By Emily Reynolds

Research has shown many benefits to extraversion. One 2019 study on personality traits in the workplace found that extraverts are more motivated, experience more positive emotions, work harder and have fewer adverse experiences at work, while another found that extraversion was associated with more creative thinking.

If you’re not naturally extraverted, however, these wellbeing benefits are not necessarily out of reach. One intervention suggested that acting like an extravert could bring the benefits of natural extraversion, while another generated similar findings a year later. However, some of this work also suggests that for people who are particularly introverted, acting like an extravert could be exhausting and actually produce negative emotions.

A new study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, looks in more detail at what happens when we deviate from our “baseline” levels of extraversion. The team finds that higher-than-normal levels of extraversion-related behaviours are associated with more positive feelings — even for those who aren’t extraverted to begin with.

By Emily Reynolds

“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in A Confession, a succinct summing up of the nihilist worldview. Depressing as it may be, nihilism seems to be on the rise, with the importance of finding a meaningful worldview steadily decreasing over the last decade or so.

But how do other people view nihilists? This is the question posed by Matthew J. Scott and Adam B. Cohen of Arizona State University in a new paper published in The Journal of Social Psychology. They find that stereotypes of nihilists are overwhelmingly negative — and unlike stereotypes about atheists, people don’t seem to have any positive views about nihilists at all.