Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism all make up the Big Five personality traits.

There’s a reason why personality tests and personality identifiers, such as Type A, Type B, extroverted and introverted, are so common. Many folks want to know themselves better, and there’s inherent value in learning about yourself.

“The overall hope with so many of these personality assessments is just to understand yourself, to improve self awareness, which hopefully or inevitably, will lead to a lot of personal growth and self-understanding,” said Emma Shandy Anway, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in California.

“And I think when you are able to increase your emotional intelligence and understanding of yourself, it helps you navigate relationships more and helps you understand how to live your life in a way that’s fully embodied,” she added.

One major way to understand yourself more deeply is by learning where you fall on the Big Five personality inventory, which is an assessment that allows folks to understand their personality structure by looking at where they fall on a spectrum of five different personality traits. These traits can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism,” said Shandy Anway.

“The research that’s been done on this, they looked at over 50 different cultures, and they found that these five traits are found cross-culturally,“ Shandy Anway added. “It’s kind of a really universal thing that is found and it’s not necessarily just Western cultures that have these.”

Research regarding the Big Five personality traits is ongoing, but it seems that where you fall on each spectrum is part nature and part nurture. Meaning, familial and societal pressures impact your traits, too, noted Anna Lau, a psychiatric nurse practitioner with Lavender Therapy in New York.

Therapists say this a helpful way to know yourself, address traits that you aren’t proud of and continue the ones that you are. Here’s what to know:

The Big Five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness,........

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