What is personality?

It is the collection of behaviour, thoughts and emotions patterns that a person is used to adopt in life.

Personality traits are relatively stable over time and influence behaviour.

What types of personality traits exist?

The most supported evidence based researches suggest that there are 5 big factors common to human beings:

• Openness to experience (curious vs cautious)
• Conscientiousness (organised vs careless)
• Extroversion (extrovert vs introvert)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs critical/rational)
• Neuroticism or emotional stability (nervous vs resilient)

How personality is developed?

Researches suggest that personality is highly defined by genetics and therefore it is a characteristic one is born with. The personality’s characteristics defined by genetics are called temperament.

What is self-compassion?

Self-compassion means treating oneself with kindness, recognising that every human is imperfect and that everyone, including oneself, is valuable also when facing failure or suffering.

There are three components that define self-compassion:

• Self kindness rather than self judgement
• Feelings of common humanity that means recognise that suffering and failure is part of the shared human experience.
• Mindfulness

What self-compassion depends on?

Like self-esteem, self-compassion highly depends on the experiences we live in our life and on ones core beliefs.

What is Functional Contextualism?

Functional Contextualism is a way to understanding human behaviour.

What are the main assumptions of Functional Contextualism?

The main assumptions of Functional Contextualism are:

• Behaviour depends on the context which is the environmental factors, what happened before the behaviour and the possible consequences that influence behaviour.
• It is more important to understand the function of a behaviour which is why a person engages in a behaviour in one particular context over to analyse what is the observable behaviour.
• It is more important the effectiveness of a intervention rather to adhering to theories.
• An idea is said to be true when it leads to the achievement of a goal, not in how well it is describe reality.

Is sufficiently sustained by empirical evidences?

The empirical evidences that support Functional Contextualism are derived from researches conducted in the field of behavioural science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory.

What is Relational Frame Theory?

Relational Frame Theory is a theory of human language, cognition and behaviour.

What are the main assumptions?

• Humans learn a lot of things about the world creating relationship between things not shaped by trial and error experiences, but through what other people told them through language.
• Humans can assign a meaning to a word not based on its physical property but on their own interpretation that may depend on the context.
• Therefore words may assume different meaning depending on the context.
• Therefore the meaning assigned to words may not be true.
• Because the meaning assigned to words may not be true and this may lead to behaviour that avoid to act towards our values, the human language has the potential to create psychological suffering.

What are the main criticisms of these theories?

I have not found specific criticism to the main assumptions of the theory, but only to the clarity and the novelty of the theory.

What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy? What is its scope?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a psychotherapy protocol based on mindfulness used to:

• increase psychological flexibility
• change or persist in behaviour that are useful to reach the desired goal in the presence of discomfort situations
• reduce cognitive fusion

Is ACT effective? Is effective also in non clinical context?

Some researches suggest that ACT does not fulfill the criteria for being considered a empirical validated therapy, while other researches suggest that ACT is effective for several mental and mood disorders. The American Psychological Association has included ACT as as an empirically supported treatment. I have not found enough data about ACT effectiveness in non clinical context. Therefore my personal conclusion about ACT effectiveness is that it is promising but the effectiveness has not yet been sufficiently proved.

What is self-esteem?

Self-esteem is what you think about yourself, it is the value that you assign to yourself.

High self-esteem means giving high value to ourselves. Low self-esteem means giving low value to ourselves.

Self-esteem is a belief and therefore it may not reflect reality.

Self-esteem can be seen as the difference between our ideal self, that is what we want to be, and our perceived self, that is how close we think we are near to our ideal self.