Perceptual Excitement and Eysenck’s Mechanism of Personality
Eysenck’s theory of introvert versus extrovert behavior and arousal can be used to determine the relative excitingness of various primitive perceptual opposites.
© 2024 Andrew Hodgson. Edited by Lisa Anthony.
Currently, there are few studies directly assessing the relationship between extraversion and the cortical arousal system in the context of varying stimulations but data available so far are remarkably consistent with Eysenck’s model.
— Mitchell and Kumari (2016)
According to Hans Jürgen Eysenck’s arousal-based mechanism of personality type (1952, 1963), extroverts have lower inherent activity in the brain, and they compensate for the resulting lack of excitement they feel by favoring more arousing experiences and stimuli, while introverts, with higher inherent brain activity, compensate by favoring lower arousal. There’s an important aesthetic component to this idea in that the distinction between types, which were first proposed by Carl Jung in Psychologische Typen (1923), is based on the fact that they have slightly different preferences with respect to certain primitive perceptual opposites.
