The Research On The Validity Of Handwriting As A Tool To Measure Personality

There have been no identical views among researchers in and abroad our country whether handwriting analysis can be regarded as a kind of effective personality survey tool or not. Combining with past researches, this research attempts to probe into the relationship between handwriting characteristics and nervousness (N), psychosis (P), extraversion or introversion (E) in EPQ.This study chooses university students in Wuhan as research objects and mainly adopts literatures and the questionnaire to carry on the discussion to the above questions. The study can be divided into four steps. The first step is to find out the 24 handwriting variables needed to be adopted into the study through study of literatures, and to make the content of the handwriting sample. The second step is to select objects—having controlled the insignificant variables influencing normal writing and rejected questionnaires getting scores more than 43.3 in L dimension in EPQ, this study finally include 135 valid questionnaires. The third step is to do some statistical research to the 135 handwritings with the 24 handwriting variables. And the fourth step is to find out the relationship between handwriting variables and the three personality specialties with multiple linear regression.The results are the following:1. Handwriting can explain a part of variance of nervousness, psychosis, and extroversion and introversion.2. The same group of handwriting variables can explain different amount variance of nervousness, psychosis, or extraversion and introversion. That is to say, different personality specialties need to be explained by different handwriting variables.3. Pause and transition in handwriting, gradient Heng have predicting function to nervousness. Pause and transition in handwriting has minus correlation with nervousness, while the gradient Heng present positive correlations with nervousness. The two handwriting variables altogether explain 44.1 percent of variance of nervousness.4. The gradient of Na stoke slope positively correlates to the psychosis level, explaining 19.0 percent variance of psychosis.5. Margins on the left and right side present predicting function to extraversion andintroversion dimension. There is positive correlation for extraversion and introversion dimension to margins on the left and minus correlation to margins on the right. 27.6 percent variance of extra- or intro- version dimension can be explained by these two variables.