To have a successful start to your professional career, it is better not to be affected by your emotions.
- The best career starts have been those of young professionals who have developed greater growth in their conscience, better emotional stability and extraversion.
- This highlights the long-term predictive power of personality.
- French research on emotions suggests that they are the product of our environment rather than innate.
Professional success does not only depend on his work but also on his personality. Young people who are successful in developing higher levels of conscientiousness and emotional stability during the transition to employment tend to be more successful in certain aspects of their early careers. That’s according to a new 12-year study by researchers at the University of Houston and featured in the journal Psychological Science on November 23.
Predict career development based on personality
This study is the first to evaluate the predictive power of personality changes on the results of the first years of the career of young workers. “The results revealed that certain personality growth models predicted career outcomes beyond adolescent personality and abilities.”, summarizes Kevin Hoff, assistant professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Houston. For teenagers who have experienced difficulties and who have an emotionally unstable personality, the study reveals that this is not definitive. “The study showed that you’re not just stuck with your personality traits, and if you change over time in a positive way, it can have a big impact on your career.”, confirms the researcher.
The researchers studied young Icelanders for 12 years, from age 17 to age 29. Those who had the best career starts developed greater awareness growth, emotional stability, and extraversion. Specifically, changes in conscientiousness predicted job satisfaction, changes in emotional stability were strongly related to income, and changes in extroversion were related to career. “Adolescent trait levels also predicted career success, highlighting the long-term predictive power of personality.continued Kevin Hoff. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of personality development throughout childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in promoting different aspects of career success..”
Emotion, product of our environment
Are these emotions innate or are they the result of our environment? French researchers support the idea that they are the product of our culture and our environment and that they are built gradually. In a study published in the journal Brain on November 22, they showed that our experiences and our environment enrich concepts learned in childhood, associated with our physical sensations, which “form” our emotions.
By studying 16 patients with a rare neurodegenerative disease, the “sementic dementia”, with the help of brain imaging, they suggested a strong correlation between memory loss of conceptual knowledge and difficulty in recognizing emotions. “Patients have difficulty mobilizing what they have learned throughout life, for example remembering that Paris is the capital of Francecontinues Maxime Bertoux, researcher in the “Neuropsychology and imaging of human memory” laboratory at the University of Caen, in a press release published by Insermassociated with the study. They also have an inability to identify everyday objects and to remember their functioning or their usefulness, or even to understand the meaning of words. However, the degradation of conceptual knowledge associated with this disease should not have an impact on the ability of patients to know and recognize emotions, if these are truly innate..”
Our conceptual and language knowledge have a decisive role
Patients were tested on their conceptual knowledge of four emotions: anger, pride, surprise and embarrassment. The results were compared with those of healthy participants and reveal that the conceptual memory of emotions is more degraded in participants suffering from semantic dementia. “On average, these patients were for example less able to give or choose the correct synonym of a particular emotion but also to select the appropriate context in which one can expect to feel it.the researchers wrote. They also had greater difficulty recognizing the emotional states expressed by other individuals, whether positive or negative, presented in photography or video..”
Thanks to brain imaging, the researchers identified the cerebral neural networks mobilized during the exercises. It turns out that the same network is activated during facial emotion recognition tasks and conceptual knowledge mobilization tasks about emotions. “Our study underlines the strong intricacy of ‘affective’ neurocognitive processes, related to the recognition of emotions, and ‘conceptual’ which were supposedly distinctexplains Maxime Bertoux. We show that our conceptual knowledge and our knowledge of language have a determining role in the way we perceive emotions. This allows us to bring new elements to confirm the constructionist theory of emotions: we would culturally construct our emotions from childhood.”
