| Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disease that suppresses a person's automatic capacity to embody feelings and aspects of identity through movement. Symptoms of facial masking, bradykinesia, tremor, and rigidity can make a person with Parkinson's disease appear to be unfeeling, lazy, anxious, or unyielding. Research has shown that these symptoms can lead healthcare practitioners to form negative impressions of personality in persons with Parkinson's disease. If healthcare practitioners form negative and inaccurate initial impressions of personality in clients with Parkinson's disease, they could develop inappropriate intervention plans and experience poor rapport and ineffective communication with their clients.; In order to identify strategies that could maximize healthcare practitioners' ability to form accurate initial impressions of clients with Parkinson's disease, researchers must explore factors that allow for and encourage accurate impressions. Chapter one presents a descriptive case study in which six men and six women with Parkinson's disease participated in a videotaped, individual interview and completed a personality measure. Four trained raters coded the expressive behavior demonstrated by the participants in two minutes of the recording. The expressive behavior measures were correlated first with personality and then with measures of disease severity. While expressive behavior was associated with disease severity, there were also some moderate to high associations with personality. In other words, there were some observable cues to personality present in this sample of persons with Parkinson's disease.; Chapter two used a modified Brunswik lens analysis to determine if 99 healthcare practitioners could use these observable cues of personality to detect differences in personality among these 12 targets with Parkinson's disease. Practitioners were able to effectively use the measured cues to achieve high accuracy for the personality trait of Openness to Experience and moderate accuracy for the traits of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Practitioners were unable to accurately detect inter-participant differences in levels of Extraversion and Neuroticism. The accuracy in judging some traits suggests that future research may identify interventions, such as sensitizing practitioners to valid behavioral cues or modifying contextual features, which could maximize a practitioner's ability to understand a client's personality. |
