Introduction:
When most people talk about personality, they’re really thinking about the whole mix of what makes someone tick: how we feel, how we think, and what we believe. Psychologists usually don’t count our beliefs as part of personality, but in everyday life, everything blends together.
In this section, I’ll explain how two of the most important parts, our emotions and beliefs, develop during childhood through interactions with parents*. I’ll start by looking at where our emotions come from, and then dig into the roots of what we end up believing about ourselves and the world. After that, I’ll show how these early emotional and belief patterns shape nearly everything about how we think, feel, and act as adults.
* Parent in this context means a person whose face is imprinted, something I discuss in another part of the website.
Emotion
Why it’s so important
Emotions influence virtually every aspect of human life, leaving no part of our experience untouched. They have a direct impact on both body and mind, affecting almost every bodily system, influencing our thinking, and determining our reactions to what happens around us. Emotions aren’t just what we feel in the moment. They are lasting forces that define who we are and how we live.
To show just how pervasive and important emotions are, here are a few examples from the countless ways they shape human life:
Body and health: Emotions affect every organ system in the body: the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, bowel, brain, and every other system that keeps us alive.
Attention, memory, and learning: Emotions steer what we pay attention to, what sticks in our memory, and how well we concentrate. Strong emotions narrow focus and make learning more difficult.
Intelligence: Emotions affect how clearly people think and how easily they solve problems, which directly shapes intelligence.
Decision-making: Emotions influence judgment in powerful ways. Fear encourages caution, while anger or entitlement can lead to impulsive choices that affect careers, finances, and safety.
Creativity and curiosity: Joy and wonder open the door to curiosity, fueling the urge to explore, imagine, and create. Anxiety and discouragement shut that door, leaving little space for invention or playful thinking.
Addiction: Unpleasant emotions drive people to use substances in an effort to feel better.
Long-term health and resilience: Emotions influence how quickly the body recovers from illness and physical setbacks.
Relationships and social behavior: Emotions shape how people respond to one another. They influence trust, intimacy, cooperation, and conflict in everyday life.
These examples show that emotion is not a side effect of experience but a driving force behind it.
Emotion becomes incorporated into personality in two distinct ways.
I. The first way emotion becomes incorporated into a child’s personality is through mimicry:
Mimicry Through Observation (without direct interaction):
When a child observes a parent behaving in a particular way without directly interacting, the child mimics both the parent’s behavior and emotion.
If a child observes a parent expressing anger toward a pet, the child learns to respond to the pet with anger.
If a parent treats a pet kindly, a child learns to act kindly toward it.
Mimicry Through Direct Interaction
Children mimic parental emotion when their interactions are positive.
When a parent smiles at a child, the child is likely to smile back.
If a parent expresses sadness while comforting a child, the child mimics that sadness.
How Mimicry Shapes Personality
The emotional reactions children experience in these situations become incorporated into their personality. Mimicry is the process that makes children emotionally similar to their parents.
II. The second way emotion becomes incorporated into a child’s personality occurs when a parent’s emotion triggers an opposite emotion in the child. To clarify how this happens, I first need to distinguish between two general types of emotion.
I group emotions into two broad categories that I call Category 1 and Category 2.
Category 1 emotions are activating or energizing. They involve increased physiological arousal and are often expressed through outward action. Common terms that describe Category 1 emotions include anger, frustration, impatience, agitation, displeasure, resentment, irritation, annoyance, hostility, indignation, disapproval, disdain, disgust, and sternness. Behaviors that are often charged with Category 1 emotion include scolding, lecturing, criticizing, punishing, and disciplining.
Category 2 emotions involve withdrawal, inward focus, disengagement, or emotional numbing, where attention turns inward, away from the outside world. They are essentially the opposite of Category 1 emotions. Common terms for Category 2 emotions include passive, uninvolved, indifferent, ignoring, not paying attention, unresponsive, distant, preoccupied, emotionally flat, unavailable, uninterested, aloof, and apathetic.
Category 1 and 2 emotions and parent-child interactions: When a parent is expressing Category 1 or Category 2 emotion, it is important to distinguish between times when the parent and child are interacting and times when they are not.
Parent experiencing Category 1 emotion: When a parent is experiencing Category 1 emotion, it is usually easy to tell whether they are interacting with the child or not. For example, if a parent is angry, it is generally clear whether the anger is directed at the child or at someone or something else.
Parent experiencing Category 2 emotion: Since Category 2 emotion causes a person to be unengaging, it may not always be clear whether a parent experiencing this emotion is interacting with the child or if the child is merely observing them. Whether it counts as interaction depends on the child’s expectation. If the child is seeking connection or believes they are engaged with the parent, that moment qualifies as interaction, even if the parent is unresponsive.
For example, if a child tries to show a drawing to a parent who doesn’t respond, the child is seeking interaction, so I regard this as an interaction between the parent and child, even though the parent is not participating. I describe this type of interaction as the parent directing Category 2 emotion at the child.
Eventually, the child may give up on trying to get the parent’s attention. At that point, the interaction has ended and the child is merely observing the parent. The child will then mimic the emotion they see in the parent, as described above.
How category 1 and category 2 emotion affects a child
Category 1 emotion directed at a child evokes fear in the child.
For example, if a parent scolds a child for doing something wrong, the child feels fear.
Category 2 emotion directed at a child evokes Category 1 emotion in the child.
For example, if a parent ignores a child who is showing them a new toy, the child will experience Category 1 emotion such as irritation or anger, which activates the child and directs their energy toward getting the parent’s attention.
