Essay on Personality & Jealousy: Low Self-Esteem & Gender Differences

Introduction

Personality has always been associated with jealousy. Studies carried out by personality psychologists characterize it with insecurity and low-self-esteem as the most displayed elements. Among the elements, concerning jealousy research, low self-esteem has been widely researched. Various metrics have been used by researchers to determine personality traits in both men and women. The differences in personality between individuals are attributed to the possession of different attitudes, especially for people that have a close relationship with each other. Such people are usually vulnerable to actions that trigger jealousy.

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Therefore, the type of attachment styles exhibited in people’s relationships significantly contributes to the personality that they will portray. For partners that are closely related, they tend to either develop insecure or secure attachment styles. Those with insecure attachments are linked with anxious and avoidant tendencies and they are more jealous as compared to those with secure attachment styles (Buunk, 1997). From the above, it can be established that personality traits in people’s impact on jealousy through styles of attachments practiced by close individuals.

Consequently, when examining personality variables about jealousy, there is a special element that takes into account the original family an individual is born, and that is the birth order. Birth order has been associated with rivalry among siblings, which, if perpetuated to adulthood, in most cases, becomes a precursor to adulthood jealous. As much as it has been difficult to determine the intensity of personality in different birthplaces, firstborns have been established to have a minimal level of jealousy as compared to lastborn. The magnitude is due to the material investment that parents seem to put on their first children as compared to their last ones.

Firstborns usually have exclusive attention and love that is reflected in the lower threshold of their jealousy despite some cases of being negatively treated by their parents. The attention and love advanced to them explain why the majority of them report fewer cases of falling into depression in their adulthood as compared to late-born children. Contrary to firstborn children, late-born children, they have always grown up knowing that they are in a competition for the love and attention from their parents (Buunk, 1997). Amid a struggle to reach the levels, they alienate themselves. They grow up with insecurities with avoidant attachment styles to either the parents or the partners they might have in the future.

According to the research by Buunk (1997), it is evident that birth order tends to have a substantial impact on jealous levels. Therefore, late-born children have a slightly greater level of jealousy as compared to firstborn children. The reason is that the latter gets a special kind of love and attention given to them in their early childhood, courtesy of the exceptional parental care that triggers a reduced attitude level, hence, a positive personality with high self-esteem (Buunk, 1997). However, the effect can be mediated by appropriate characteristics of personality or attachment styles.

Personality seems to revolve around jealousy among people where at least everyone jealous shows signs of rigidity, neuroticism, social anxiety, and hostility. However, the prevalence of the above signs is more explicit in women that have low self-esteem as compared to men. The prevalence shows that personality in women is determined by their jealousy levels. On the contrary, men display a lack of correlation between their self-esteem and jealousy in the determination of their personalities. A possible explanation to the differences in behavior between the two genders is that the existence of a happy relationship courtesy of attachments between opposite genders proves to be of the essence for the female than male personalities. Therefore, any form of threats advanced to attachments adversely affects women more than men.

Personality differences are also attributed to various attachment styles. For instance, individuals with avoidant attachments in their interactions depicted tendencies of dominating over others and always being in control and being rigid to other people’s opinions. Those with anxious attachment styles confirmed to be hostile, neurotic, and with low self-esteem. People with anxious-ambivalent attachments are more jealous as compared to those with avoidant attachments. Individuals with avoidant attachment styles are more jealous because research shows that they highly depend on their partners or parents at the same time; they feel they are not offered sufficient attention. Therefore, they are on the verge of losing them anytime. Avoidant people possess a feeling of inadequacy to cope with current situations, which might lead to them undergoing a functional decline and exhibit posttraumatic signs.

People with developed avoidant attachments portray emotional and adjustment problems as much as they try to pretend to defend their façade with security and remain composed. The pretense is achieved through blocking normal emotions and suppressing unresolved distress, which in turn impairs their personality and interaction (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008). They are insecure and, thus, experience problems in the management of their behaviors. Their relative incapacities to solve problems interfere with their right plans and actions disengage them from setting goals and objectives. They end up being frustrated, affecting their attachments with people at workplaces or in their families.

According to the attachment theory backed up by intensive research, people that are insecurely attached exhibit a significant magnitude of doubts to their self-worth and self-efficacy (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). They usually lack self-belief; hence, they remain helpless and hopeless towards important aspects of life. Victims become vulnerable to any form of prejudice and rejection. They fear being criticized and disapproved whey they end up blaming themselves and always want perfection in their actions that cannot be easily achieved. When cognitive processes become destructive, the insecurely attached individuals are left susceptible to distress that negatively influences their personality and their attachment with other people.

Attachment theory suggests that attachment behaviors are bred from within an individual in response to a particular internal or external cue that perpetuates to shape up their personality with their surroundings. The selected behaviors at a given time by a child, for instance, are the ones that are found useful at that moment, whose application and development depend on the achievement of proximity. Attachments are influenced by emotions, especially during the childhood of a person. Many of the emotions are as a result of the maintenance, formation, renewal, and disruptions of attachments at a given point in time. Emotions regulate attachment relationships between individuals. It implies that any differences between two attached individuals result in attachment insecurities that determine how emotions are responded to, shared, and communicated about, and how they are controlled in the attachment relationship.

According to the theory, there is the development of multiple attachments in young people. Children are established to have more than one person to whom they attach behaviors directly. Therefore, there is always a high probability of developing different personalities at a young age in people. However, the treatment of each attachment figure during this time is not equivalent to each one of them, similar to exhibiting interchangeable personalities (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008). Children tend to be inclined towards seeking for comfort and security. The party that advances this has an upper hand advantage of shaping the personality of the child.

Attachment Systems

Attachment systems are also evident during the adolescent stage among young people. It is at this stage of transition from childhood to adulthood that young people learn to communicate. Adolescents have cognitive and emotional advances that allow them to reflect and modify their states of mind to attachments. Cognitive differentiation triggers the consciousness that allows them to establish a consistent view of their personality as they interact with people around them (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008). Regardless of the gender, parents, and caregivers actively interact with adolescents to correct any attachment-related behaviors in a bid to meet the teens evolving attachment needs at the same time balancing them. Modification at this stage results in further increased attachment or independence of the teens.

Attachments are evolutionary in the sense that they change from child to parent and beyond infancy. The shifts in a child’s attachment to the parent figures come to effect in their third or fourth years, where they can enter into a goal-corrected partnership with their parents (Parker et al., 2006). It is at the onset of simple cognitive perspectives where the child begins to understand their attachment with parents and caregivers. They can incorporate their parent’s plans to agree with theirs to enhance their attachments. Significant changes begin to emerge in their sixth year in the manifestation of their patterns of attachments.

Attachment theory is influential and applicable in family therapy, whereby the understanding of the personal attachment among the family siblings in their parents is necessary. It is through the theory that further explanations regarding birthplaces and personality can be examined to explain the patterns of relationships among members. Therapeutic moves through clinical experiences have been ascertained to successfully alter the patterns of relationships to those that are benefited by both siblings and parents (Parker et al., 2006). for the theory to be effective, the affected members of a family must participate in the transition. Failure of which the process might be jeopardized, especially when a child leaves home in the process of growing up. The child ends up losing the availability of an attachment figure.

References

Buunk, B. P. (1997). Personality, birth order and attachment styles as related to various types of jealousy. Personality and Individual Differences, 23(6), 997-1006.

Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (2008). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd ed.). New York, NY. The Guilford Press.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. New York, NY. The Guilford Press.

Parkes, C. M., Stevenson-Hinde, J., & Marris, P. (Eds.). (2006). Attachment across the life cycle. London. Routledge.