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The Relation Between Handshaking, Personality and First Impressions

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Handshakes are so important to individuals in the business world that they devote entire classes on proper handshaking etiquette. This study offers a deeper look into how personality is demonstrated through handshaking. I choose this topic because I have always seen a positive correlation between someone’s personality and their handshake. I believe that you can learn a great deal about someone from how they shake your hand. This was not a true experiment in the sense of manipulating variables, but the results were important and should be followed up on. I learned from the introduction section that historically handshaking was mainly engaged in by men as a common greeting. Many legends claim that the handshake was used between…show more content…
Using the handshaking literature and Astroem’s studies as a foundation the authors selected nine personality dimensions to be assessed within the study. “The view that good handshakes communicate sociability, friendliness, and dominance, whereas poor handshakes communicate social introversion, shyness, and neuroticism led the authors to select the Big Five Factors of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience as possible correlates of handshaking.” Also the authors included an assessment of shyness, emotional expressiveness, and positive/negative affect. The goals of this study were to assess handshaking consistency over time or situations unlike the previous studies, to determine any gender difference in handshaking, and to assess any relationship between personality traits and handshaking. There were 112 participants in the study, 48 were male and 64 were female. They were all college undergraduates receiving course credit for participating in the study. The raters were 4 advanced psychology undergraduates, 2
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