[1][2] Openness involves six facets, or dimensions: active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety (adventurousness), intellectual curiosity, and challenging authority (psychological liberalism).
Openness has more modest relationships with aspects of subjective well-being than other Five Factor Model personality traits.
[8] Which measure of either type is used is determined by an assessment of psychometric properties and the time and space constraints of the research being undertaken.
[23] Openness to experience is strongly related to[clarification needed] the psychological construct of absorption,[24] defined as "a disposition for having episodes of 'total' attention that fully engage one's representational (i.e. perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational) resources.”[25] The construct of absorption was developed in order to relate individual differences in hypnotisability to broader aspects of personality.
However, when considering external criteria other than hypnotisability, it is possible that a different dimensional structure may be apparent, e.g. intellectual curiosity may be unrelated to social/political liberalism in certain contexts.
However, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation are each more strongly (positively) associated with prejudice than openness or any of the other five-factor model traits.
[5] These relationships with aspects of subjective well-being tend to be weaker than those of other five-factor model traits, that is, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
[clarification needed] A meta-analysis of the relationships between five-factor model traits and symptoms of psychological disorders found that none of the diagnostic groups examined differed from healthy controls on openness to experience.
[6] Openness to experience may contribute to graceful aging, facilitating healthy memory and verbal abilities as well as a number of other significant cognitive features in older adults.
[39] At least three aspects of openness are relevant to understanding personality disorders: cognitive distortions, lack of insight, and impulsivity.
Problems related to high openness that can cause issues with social or professional functioning are excessive fantasizing, peculiar thinking, diffuse identity, unstable goals, and nonconformity with the demands of the society.
Lack of insight (shows low openness) is characteristic to all personality disorders and could explain the persistence of maladaptive behavioral patterns.
[40] Rigidity is the most obvious aspect of (low) openness among personality disorders; it shows lack of knowledge of one's emotional experiences.
Its opposite, known as impulsivity (here: an aspect of openness that shows a tendency to behave unusually or autistically), is characteristic of schizotypal and borderline personality disorders.
[43] By contrast, across nations women were found to be significantly higher than men in average neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
The relationship between dream recall and these traits has been considered as evidence of the continuity theory of consciousness[clarification needed].
This might be because open wives are more willing to explore a variety of new sexual experiences, leading to greater satisfaction for both spouses.
[47] Higher levels of openness have been linked to activity[clarification needed] in the ascending dopaminergic system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
[48] An Italian study found that people who lived on Tyrrhenian islands tended to be less open to experience than those living on the nearby mainland, and that people whose ancestors had inhabited the islands for twenty generations tended to be less open to experience than more recent arrivals.
The highest average scores on openness are found in the states of New York, Oregon, Massachusetts, Washington, and California.
Openness was defined in these studies as high creativity, adventuresomeness, internal sensation novelty seeking, and low authoritarianism.
Several correlational studies confirmed that young people who score high on this cluster of traits are more likely to use marijuana.
[53] The study found that individual differences in levels of mystical experience while taking psilocybin were correlated with increases in Openness.
Increases in Openness (including facets as well as total score) among those whose had a complete mystical experience were maintained more than a year after taking the drug.