I’m sort of half and half. I get along well with both introverts and extroverts. I can stay content with light conversation and long silences during dinner, or I can talk 90 miles an hour and laugh with someone until we are both blue in the face.
My wife is an introvert. She likes her space and quiet time, even at home. I am her deflector shield at parties. If she gets cornered by a Chatty Cathy, she gives me the signal and I join the conversation. Since they start getting the quicker responses they were expecting, they tend to focus more on me so I can draw them away and she can duck out.
Like many of the previous posters, she likes sitting back and listening to the conversation. She may pop in when she feels like it, but it’s not necessary for her to enjoy herself.
She always says she has permanent bitch face. There are a few cartoons floating around the internet that sum it up, but it’s pretty much a condition where her facial expressions very seldom match her emotions. She may be perfectly happy and people will wander up at random and ask what’s wrong. Needless to say, it’s very frustrating for her. Many people don’t know how to react to her until they have been around her long enough to know her pretty well. I suspect some of the extroverts posting here would run screaming based on what I have read so far.
She actually is a fun person with a great sense of humor, but it takes time for people to get her rhythms.
I have read the same thing, and I find it interesting. But it begs the question of whether this is a constitutional property or one that is acquired. I can certainly see it being both.
To use msmith’s question as an example, if you have tedious, stupid people for parents, are you more likely to develop “overactivity” than someone who doesn’t? Chronic stress can definitely affect the brain. Seems to me it is possible to influence of a brain’s “deposition” by subjecting a person to certain environmental factors.
I have an older sister who is the complete opposite of me personality-wise. The oldest in the family, she experienced the first six years of her life as an only child and the center of adult attention. Perhaps all that early attention primed her brain’s reward center in a way that makes her have a higher threshold for stimulation. If she had been born as the youngest child, I have no doubt she’d still be extroverted. But maybe she wouldn’t be quite so extroverted because she wouldn’t have been “hooked” on attention at such an early age.
Maybe, but I am an only child - the only grandchild for 15 years - and very much an introvert. I was a spoiled brat up until around age 8 or 9. I’m not proud of it, but I admit I had a low opinion of a lot of my peers during my early childhood. I also had a very active and vivid imagination, which means I spent a lot of time daydreaming by myself, and started writing fiction all of the time instead of interacting with others. There are thinkers and doers, and I’ve always been a thinker.
I have an Aunt I am very close to, and we are very, very similar in personality. The biggest difference is that she is extremely extroverted. She always wants to do something, go places, meet people. She is a doer, the person guaranteed to take charge of a situation and get shit done. I grew up spending a lot of time with her, but the extroversion never really rubbed off.
I’m not saying environment has nothing to do with it, because of course it does, somehow. But I think it can also be just how you are. It’s always really been just how I am.
If someone corners you and asks whether a given behavior is innate or learned, it is almost always a best response to say “a little of both.” Fencesitting maybe, but true. If you are born with one predilection, your daily interactions can enforce or dampen your natural response. Probably just your innate self makes it that much more likely you will continue on the same path. I am not a strict behaviorist; raising an introverted baby in an extrovert-friendly environment will probably not make them extremely introverted with any certainty.
By the way, the term I have seen sometimes used for people who are “half and half” is ambivert. This is the majority of the population, it is only us extremes who get referred to by these other terms.