Author: Roger
Date: 15:36:46 01/19/00
Below are two article abstracts I came across today doing a search of the PsycInfo Database at the American Psychological Association website. The first article is more of a research article, and it finds that highly competitive players are more suspicious, albeit with a small sample. The second is just psychoanalytic trash, by Ernest Jones, a biographer of Freud. I posted the second because I was not aware that Morphy succumbed to paranoia, but it converges with the first in that aspect. Fischer comes to mind here, too. Highly competitive people of all kinds, of course, are likely to be more suspicious, but I was wondering if there might not be successful chess players possessing a level of suspiciousness over and above what you would expect from just competitiveness alone. The ability to smell an obscure positional or tactical threat, for example, would seem to serve chess players very well...to an extent. You have to wonder, for example, what with Morphy and Fischer both American and World Champions and both off the deep end, if a latent paranoid quality didn't serve them quite well during their glory years, only to blossom into psychopathology later in life. You might also speculate that at pathological levels of suspiciousness come to the surface, the quality of play would begin to degrade, since the person begins to see "ghosts," threats that don't really exist. Anyone care to pick up this discussion, or know of other interesting examples? Roger Personality and leisure activities: An illustration with chess players. ABSTRACT Investigated the relationship between personality and involvement in the leisure activity of chess playing. 60 male participants comprised groups of (1) highly competitive chess players, (2) moderately competitive chess players, and (3) nonplayers. Results show that of 6 personality characteristics, all chess players differed from the comparison group in terms of unconventional thinking and orderliness. Highly competitive players differed from nonplayers in being significantly more suspicious. The 3 groups did not differ significantly on neuroticism, aggressive tendency, and hostility. ((c) 1999 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved) AUTHOR Avni, Amatzia; Kipper, David A.; Fox, Shaul AFFILIATION Bar-Ilan U, Ramat Gan, Israel SOURCE Personality & Individual Differences. 1987 Vol 8(5) 715-719 Das Problem Paul Morphy. /The problem of Paul Morphy. ABSTRACT The case of Paul Morphy, the world's greatest chess player, is cited, and an attempt made to ascertain what relationship may have existed between his extraordinary ability, manifested in early childhood, and his early death as a paranoiac. After giving the history of the game, the author describes the method of the master, then the personality traits which later broke in the paranoiac state from which early death released him. The author believes that unusual accomplishment arises as a compensation for inferiority feelings, a type of sublimation. When this sublimation breaks down, the mental balance is lost. ((c) 1999 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved) AUTHOR Jones, E. AFFILIATION SOURCE Psychoanalytische Bewegung. 1931 3 193-216
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