Clinicians Digest Jan/Feb - Page 6


Critics might say that recognizing your dominant personality style is a little like reading a placemat at a Chinese restaurant: if you pretend you were born in the year of the dog rather than your real year (the horse), you'll probably find the dog description fits you pretty well. But Fisher reports that she's established internal validity for her questionnaire—data that will soon be available in the academic literature.

There are 14 items on the questionnaire in no obvious order that measure each personality type. Some validating items (which aren't part of the questionnaire), such as manipulating lines in an optical illusion to try to make them equal length, or noting whether your ring finger is longer or shorter than your index finger, seem puzzling at first. But testosterone-dominants have strong spatial skills, and fetuses exposed to high levels of testosterone have a longer ring finger than index finger. By contrast, fetuses exposed to more estrogen have a longer second finger, or ring and index fingers of equal length.

In her new book, released this month, Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type, Fisher (a featured speaker at this year's Networker Symposium, see p. 12) presents her data  to answer whether opposites or similar personality types attract. In fact, the answer depends on who's looking. Some types, like those expressive of dopamine and serotonin, are attracted to people like themselves. Others, like the testosterone people, seek their opposites—estrogen people.

It turns out that, like human beings themselves, the science of attraction is more complex than researchers have too often assumed. As Fisher notes, "There'll always be a magic to love."

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