Laurie A. Helgoe

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Laurie A. Helgoe

8 Published BooksLaurie A. Helgoe

Laurie Anne Helgoe is an American psychologist and author specializing in personality development and the psychology of desire. Helgoe has a private practice in clinical psychology and serves as an assistant clinical professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, Charleston Division, supervising and lecturing psychiatric residents.

Raised as the ninth of ten children, she was surrounded by gregarious siblings and sought out solitude, reflection and writing to replenish her energy. This early discovery of the power of solitude had a profound influence on her later work.

In 2008, her writing revealed that scholarly and popular accounts regarding humans who display the personality traits of introversion and extroversion were flawed, and that, instead of representing a 25-30% of the population, introverts make up 57% of the population. The identified flaw was a dated reliance on the early work of Isabel Briggs Myers, and the failure to note the latest comprehensive results of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a questionnaire used by psychologists to classify human personality traits.