The Gift of Introversion

associated with many positive outcomes like higher levels of happiness, those
extraverted people are also likely to be exposed to interpersonally transmitted infectious
disease as they tend to contact more people. When individuals are more vulnerable to
infection, the cost of being social will be relatively greater. Therefore, people are less
extraversive when they feel vulnerable and vice versa.
Although neither introversion nor extraversion is pathological, psychotherapists can take
temperament into account when treating clients. Clients may respond better to different
types of treatment depending on where they fall on the introversion-extraversion
spectrum. Teachers can also consider temperament when dealing with their pupils, for
example acknowledging that introverted children need more encouragement to speak in
class while extraverted children may grow restless during long periods of quiet study.
Regional Variation
Some claim that Americans live in an "extraverted society" that rewards extravert
behavior and rejects introversion. This is because the US is currently a culture of
external personality, whereas in some other cultures people are valued for their "inner
selves and their moral rectitude". Other cultures, such as Japan and regions
where Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism etc. prevail, prize introversion. These
cultural differences predict individuals' happiness in that people who score higher in
extraversion are happier, on average, in particularly extraverted cultures and vice versa.
Researchers have found that people who live on islands tend to be less extraverted
(more introverted) than those living on the mainland, and that people whose ancestors
had inhabited the island for twenty generations tend to be less extraverted than more
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