A study conducted by a team of psychologists from Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest universities shows that Romanians’ national personality is bipolar, which means that there are two very different personality profiles.

“On one hand, there is a profile characterized by low emotional instability, associated with increased openness, extroversion, agreeability, and scrupulousness, called the X plus factor, having a positive potential, whose metaphorical name is Fat-Frumos (e.n. Prince Charming in English). We then have a second profile with low openness, and low extroversion, agreeability, and conscientiousness, the minus X factor which we’ve called Zmeul (e.n. TheDragon in English),” said team coordinator Daniel David, cited by local Mediafax.

The Prince Charming profile is associated with people with higher education, aged between 30 and 50, and the other profile is more frequent among people with a lower level of education, aged between 14 and 19, and over 60.

According to Daniel David, the two profiles are almost equally distributed in Romania. They are not positive or negative, they only have a negative or positive potential that realises depending on the outside environment.

"The transformation (of these profiles) in functional social behaviors depends on the socio-cultural institutions that exist in Romania. If the institutions are bad, the X plus profile won't be able to express itself while the emotional instability of the X minus profile will increase," David said. He explained that understanding this bipolar personality structure is not aimed at changing it, but at creating modern socio-cultural institutions to maximise each profile's potential. "This is the major challenge we have as a country," he added.

He also said that this bipolar structure also had a series of advantages. "In an insecure world, full of dangers, this bipolar structure makes us be less influenced by the action of several negative forces on the system, which is a good thing. In a world without dangers, this structure would not help us very much.”

The psychologist added that, in a globalized world, where countries interact more and more, it is necessary to understand the psycho-cultural profiles as “it can contribute to a better communication between different countries and cultures and to avoiding conflicts.”

The study was made by psychologists from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest University. The study's results will be published in November in the "Romanian Journal of Applied Psychology”.

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Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com