PSY 330 Emotional Stability Research Paper

Emotional Stability
VickyFlucke
PSY 330
Tolanda Martin
March 9, 2014

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Emotional Stability

Decades of research on personality has uncovered five broad dimensions of personality. These so-called Big Five dimensions are called: (Magnavita, 2012) Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellect. Extraversion is characterized by social ability, talkativeness, assertiveness and excitability. People who are high in extraversion seem to seek out social stimulation and love to talk to others. When people describe extraversion people they say they are full of life, energy and very positive. They are very assertive. When we talk about agreeableness
we use the words pleasant, accommodating, empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous, helpful, trusting and honest to name a few adjectives. Agreeableness distinguish between people who enjoy working with others and are trusting, from people who are more competitive and prefer to work by themselves. Depending on your degree of agreeableness determines your likeliness to lead a team or to be led. Conscientiousness is the personality model that influences whether a person sets and keeps their long-range goals, deliberate over choices or behave impulsively, and take seriously obligations to others. Conscientiousness is a key in being successful. The personality model of intellect is the ability to identify, analyze, memorize, and categorize. Intellect (Fact) and Intelligence (Feeling) determine the existential course of one’s journey through life. Here is a relatively mundane illustration of how they work together. (Antonakis, 2009) The last personality model we are going to talk about is mental stability and the importance of it on the job. I have been told numerous times that I seem so calm even with children calling my name constantly, parents are wanting to talk to me and school politics are driving me a little crazy in my mind. I try to keep my outside calm, so I would like to know how I do this and how to keep it this way. Emotional stability refers to one’s proneness to negative emotions and anxiety. More resilient persons (high on emotional stability) are less prone to experiencing negative reactions. Emotional stability distinguishes individuals who are laid back and relaxed from those who are easily stressed and in touch with their emotions. People who are too stressed become impossible to market to because they filter out unimportant messages, but people who are too relaxed are also impossible to market to because they are not motivated to act on your message. Marketing therefore must follow a careful balancing act between a call to action that is too urgent versus one that is not urgent enough, and there is no single answer for everyone-it depends on an individual’s emotional stability. (Wang, 2011) Emotional stability is having a calm behavior, even if things go wrong or major pressure is on.
It is the skill to control his or her emotional expression while still keeping the right mind to make rational and professional decisions. This is not an act but true calm. I have worked with people that you think are true calm and the smallest thing will send them over the edge. Teng, Chang & Hsu (2009: 2088) states that a person having good emotional stability is less likely to display strong emotional reactions to stressful situations. Teng also adds that these people lean more towards being pro-active and successful in problem-solving. Neuroticism would be the other end of the scale where one will have the buoyancy to experience negative emotions. Neuroticism includes characteristics of excessive worry, pessimistic and low confidence (Bozionelos 2004:
70) When you look at workers who are narcotic they have a difficult time coping with stress or are on a bad mood most of the time under normal circumstances.
Employers favor employees who are emotionally stable because they are dependable and can handle success and failure. Emotional stable employees will continue on with the work assigned, it’s important to help learning and understanding a task. When employees that are neurotic make an error or have a project that doesn’t work out their personality of emotionally positive or negative affects the outcome of their behavior. Emotionally stable individuals will learn from their mistakes, neurotic employees will develop a fear when they make a mistake. Neurotic employees choose alternative activities, often unchallenging work to take their minds off any errors that could relieve fear. This lets us know that emotionally stable employees learn from their own mistakes. One other part of having an emotional stable employee is they can make competent judgment calls even under the most stressful situations. It has been stated emotionally unstable employees will make decisions based on personal emotions rather than facts and logic. In the article by Teng et al, “Emotional stability of nurses: impact on patient safety. Emotionally stable nurses can be expected to achieve better nursing outcomes than emotionally unstable nurses.” (Teng, 2009) This article is about nurses, who have a very stressful job, so it can be
