Emotions, Personality, and Mental Health: Oh My!

I’m joining the blog lifestyle!

In this blog, I’ll be commenting on my favorite topics: emotions, personality, mental health, and pop culture. You all caught that Wizard of Oz reference in the blog post title, right? Probably so, because the Wizard of Oz is apparently the most influential movie of all time.

Anyway, I’ll mostly talk about the science of emotions, personality, and mental health, but with some occasional meanderings into how these topics show up in the pop culture I’m consuming (TV shows, books, movies).

Why are emotions, personality, and mental health my favorite topics?

Because as an academic clinical psychologist, those are the topics I research, teach, and spend most of my time thinking about.

What’s An Academic Clinical Psychologist

What is an academic clinical psychologist? Let’s break that down. The ‘academic’ part means that I’m primarily a professor at a university. The ‘clinical psychologist’ part refers to my degree and my license—I have a PhD in clinical psychology and I’m licensed as a psychologist in the state of Arkansas.

Fun fact: In most states, you have to be licensed or license-eligible to call yourself a ‘psychologist.’ That means my friends with PhDs in social psychology or cognitive psychology technically can’t call themselves psychologists, because they do research and teach but they don’t do therapy. Wild and unfair, but there you have it.

As an academic clinical psychologist, my primary role is doing research as well as teaching and mentoring. I teach courses about emotions, personality, and (wait for it….) mental health. I also help train doctoral students learn how to conduct psychological assessments and how to be a therapist. I’m also a therapist myself with a part-time private practice, where I see maybe 3-4 adult individuals or couples per week.

But why these topics?

None of the above actually answers why emotions, personality, and mental health are my favorite topics, though. And in truth, I don’t entirely know why I’m drawn to them. I’ve been interested in emotions for a long time, because I am amazed to see how different people in the same family can respond to the same situation in such unique ways.

Christmas Family Drama

For example, I remember one Christmas when I was in college, when I was visiting my parents in South Florida. That was already weird because I grew up in Illinois and was not used to swimming outside in December (but who says no to an afternoon ‘beer and float’?). That year, sitting around the tree, we got into an argument—about something I can’t even recall. The topic clearly wasn’t important enough to remember. But I do remember how we responded. My dad yelled, my mom burst into tears, my younger sister got feisty and yelled before stomping off, and I just sat there silently, stonefaced.

At the time, I was a Dramatic Arts major with a music minor, with vague plans of becoming a (famous) theater director. My only real thought in that moment was, “Yikes.” And then, “Does this mean we aren’t going swimming?”

But later on, after I abandoned my theatrical dreams—a topic I will cover in another post—I thought about that Christmas and started asking many questions about emotions, which wriggled deep and took root in my mind, until eventually they became what I wanted to devote my career to studying.

Questions about Emotions, Personality, and Mental Health

What kinds of questions did I ask? Here are a few of my early questions:

Do people learn their emotional reactions from their family, or is emotionality inherent and unlearned, more nature than nurture?

How does emotionality fit into personality? What are aspects of personality that are particularly emotional, and what are non-emotional aspects of personality?

Do people with mental health concerns have too-strong emotions that they don’t know how to cope with? Are some personality types more vulnerable to mental health issues than others?

Questions Partially Answered

Many decades later, I know the answers to some of these questions. Or at least partial answers, because in psychology there are rarely clear and definitive conclusions. My students often joke that the best answer to any question in psychology is “Well, it depends….” They aren’t wrong!

But, the psychological research has at least started to address these questions, and thousands more.

People definitely learn about emotions from their families, and their peers, and their broader social environments.

Emotions are also embedded into personality—some people are inherently more emotionally reactive than others, but emotionality can also be shaped by experiences.

People with mental health concerns often have strong emotions, or few emotions.

And are some personality types more vulnerable to mental health issues? Well, personality can’t really be distilled into types, so that question is not even one worth asking! (I’ll address the problems with thinking about personality types in a future post, too.)

What’s to Come

The short version is that there is much to discuss in the realm of emotions, personality, and mental health. My plan here is to go beyond what I talked about in my book but with a similar goal in mind. I want to convey the science of emotions, personality, and mental health in an understandable way with a focus on how to apply the science to real-world situations. There’s a LOT of science on all of these topics, so there will be plenty to discuss!

Not everything I’ll talk about here will be easy to apply to everyday life. Some of the science is just interesting to know about. For example, I’ll review the main points of fascinating research studies or psychological theories. I’ll talk about career trajectories in psychology and what it’s like to be a therapist. I’ll try to debunk some misconceptions about emotions, personality, and mental health that I see online or in pop culture.

I will also try to provide evidence-based suggestions of the same type I give to my students and clients. If you try them, let me know how they go! If you don’t, let me know why you refuse. I hope to learn something from writing this blog as much as I hope you learn something from reading it!

If you have any questions about personality, emotions, or mental health you want me to tackle, fill out a contact form and ask. I’ll add your question to my topic list!

Let’s gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!