The Psychology of Handwriting
Flipping through the pages on my old high school notebooks, I realized how much my handwriting has changed in the last five years. It made me wonder if this change was directly linked to the development of my personality. Through further digging, I found a multitude of online tests that claimed they could accurately assess my personality based on my handwriting.
Graphology is “the allegedly scientific practice of determining people’s social, psychological, occupational, and medical attributes from the configuration of their letters, lines, and paragraphs on a page” (Beyerstein, 1996). It is believed that detailing one’s handwriting can help determine “a person’s general intelligence, emotional stability, characteristics as leader or follower, their level of honesty, frequency of drug use, and physical activity level” (Scanlon, 1992). Psychoanalysis experts, such as Freud and Jung, affirmed that graphology can help gain insight into the conscious and unconscious mind of individuals and “immediately shows our evolving physical and mental state” (Scanlon, 1992).
Through comprehensive research on this subject, it became apparent that there was no definitive methodology for analyzing one’s calligraphy. Like many studies that create their own independent scales to measure psychological constructs, the measures of graphological tests are based off of the researcher’s preferred items. Thus, there is diverging criteria for the examination of personality based on one’s penmanship. The most popular elements to evaluate are the size and slant of letters, pressure applied, leveling of lines, word spacing and creation of margins and paragraphs (Prasad, 2010). For example, many graphologists agree that writing large letters can identify someone who likes to be noticed and stand out in a crowd, or writing with a right slant symbolizes someone sociable, friendly and interested in others (Prasad, 2010).
There is an ongoing debate about the validity of this testing because the results are completely dependent upon the knowledge and experience of the graphologist. This approach received a lot of criticism due to its high level of subjectivity which resembles negative attitudes some scientists hold towards projective psychological testing. This investigation of subconscious patterns in writing fails to provide impartial and detached data which leads to its disapproval within the psychology community. Therefore, it is often characterized as a pseudoscience and compared to astrology and numerology for its lack of adherence to the scientific method.
Like most scholars, I believe that the analysis of one’s handwriting cannot fully portray one’s personality, because of the high involvement of the researcher in the findings. Also, I think that this form of testing gives general results (i.e. can be applicable to the majority of people) and is done to create a false sense of credibility over the results. Thus, I do not believe that personality traits can be associated with a specific way of writing; for example, when comparing my own handwriting, a far spacing of letters would signify that I am more open to sentiment and intelligence than I was five years ago. This assumption is not scientific and therefore, I do not believe in its effectiveness or accuracy.
References cited:
Beyerstein, Barry L. 1996. “How Graphology Fools People”. In The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. Online. Retrieved from:
<http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/grapho.html>
Prasad, Shitala; Singh, Vivek Kumar, and Akshay Sapre. 2010. “Handwriting Analysis based on Segmentation Method for Prediction of Human Personality using Support Vector Machine”. In International Journal of Computer Applications. Vol. 8 — No. 12. Online. Retrieved from: < http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.206.5712&rep=rep1&type=pdf >
Scanlon, Matthew, and James Mauro. 1992. “The Lowdown on Handwriting Analysis”. In Psychology Today. Online. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/the-lowdown-handwriting-analysis
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