A recent post by Kitsune discussed blogger personality styles. While the finding that all bloggers are more open to new ideas and creative is an interesting one, the observation that woman bloggers score high on “neuroticism” needs a closer look.
As a psychologist, blogger, published test author and digger, I am fairly qualified to dig a little deeper. Kitsune uses the five factor model, and two of the three rersearchers who did the cited study are female. But the term neuroticism is old school in psychology and fell into disfavor many years ago. That doesn’t mean the research didn’t mean anything, it just says be careful how we interpret it.
The dimension in question really gets at a tendency to be open to emotions, especially the negative ones. I can believe that female bloggers may be more emotionally available than me and most of the other male bloggers, and possibly even more vulnerable. But the use of the label “neurotic” has long been used to diminsh women and keep them down as second class citizens. Women in general and especially female bloggers are not only first class, but more often than not they are classier.
One of the ways women bloggers have a leg up on men is that they are more open to their emotions.
Indeed, the term “neurotic” should not be used. In fact, some early personality researchers in 40s and 60s denoted this dimension as Emotional Control and Emotionality instead of Neuroticism. Also it is important to note that a trait is just a tendency for a particular behavior, and its manifestation depends on the situation. Sometimes traits influence behavior significantly, other times – not at all.
Are we really making a blanket observation of women versus men? Why not just as easily discuss McCain and Obama in terms of skin color? It seems highly simplistic to me to lump female bloggers into one category.
[...] neuroses, psychology, research, studies, women, writing Excerpt from Author-Friendly Weblog: Women who blog are not neurotic A recent post by Kitsune discussed blogger personality styles. While the finding that all bloggers [...]