Personality Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Personality - Essay ExampleThe Naked Face demonstrates that personality and physical appearance directly influence each other by dint of their two-way feedback system. Paul Ekman, a psychologist from San Francisco, studied human facial expressions with Wallace Friesen. They contacted Silvan Tomkins, another professor of Psychology at Princeton and Rutger. Ekman showed Tomkins close-up pictures of two tribes, the peace-loving South forwards and the hostile and homosexuality-practicing Kukukuku (Gladwell 3). Tomkins correctly interpreted the personalities of these two tribes, when he said that the South Fore were a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful, while the Kukukuku were violent, and there is lot of evidence to suggest homosexuality (Gladwell 3). ... These researchers also studied medical textbooks that identified facial muscles, and they determined the specific muscular movements that the face nominate produce. They recognized 43 movements and labeled them as action units or A.U. (Gladwell 3). After that, they wrote the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, which included all A.U. and the rules for reading them. Their study emphasizes that it is possible to survive who people are from their faces only. Their research reveals another perplexing finding peoples expressions also affect their body. When people consciously project happiness, their bodies also show signs of happiness In the facial-feedback system, an expression you do not even know that you have can create an emotion you did not choose to feel (Gladwell 5). Friesen and Ekman implicate that appearance can also influence peoples emotions, and perhaps their personalities too. The Story of My Body disagrees with The Naked Face, because it believes that physical appearance can impact personality, only when people allow it to. Cofer says that as a child, she was quite bony and small compared to American or white counterparts. As a result, her peers called her Skinny Bones and The S hrimp. Even when people taunted her, however, she remained emotionally strong, because she focused on her academic skills instead. She decided to be a brain and not an athlete. Still, how people saw her also shaped her personality. For instance, when Cofer had chicken pox, she scratched them and had permanent scars all over her face. A nurse told her that her scars would always seem to other people that a mad cat had plunged its claws deep into her skin. This remark made her feel inferior and she