Openness to experience

Openness to experience is one of the domains which are used to describe human personality in the Five Factor Model. Openness involves six facets, or dimensions, including active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. A great deal of psychometric research has demonstrated that these facets or qualities are significantly correlated. Thus, openness can be viewed as a global personality trait consisting of a set of specific traits, habits, and tendencies that cluster together.

Openness tends to be normally distributed with a small number of individuals scoring extremely high or low on the trait, and most people scoring moderately. People who score low on openness are considered to be closed to experience. They tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines to new experiences, and generally have a narrower range of interests. Openness has moderate positive relationships with creativity, intelligence and knowledge. Openness is related to the psychological trait of absorption, and like absorption has a modest relationship to individual differences in hypnotic susceptibility.

Openness has more modest relationships with aspects of subjective well-being than other Five Factor Model personality traits. On the whole openness appears to be largely unrelated to symptoms of mental disorders.

Openness to experience is usually assessed with self-report measures, although peer-reports and third-party observation are also used. Self-report measures are either lexical or based on statements. Which measure of either type is used is determined by an assessment of psychometric properties and the time and space constraints of the research being undertaken

A number of studies have found that openness to experience has two major subcomponents, one related to intellectual dispositions, the other related to the experiential aspects of openness, such as aesthetic appreciation and openness to sensory experiences. These subcomponents have been referred to as intellect and experiencing openness respectively, and have a strong positive correlation (r = .55) with each other.

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