The Big Five Personality Types: A Narrative Review
Abstract
Tiffany Field
This narrative review is a series of summaries of studies on the big five personality types published in 2023-2025. It includes 29 studies that can be categorized as: 1) psychometric properties of the Big Five Personality Inventory-20 and heritability of the big five personality types; 2) positive effects of the big five personality types; and 3) negative effects of the personality types. The big five personality types have been described as four positive domains including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness and one negative domain neuroticism. The positive effects of the big five personality types include number of friends, health apps, innovation behavior, academic achievement, religiosity, self–efficacy, self-esteem, life satisfaction and joy. The negative behaviors include excessive Facebook time, aggression, bullying, obsessive compulsive disorder and healthcare utilization. The negative feelings include burnout, negative quality of life, dark tetrad, tinnitus, stress, allostatic load, poor sleep, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. The number of negative behaviors and feelings that have appeared in this literature exceed the number of positive behaviors, likely because medical and psychological research has focused on and has been funded for studying problems/conditions. Several methodological limitations can be noted for this recent literature. They include the almost exclusive sampling of university students as convenience samples, the uneven distribution of positive and negative qualities on the big five personality inventory and the cross-sectional data versus longitudinal data that cannot determine directionality or causality.