through biofeedback.

Of course, being very interested in personality, I would have done it even if there were no points involved.

Anyway, I did the scales and received some very interesting information. There's actually about 80 different scores covering different scales and systems.
There's some interesting results when I look at all of it but I was particularly interested in the Big Five Traits measured by biofeedback.

According to the professor 4 of the Big 5 Personality Traits have been proven to correlate strongly to the MBTI system. The obvious one is the Extroversion/Introversion Scale, the Openness scale correlates to Intuition vs Sensing, the Agreeableness scale correlates to Feeling vs Thinking and the Conscientiousness scale correlates to Judging vs Perceiving. The main difference is that there is Neuroticism included in the Big Five which isn't in MBTI and he says that is why the MBTI has a more positive spin to it. The other difference being that in Big Five you're on a sliding scale and are not on one or the other side of an arbitrary line in the middle.

So anyway, here are the results of my biofeedback test for my Big Five Personality Traits, indicated by percentile compared to the rest of the people who have taken this test.

Extroversion - 15.87 percentile
Openness - 61.79 percentile
Agreeableness - 97.73 percentile
Conscientiousness - 61.79 percentile

Emotional Stability - 97.13% percentile (I am not neurotic in the least, now I can report back to my ex that I have proof that he was wrong, lol)

The other part that seems to be different is that agreeableness (feeling) does not negate thinking - in my results my need for cognition which would be representing how much I need to logically analyse information my percentile is 98.61

Yes - I feel and I think too much...but at least I'm not neurotic.

 

[Dohavior]

I always thought that Neuroticism was a figure that could be extrapolated from the other 4 traits. For example if you scored INFJ yet your dominate trait of Intuition was repressed in some manner by having a low percentile then you would be considered highly neurotic. And what that means is your conscious and subconscious functions are prone to fluctuation of sporadic mood swings.

 

[Oscillation]

Do you consider this test work just as well as the one you took?
I have used Big Five before. Lately I've been more of confused about the MBTI, so perhaps I should retake this one instead.

 

[La Sagna]

Do you consider this test work just as well as the one you took?
I have used Big Five before. Lately I've been more of confused about the MBTI, so perhaps I should retake this one instead.

I haven't done the test you linked but here's the link our professor gave us for an online version of the Big Five. My result on it correlated closely to my results with the biofeedback.

 

[Oscillation]

I can't see the link.

And what is a biofeedback? op2:

 

[charlatan]

According to the professor 4 of the Big 5 Personality Traits have been proven to correlate strongly to the MBTI system. The obvious one is the Extroversion/Introversion Scale, the Openness scale correlates to Intuition vs Sensing, the Agreeableness scale correlates to Feeling vs Thinking and the Conscientiousness scale correlates to Judging vs Perceiving. The main difference is that there is Neuroticism included in the Big Five which isn't in MBTI and he says that is why the MBTI has a more positive spin to it. The other difference being that in Big Five you're on a sliding scale and are not on one or the other side of an arbitrary line in the middle.

Yes it has, albeit, there are some clarifications to address in the correlations on a more detailed level.

One is that the more detailed measures of the Big 5 dimensions include facets, which are formed out of greater conceptual coherence AND generally greater statistical coherence. For instance, the MBTI N/S correlates most with Big 5 Openness to Experience - naturally, as the Ns are more possibilities oriented and excited to hunt out new experiences, with the opposite of Open being more Conventional, which goes more with our view of S.
Much of N test questions go into overall willingness to be unconventional and the specific facets of fantasy/imagination and ideas/intellect.

T/F goes into Agreeableness, specifically Tenderness (compassionate sentiments) the most, but also there seems to be a consensus that F correlates with Openness to Feelings positively to some degree (but not as much as you'd think! suggesting F indeed has more to do with Tendermindedness than with depth of feeling - hence F =/= Jungian feeling function).
Overall I've also noticed that T goes more away from Openness to Feelings than F seems to go away from Openness to Ideas.

The important thing to remember is that the scales are constructed by purported coherence of items, but this coherence doesn't have to be intensely strong, only sufficiently strong.
If the correlations between items were intensely strong, you'd expect most people who have any preference at all to end up with a very strong preference (i.e. picking the Agreeable option on one thing results in picking the Agreeable option in almost everything, to roughly the same degree).
This is not the case. The coherence is sufficient to note that there is a definite theme to people's answers, and that's all.

This is why you end up with people who are a little hard to classify in the dichotomies scales of the MBTI, because plainly their scores on individual facets render them hovering somewhere in the middle. This would be the case for instance of someone who is very high in Ideas, somewhat moderate in Feelings, and moderately high in Agreeableness - does one call this person a likely NT or NF, for instance? One could say F, but then it would align poorly with many MBTI type portraits because they could have the classic theorist temperament, which is often attributed to NT. In such cases, while it is still possible to use raw stats to figure out where someone is, I think it's safe to say I prefer to just use the facet measurements.

The proper reading of the MBTI scales is such that in-the-middle preferences are allowed. At least, rough in-the-middle preferences.
Unfortunately, the attachment to presenting them as dichotomies leads to neglecting this truth.

Which is pretty much what you get at here

The other difference being that in Big Five you're on a sliding scale and are not on one or the other side of an arbitrary line in the middle.

There's not a really clear middle to personality. It's really a statistical middle - you get an overall distribution and it's going to be slightly different depending on inventory and so forth. You get a decent idea of where you are relative to the population, but it's not meant to tell you where you are exactly.

For those who don't think Carl Jung, the originator of the functions theory, thought you could be in the middle more or less, they should note that he said in an easily google-able interview that there are people roughly as much influenced from within as without, the extensive middle group.

 

[La Sagna]

I can't see the link.

And what is a biofeedback? op2:

Sorry. Here's the link http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/ipipneo300.htm

In the biofeedback test they had electrodes on my head and measured brainwaves as I answered questions. I'm not sure exactly how it works but it's part of a research that should be published in a few years.