used in more corporate jobs with stress. Even though emotional stability is one of the big five personality factors, there is some evidence that suggest external factors play a part in this behavior. Being unhappy or over worked in your job can lead to unemotional stability. It can cause work burnout and lead to negative emotions than we have neuroticism. In the article Ten et al. (2009) research has shown that emotional stability can be taught. And that there is almost no correlation between emotional stability across the years for the same individual (Hampson & Goldberg cited in Teng et al. 2009). Knowing that external factors can cause instability, employers can find ways to increase job satisfaction. It is critical for managers to create an organizational environment that promotes the emotional stability of employees. There are many different kinds of leadership. Being smarter than anyone else is not what makes a good leader, more important is emotional intelligence. A good leader makes good and rational decisions for the teams they leave. Having control over your emotions is important for being assertive, gregarious, energetic, calm and progressive in a leadership role. Neuroticism in leadership will steer towards hostile and panicky attitudes which do not contribute in leading a successful team today. It is always important that the team leader remains calm and collected in order to keep the team composed; followers will be seeking for a stable point in the team and times of distress and the leader often times must assume this role. (Antonakis, 2009) Leaders who can manage their own emotions are able to direct their attention to prioritize events and handle issues in the order of importance. Dr. Wasilewski stated that leaders who are emotionally intelligent are able to successfully implement changes in an organizations. They understand their responsibilities as a leader and will take steps necessary to improve the team and will also make better judgments on the viability of a follower in the team. With the points presented, it is easy to conclude that a leader with emotional stability will make a better leader than one with emotional instability. (George, 2000) Eysenck was one of the first psychologists to relate biology to personality and has developed an extensive range of theories on many topics and published over 40 book. Eysenck believed that an individual’s personality traits are caused directly by a person’s genetic make-up. There have been many studies that support biological explanations of Eysenck’s trait personality theory: these include, twin studies and brain imaging. Eysenck made traits more mathematical, he gave a long lists of adjectives to hundreds of thousands of people and used a special statistics called factor analysis to figure out what factors carry the most weight. He took the results of this work and created a test called the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. A low score meant you were introverted, a high score extraverted. Of course, this meant you could be halfway in-between - as in fact most people are. The article I found interesting was from the Professional Psychology, Eysenck Personality Inventory. It explains the system Eysenck used to develop his Eysenck Personality Inventory
(EPI). The total number of subjects employed in the series of investigations that culminated with the development of EPI exceeded 30,000. In addition to university students, use was made of various English middle class and working class groups who varied in age and sex composition, as well as of samples purported to be representative of the whole population of England. One of the main problems facing schools is finding the emotionally stable teachers. Ryan Carson states, “No plans for better teacher preparation can omit consideration of the selection of candidates for training. Though there is general agreement as to the need of more satisfactory selection of those young people who are to be encouraged to go on for the work of teaching, little has been done about it.” He also states, “Not only has there been little effort to select for teacher training candidates who are good prospects from the point of view of mental health, but there is some competent opinion to the effect that, is anything, present methods of selection tend to favor a type of candidate whose influence upon children in school is unfortunate.” (Carson, 2010) Everyone wants emotionally stable teachers, but finding ways to hire them is difficult, pay is low, work is difficult. The few schools that have programs of selection in operation have felt more confident of their ability to select for good teachers. I am having some issues at work hiring a new assistant in my classroom. I need one with emotional stability that I can count on and be positive because that is a big part of a teacher’s job is to be positive to the students, parents, and coworkers. To work with students it can be very stressful and you have to be able to handle issues in the importance of them. You have to be able to shift gears and always be ready to keep your students safe. You have to put your personal issues aside. I have worked with other teachers that are so involved in their own problems they forget to work for their students. Being a teacher is difficult and I have seen several teachers burnout. Our office staff is putting in place different outlets for the teachers to relieve stress and give us back our emotional stability. My paper is explaining the benefits of emotional stability on the job. Emotional stability is a benefit in the process of learning things on the job. Emotional people learn from their errors and errors of coworkers in the work place. Emotional stability helps the employees and management make decisions for the welfare of the company. I discussed the details about the emotional stability and neuroticism and how they work together in the work place.
References

Antonakis, J., Ashkanasy, N.M. & Dasborough, M.T. (2009). Does leadership need emotional intelligence? The Leadership Quarterly, 20, 248-260.
Burton, N. L. (2012). Hide and seek: the psychology of self-deception. Great Britain: Acheron Press.
Ryan, W. Carson, (2010) “Toward Better Education for Teachers,” Mental Health Through Education, The commonwealth Fund, pp 120

Linden, J. D. (1970). Reviews, etc.: Eysenck Personality Inventory. Professional Psychology, 1(4), 413-415. doi:10.1037/h0020642

Magnavita, J. J. (2012) Theories of Personality. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

Teng, C. I., Chang, S. & Hsu, K. (2009). Emotional Stability of nurses: impact on patient safety. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 65(10), 2088–2096.

Wang, S., Repetti, R. L., & Campos, B. (2011). Job stress and family social behavior: The moderating role of neuroticism. Journal Of Occupational Health Psychology, 16(4), 441-456. doi:10.1037/a0025100