Title: The healthy personality from a basic trait perspective.
Abstract: What basic personality traits characterize the psychologically healthy individual?The purpose of this paper was to address this question by generating an expert-consensus model of the healthy person in the context of the 30 facets (and five domains) of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) system of traits.In a first set of studies, we found that the healthy personality can be described, with a high level of agreement, in terms of the 30 facets of the NEO-PI-R.High levels of Openness to Feelings, Positive Emotions, and Straightforwardness, together with low levels on facets of Neuroticism were particularly indicative of healthy personality functioning.The expert-generated healthy personality profile was negatively correlated with profiles of pathological personality functioning and positively correlated with normative personality functioning.In a second set of studies, we matched the NEO-PI-R profiles of over 3,000 individuals from seven different samples with the expert-generated healthy prototype to yield a healthy personality index.This index was characterized by good retest reliability and cross-rater agreement, high rank-order stability, and substantial heritability.Individuals with high scores on the healthy personality index were psychologically well-adjusted, had high selfesteem, good self-regulatory skills, an optimistic outlook on the world, and a clear and stable self-view.These individuals were low in aggression and meanness, unlikely to exploit others, and were relatively immune to stress and self-sufficient.We discuss the results in the light of their implications for both research and theory on healthy personality functioning.