Authors
Amritha Varshini, Reah Sunil, Joshna Joseph
Abstract
Personality is a set of characteristics in a person which is distinctive and shaped throughout one’s childhood, adolescent, adulthood, etc. it is their feelings, thoughts, and behavior which is formed through various social interactions, during their development. These qualities or traits of the individual is unique to others. Similar to personality, handwriting is also unique and different for every individual. Handwriting is a kind of writing style which is unique in context of pen pressure, thickness, slant, alphabet representation, etc. certain traits found in the individual contribute to these distinct forms of depiction or characterization. Handwriting is also known as brain writing. It can be a reflection of one’s patterns in line of thinking and actions. For instance, loopy and rounded letters can be an indicator of a person being imaginative, creative and having artistic traits. This study aims to bring out the importance of manual deciphering of handwriting styles and prediction of personality in everyday life while also bringing out the relevance of ‘H’ factor of personality [Honesty-Humility] as proposed by Ashton and Lee. We identified personality traits through specific handwriting styles and using the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised [HEXACO-PI-R] on a group of college students. Various forms of handwriting styles such as pen pressure, slant, baseline, etc. was taken into thought for evaluating personality traits of the subjects from the writing samples which was obtained. Following, the scoring of the inventory and interpretation of the handwriting, it was noted that there was overall 70% match between the two variables. Also, among all the dimensions, highest percentage of matches was under Honesty-Humility and Extraversion, the lowest percentage was under Conscientiousness and Emotionality. This concludes that the graphology techniques used are reliable and accurate for personality assessment through handwriting analysis. Keywords: Handwriting, HEXACO, Graphology.
Introduction
Handwriting is simply known as the individual writing style of a person. There are multiple writing systems that produce handwritings of people. Various languages exist such as English, Tamil, Malayalam, Russian, Sanskrit, Korean, Arabic and many more and they have individual scripts that have different requirements; some have more lines that make up the letters while some require dots (.), some are rounder than other scripts, some are written from right to left, all these differences exist in language scripts. Despite these differences, based on handwriting some facts about a person is identifiable. People who are trained in handwriting analysis can determine a number of things about a person, simply by studying documents written by that person. An analyst can determine for example, if a person was intoxicated when they wrote a document, by analyzing how the person formed various characters.
Graphologists are the said analysts. They study a person’s penmanship and evolution over time and it can determine various facts about a them, from whether they are being dishonest in the writing to even if they are suffering from one of several neurological disorders.
Personality is a set of characteristics in a person which is distinctive and shaped throughout one’s childhood, adolescent, adulthood, etc. It is their feelings, thoughts, and behavior which is formed through various social interactions, during their development. These qualities or traits of the individual is unique to others.
Similar to personality, handwriting is also unique and different for every individual. In this study, we analysed handwriting samples to assess personality traits of a person and used a personality questionnaire to verify our graphology techniques. Graphology is multifaceted, it can be used in various settings.
Uses of graphology:
1. Recruitment, an experienced graphologist can advise over suitability of candidates.
2. Selection processes where it can be used simultaneously with psychometric assessment.
3. Evaluating honesty.
4. Personality profiling for those needing self-awareness.
5. Historical profiling for genealogists and biographers who want to learn more about people who have died.
6. Document examination and forensic analysis for assessing forgeries and poison pen issues.
References
Amend, Karen, and Mary S. Ruiz. Handwriting Analysis: The Complete Basic Book. 1980.
Antony, D. John, and O. F. M. Cap. "Personality profile through handwriting analysis." International Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2008).
Ashton, Michael C., and Kibeom Lee. “Empirical, Theoretical, and Practical Advantages of the HEXACO Model of Personality Structure.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 11, no. 2, SAGE Publishing, May 2007, pp. 150–66.
Ashton, Michael C., et al. “A Six-Factor Structure of Personality-Descriptive Adjectives: Solutions From Psycholexical Studies in Seven Languages.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 86, no. 2, American Psychological Association, Jan. 2004, pp. 356–66.
Esposito, Simona. "Handwriting: an instrument of understanding and empathy." (2015).
Elisabeth, Kubler-Ross, and David Kessler. Life Lessons. 2000.
How to cite this article?
| APA Style | Varshini, A. et al. (2023). Personality Assessment Through Handwriting Analysis On College Students Based On Manual Graphology Analysis. Academic Journal of Forensic Sciences, 06(02), 08–12. |
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