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OCEAN Considerations and Narcissism

Big Five Ocean thinking
Anticipating things well is a task of wisdom.
The OCEAN has five dimensions . . .

OCEAN, or the Big Five
Lassie, the Wonder-Dog (Well Trained)
Narcissism

Supporting "well medleys" are presupposed throughout:

OCEAN - The Big Five

The Big Five is currently the most reliable and well-validated system of trait description. Feel free to think, "The Big 5 - fit for times of peace, more unfit for war", because openness and agreeableness may hinder combatting, and extroversion too may not fit secrecy making and desorientation (lying) that often goes along with warfare. Compare the traits below.
The "Big Five" (each trait exists on a high/low scale) is the most used current psychometric measurement perspective in personality psychology. The five dimensions are:

Openness - also: Culture, Originality, or Intellect
Conscientiousness - or Consolidation, or Will to Achieve
Extroversion - or Surgency
Agreeableness - or Accommodation
Neuroticism - including: Need for Stability, Negative Emotionality

The order of the trait factors may be put in other ways too, but this one is good for learning the content through an acronym. Various descriptive traits are clustered to each of them.

"Each of the Big Five dimensions is like a bucket that holds a set of traits that tend to occur together. The definitions of the five super factors represent an attempt to describe the common element among the traits, or sub-factors, within each "bucket." The most commonly accepted buckets of traits are those developed by Costa and McCrae (1992) . . . For use in the business community, some of the terms need to be modified. Specifically, the term “Neuroticism” needs to be changed to “Negative Emotionality"

Characteristics of High Scorers Nature of Factor Characteristics of Low Scorers

O: Openness

creative, original, curious, imaginative Toleration for and exploration of the unfamiliar unartistic, conventional

C: Conscientiouness

organized, reliable, neat, ambitious Individual has degree of organization, persistence, and motivation in goal-directed behavior unreliable, lazy, careless, negligent

E: Extraversion

talkative, optimistic, sociable, affectionate Capacity for joy, need for stimulation unartistic, conventional

A: Agreeableness

good-natured, trusting, helpful One's orientation along a continuum from compassion to antagonism in thoughts, feelings, and actions rude, uncooperative, irritable

N: Neuroticism

self-pitying, worrying, insecure, emotional, nervous Proneness to psychological distress, excessive carvings or urges, unrealistic ideas calm, content, secure, unemotional, relaxed

The Big Five has become quite a standard framework for going into individual differences. Outlooks from many personality theories may be compared and discussed by fitting them in the outlook and agreed-on vocabulary of the Big Five. For example, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego may be described in terms of low, medium, and high Conscientiousness, but it may not be easy to see how meaningful it is to alter things like that.

More to come

Lassie, the Wonder-Dog (Well Trained)

Rough collie.

"What is it, Lassie? A boy fell down a mine shaft and broke his ankle and is diabetic and needs insulin? Is THAT what you're trying to tell me?"

[Lassie, the world's most famous rough collie, is also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The dog in the picture is of the same breed as Lassie.]

The OCEAN's criteria seem to be - and this is not too serious:

O, OPENNESS: The dog tolerates and explores the unfamiliar in episode after episode, might be a little bit curious too. This bodes well.
C, CONSCIENTIOUSNESS: The dog persists in its goal-directed behaviour, is always reliable, and seems neat and organised too, by and large.
E: EXTRAVERSION: Capacity for joy is present in the sociable and affectionate animal.
A: AGREEABLENESS: Good-natured, helpful "compassion" as by instinct is in "every" episode.
N: NEUROTICISM: The film collie is content and secure. The rough collie, however, may get unrealistic worries, for example if left alone too long outside the supermarket -

The OCEAN parameters seem to describe a movie star's features and some of the features of the properly trained collie too. The question is: Is that your ideal self if you are not a dog and do not aspire for a dog's life?

Big Five Ocean Lassie
BAR CHART: FOR THE FIRST TIME? A rough collie's OCEAN data suggested. Much depends on the owner. To read it: 5 is maximum, 0 is "neutral", etc.

Some Traits

Narcissism

Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissitic Personality Disorder

Core Definition of the Disorder: "A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by 5 or more of following:

Grandiose sense of self-importance
Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
Believes he/she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people
Requires excessive admiration
Has sense of self-entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
Is interpersonally exploitative
Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him/her
Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Likert Scale

I may add: In most cases of sensed, "intutive" evaluations, the Likert scale is much better and safer to use than the mere yes/no response, evidently. In a very suitable form the responsed on a Likert scale has:

Emphatic, strong 'no' (much denial)
Reserved 'no'
'Quite neutral' or 'don't know'
Soft 'yes'
Strong, emphatic or majestic 'yes'

The responses are allotted numbers, the numbers are next added, and then you may compare responses to an agreed-on key or table that furnishes quite averaged "boxes".
However, for the narcissism disorder such a nuanced solution has not come to my ears, so I leave you with the add the factors to say 'yes' to and see of you "break water" or come under the limit. Good luck.

For Cult Members

We turn to Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) with its international headquarters in Los Angeles. It is evaluated as a cult nowadays. I suspect the narcissism points 2, 3, 5, 8, and 9 to be latent or at work in the open for many of its members:
2. Fantasies of ideal love: In a cult like SRF (Self-Realization Fellowship) much of the liturgy revolves around crying to God Mother to get her love - loving God is part of its ritual. It may breed depressons and much else, and is quite an example and may reveal exclusiveness of attitutes (cf. point 9) in some in addition.
3. Being unique and of a high class with its associations: It is taught in SRF that those who get initiated are specially favoured, have particularly good karma, and most others may have to be left outside of those much favoured circles, maybe for lifetimes.
The idea of associating with high-status people is taken so far in monastic circles that they even retire from contact with lay members.
5. Self-entitlement compliance: The founding guru entitled his own gurus "divine descensions", avatars, and so many Christs, and members comply with such seemingly megalomanously given titles.
7. Recognising feelings of others outside - maybe.
8. May be envious of others who live freely, are free to doubt and think freely, have sex freely and not as boss advised, and so on.
9. Arrogant attitudes: It depends.

There could be a jolly good chance that cult and sect members are turned into narcissists if they were not in the first place. My very tentative, private, average odds go up to 96% - That means I strongly suspect any cult member to be a narcissist before I know him or her too.

What do we do with narcissists?

That is the question for you to answer. One old method is to stay away from them (as cult members) altogether.

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