Can We Train Ourselves to Succeed in Relationships?

A theory emerged to describe the basic traits that serve as the building blocks of personality. The "Big Five" Personality Traits, as they are often referred to, are broad categories of personality traits that can be broken down into:

1. Extraversion: characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.
2. Agreeableness: includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other pro-social behaviors.
3. Conscientiousness: include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details.
4. Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness.
5. Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.

The "Big Five" Personality Traits examines the individual differences in people. We can use these differences to identify how someone might perform in certain work environments or tasks. For example, Openness is associated with tolerance of ambiguity (which means when something is not clear), a capacity to absorb information, being very focused and the ability to be aware of more feelings, thoughts and impulses simultaneously. The result is deeper more intense experiences. Open individuals are motivated to seek out the unfamiliar and to look for complexity.

Our openness to new experiences is a trait that may lead to relationship success; both professional and personal. Each person's degree of openness has been found to be connected to satisfaction in certain business relationships and dating or married couples. The more open individuals are, the better at communicating and working out conflicts they tend to be.

Openness (open and closed styles) are useful in different environments. The personality style of the more open person may serve a professor, scientist or teacher well, but research has shown that closed thinking is related to superior job performance in police work, sales, and a number of service occupations.

Depending on the environment or personality trait desired, Lumosity.com points out, openness may be trainable, according to new research from the University of Illinois published in Psychology and Aging. Out of 183 older adults, those who underwent cognitive training increased their openness to new experiences. After the training, which featured pattern-recognition and problem solving, these same participants also improved inductive reasoning skills.

The study is particularly surprising because "Big Five" Personality Traits such as openness were long thought to be stable throughout much of the lifespan. Although much research remains to be completed regarding the links between openness and relationship success, the Illinois study raises a fascinating possibility—that integral life traits such as openness can be altered through cognitive training, even later in life.