Personality Traits In Musicians

BACKGROUNDPerforming music is a complex creative activity which in addition to professional skills requires phantasy, a sense of aesthetics, cognitive involvement. intellectual curiosity, perceptual sensitivity, mental flexibility, but also discipline, motor precision and speed, attention endurance, emotional expression and communication. Many of these characteristics are also reflected in personality traits such as Openness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness and to some degree Neuroticism. Previous research has investigated the differences between personality traits amongst musicians. but there are few studies that compare personality characteristics between musicians and non-musicians.PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDUREUsing the Ten-Item Personality Measure (TIPI) the present study investigated Big Five personality traits in a sample of musicians (n = 509) compared to non-musicians (n = 201).RESULTSControlled for gender and age, the findings demonstrated that musicians had significantly higher scores on Openness and lower scores on Conscientiousness compared with non-musicians. There were no significant differences between the groups in Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability-Neuroticism. The differences were larger for Openness than for Conscientiousness.CONCLUSIONSMusicians seem to differ from non-musicians in two traits: somewhat lower scores on Conscientiousness, and considerably higher scores in Openness to experience. Thus, Openness seems to be the most typical personality trait for musicians. There were no significant differences in Extraversion, Agreeableness or Emotional Stability (Neuroticism) between the two groups. These results suggest that musicians are more creative and openminded than non-musicians.