Personality predicts success in medical school Personality characteristics play a major role in determining who succeeds in medical school, according to new research. During the early, pre-clinical years, conscientious individuals do much better than those who display lower levels of this trait. However, as the curriculum changed over the years, interpersonal aspects (for example, performance during internships or patient interaction) became
Personality Traits and Political Attitude The relationship between personality and political preferences is not the simple relation between conservatism and negative personality traits on the one hand and liberalism and positive personality traits on the other hand. Personality is understood as the combination of innate dispositions and personal experiences that guides behavior in a stable and predictive manner. Behavior is [...]Related
The Pathologizing of a Culture A young woman in her mid-twenties recently came in for her first visit with me. Three months earlier she had experienced her first bout of anxiety and it had become more acute thereafter. She went on to explain that she had been seeing a psychiatrist who had prescribed four different psychotropic medications, simultaneously. Complaining of a blurred and disconnected feeling, she offered that she
Why New Year's Resolutions Tend to Fail and How We Can Achieve Them Year after year, so many people make New Year's resolutions that over time wither and fade into another failed attempt to transform some aspect of their lives. What begins with a hopeful optimism unravels in yet another unmet aspiration. It's always a curiosity to me how we come to try to evoke change in the same way that gives us the same failure. I imagine that if we conducted a survey six mont
The Paradox of Expectations  Beginning a new year often brings forth a review of our expectations and I thought it might be a good idea to briefly examine this topic. As with many concepts in our culture, we tend to fall well short of fully appreciating what these terms truly suggest and at times, the apparent contradictions that they may evoke. This is certainly the case with the word expectations. Are they to be valued a
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