Humanistic psychologists have published new research that offers a unique approach to measuring personality traits through the flexible, adapted Five-Factor Personality Assessment (FFPAS) approach.
Psychological research has often emphasized the Big Five or the five-factor model, a more generalized form of personality.
However, traditional applications of the FFM, such as the NEO Personality Inventory, do not fully take into account the unique, individual experiences that are responsible for psychological distress. This gap has become more prominent in humanistic psychology, which focuses on a person-centered, holistic approach to understanding psychological challenges.
The FFPAS aims to establish a link between trait-situation disparities in personal characteristics and life circumstances that cause psychological harm.
Dr. Gary Hovhannisyan, a therapist at Toronto’s Centre for Interpersonal Relationships and the Centre for Psychology and Emotional Health, said a key question for his research is how the Big Five personality traits influence the world as we see it.
According to the semi-structured interview reported in my dissertation research, the Big Five model can be used in clinical settings to diagnose and treat individuals who are involved in negative patterns.
The FFPAS is designed to be administered in a semi-structured interview format and can be used alongside existing personality assessments, such as the NEO. Hovhannisyan’s approach uses coding criteria to assess client stories and sheds light on how personality traits are expressed in real-world contexts.
A pilot study used the IPIP-NEO personality assessment methodology with four participants who completed a comprehensive personality assessment using university mailing lists and two-hour interviews.
Participants noted repetitive patterns of distress in their lives (provided by descriptions) during the interview and their narratives were transcribed and analyzed using the FFPAS coding system, which included annotations on five personality domains (i.e., openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and their corresponding facets (e.g., self-discipline, impulsiveness) to help the researcher identify patterns of trait-situation mismatch.
Hovhannisyan observed that personality traits are dynamic and dynamic in their impact on life situations. This is evident in extroverts’ intense need for social interaction, which in turn drives their behavior.
According to the FFPAS, personal difficulties are often the result of incongruence between our characteristics and the expectations of our surroundings.
Psychology of the Mind, for example, provides clients with evidence that “none of the negative patterns we experience can be explained by our relationship with the world—there is nothing intrinsically wrong with us, but there is something good in all of us,” making this a helpful approach to conducting psychological assessments.
This can help relieve feelings of guilt and shame because it helps clients understand that the external world was not the source of their negative patterns, and that, in fact, the world is a place to live in despite their suffering, as there is no way it would be otherwise.
The FFPAS remains unproven due to limited psychological testing. According to Hovhannisyan, the reliability and practicality of the system can be substantiated by empirical evidence, as the current findings are based on preliminary research.
Questions remain: “We need to establish a stronger empirical basis on the FFPAS’s coding system; we need to understand the full spectrum of its clinical applications; and we need to explore how the FFPAS can best be applied in a variety of therapeutic settings; and we need to examine differences in trait-situation mismatch among more diverse populations to better generalize the system.”
He highlights the FFPAS’s ability to combine theoretical insights from personality research with practical, therapeutic applications in psychology, emphasizing the systematic integration of the Big Five personality traits.
The author of “The Five-Factor Personality Assessment System” is Gary Hovhannisyan.