In both cases, the child experiences a threat. Category 1 emotion feels like a direct attack, while Category 2 emotion feels like abandonment.
How these interactions shape personality
Emotions evoked during these interactions become permanently active, yet remain largely outside conscious awareness. I call these baseline emotions.
These experiences also cause the brain to interpret situations as more threatening than they actually are.
Each time these experiences occur, both the baseline emotions and the brain’s tendency to misinterpret the environment as threatening become more pronounced.
Direct interactions of this kind are what make children emotionally different from their parents.
Later Reactions in Older Children
Older children may appear to respond differently than described above. This is because their reactions combine baseline emotions formed earlier with their immediate response to a parent’s current emotion.
For example, a child who usually feels happy around a parent may still feel fear if that parent suddenly becomes angry. In these moments, the ongoing happiness combines with the newly triggered fear, creating a complex emotional response.
Beliefs
Children acquire beliefs in several ways.
Children generally believe whatever a parent tells them.
Children acquire beliefs about both themselves and their parents according to how their parents treat them.
Positive emotion directed toward a child produces positive beliefs about the parent and themself.
Directing category 1 emotion at a child (e.g. punishing or scolding) evokes contradictory beliefs characterized by "I did nothing wrong, I don't deserve this," and "I must have done something wrong, I'm a bad person."
Directing category 2 emotion at a child (e.g. ignoring or withdrawing) also evokes contradictory beliefs characterized by "there must be something wrong with me or you would pay attention to me," and "something must be wrong with you because you don't pay attention to me!"
3. Children acquire beliefs about things they experience outside of their relationship with their parents. Children are constantly taking in their environment and forming beliefs about how it works according to their experience. For example, if they have very negative experiences at school, they might learn that teachers are mean or bad and schools are worthless. If they have a very positive experience with a person from a different race, they might learn that people of that race are generally very nice.
Schemas
The emotional patterns and core beliefs that take shape in childhood don’t exist in isolation. Over time, they become organized into larger mental structures known as schemas, which store what happened, how it felt, and what they came to believe about it. Similar experiences—especially those sharing the same emotional tone or meaning—become connected in memory, forming networks of linked feelings, beliefs, and expectations. Each schema functions like a mental map that helps us interpret situations, anticipate outcomes, and decide how to respond. Because our earliest schemas are built from childhood experiences, they remain deeply embedded and continue to shape much of what we think, feel, and do throughout adulthood.
Schemas often generalize beyond the original situations in which they were formed. Once a child has learned emotional patterns and expectations from early relationships—especially with parents—they begin to apply those same interpretations to new people and contexts. This happens automatically: the brain recognizes similarities between a present moment and past emotional experiences, then activates the same feelings and beliefs that were once adaptive in the original setting.
For example:
A child frequently exposed to parental anger may develop a schema linking authority and danger. Later, even mild disapproval from a teacher can trigger fear or defensiveness.
A child frequently shamed or criticized at home may form a schema that connects judgment with rejection. Among peers, even light teasing can provoke anxiety, withdrawal, or self-protective behavior.
A child exposed to chronic tension may generalize a threat response to any adult who appears stern, reacting with unease even when no actual threat exists.
Once established, schemas operate automatically, determining much of what a person thinks, feels, and does throughout their life.
Adult life
In adulthood, most of what we think, feel, and do is determined by the combination of emotions and beliefs shaped into schemas during childhood.
All adult beliefs must be consistent with beliefs acquired during childhood.
Emotions and beliefs acquired during childhood never change once a person becomes an adult, except through the process I describe in another part of this website.
It may appear that adults change their beliefs or emotional responses, for example through therapy or personal growth. However, I believe that what seems like change in adulthood is usually the activation of different emotional and belief patterns formed earlier in life. Most people have a wide range of possible emotions and even conflicting beliefs from their early years, some of which may remain dormant until triggered by new experiences or therapeutic intervention. This is why therapy sometimes appears to "change" a person—it really activates a different childhood-acquired pattern, rather than creating anything new. People who show greater shifts or improvements in therapy do so because they have a broader set of underlying emotions and beliefs to draw from. By contrast, those whose childhoods produced only a narrow range of emotional and belief patterns struggle more to find healthier ways of feeling and thinking as adults.
When an adult faces a situation, the brain retrieves similar experiences stored during childhood and interprets the current situation through that lens. Those early experiences determine how the situation is understood, which stored beliefs are applied, and what emotional reaction follows.
Putting it all together
Let's look at some of my main claims and see how childhood experience explains them.
Intelligence: Emotion directly affects the brain’s ability to focus, absorb, process, and retain information, effects large enough to account for most differences in intelligence.
Psychiatric disorders: Psychiatric disorders, defined by persistent groups of emotional, physical, and mental symptoms, can be fully accounted for by baseline emotions and beliefs acquired during childhood.
Psychiatric disorders are defined by groups of symptoms that last a specified length of time.
Psychiatric symptoms are:
Emotional, such as feeling depressed or anxious,
Physical, such as low energy or sleep problems, or
Mental, such as the thought that people “hate me.”
Emotion can cause both the emotional and physical symptoms of psychiatric disorders.
The mental aspects of psychiatric disorders can be beliefs acquired during childhood.
Thus, all of the symptoms of psychiatric disorders can be caused by emotions or beliefs acquired during childhood
Medical problems: The direct effect of emotion on the body can produce medical problems. It also plays a major role in how the body responds to and recovers from illness.
Summary:
Childhood is the blueprint for everything that follows. Emotions and beliefs acquired early in life shape how we think, feel, and respond as adults. Virtually every important human trait rests on the emotional and cognitive foundations built in those early years.