Causal Modelling of Personality Traits: Extraversion and Locus of Control

This work contributes to the task of automatically analyzing people’s personality during social interaction by using acoustic and visual features. We focus on two personality traits: Extraversion, one of the Big Five dimensions, and the Locus of Control and submit them to two causal Bayesian models that differ according to whether they incorporate the effect of the context (other people’s behaviour) on the target’s behaviour. The experiment performed shows that for the Extraversion trait the causal model whereby the target’s behaviour is affected by both his/her personality and the parties behaviour performs much better than the simpler one that only considers the relationships between personality and the target’s behaviour. Nothing similar is found for the Locus of Control, confirming psychology studies that maintain that the latter trait’s behavioural manifestation is verbal rather than non-verbal.