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The Big Five personality factors are conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion. Some researchers have labeled the CANOE personality model as an easy aid to remembering each factor.

• Conscientiousness is defined as an individual’s tendency to be organized, thorough, controlled, decisive, and dependable. Of the Big Five factors, it is the personality factor that has been related to leadership second most strongly (after extraversion) in other researches.

• Agreeableness, or an individual’s tendency to be trusting, nurturing, conforming, and accepting, has been only weakly associated with leadership.

• Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, hostile, depressed, vulnerable, and insecure, has been moderately and negatively related to leadership, suggesting that most leaders tend to be low in neuroticism.

• Openness, sometimes referred to as openness to experience, refers to an individual’s tendency to be curious, creative, insightful, and informed. Openness has been moderately related to leadership, suggesting that leaders tend to be somewhat higher in openness than non-leaders.

• Finally, extraversion is the personality factor that has been most strongly associated with leadership. Defined as the tendency to be sociable, assertive, and have positive energy, extraversion has been described as the most important personality trait of effective leaders.

Researches on the Big Five personality factors have found some relationships between these overall personality factors and leadership.

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Sensation is the process whereby we receive raw information about the environment from the action of our sense organs. Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 set up the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in order to study sensations. The sensory systems provide our brains with the basic inputs from which our experiences are constructed. We respond to the world as we perceive it not as it is.

Nature of the sensory process

Sensation is the stimulation of sensory receptors to receive information about the outside world. Light, sound, taste, smell, cold, heat, touch, or pain can all produce different sensations. There are eight sense organs and eight corresponding sensations.

The stimulation of the senses is mechanical. It results from sources of energy like light sound, or the presence of chemicals as in smell and taste. Some of these senses work in combination and our response may be a result of this combination. The satisfaction that we enjoy on sipping coffee for example is a combination of the odor and taste of the coffee. Though vision is a very important sense to lives successfully, blind people adapt themselves to their lives and find satisfaction by inventing ways that make them lead successful lives. They channelize the available senses to maximum enjoyment and success in life. The same could be the case with other senses too. The adaptive nature of the sense organs makes life possible in the absence of one or two of those senses. These senses organs function continuously though we may not be aware of their functioning always.

Each sensory channel consists of a sensitive element called the receptor. A receptor is a group of cells specialized to respond to small changes in a particular kind of energy. Each of the receptors responds to a certain kind of physical energy. Sight responds to electromagnetic energy. Hearing responds to mechanical energy sound. Taste or gustatory sense to chemical substances.

Sensation involves a neurological activity. This physical energy which is a stimulus has to be changed into activity within the nervous system. Transduction occurs at the receptors converting physical energy into electrical potential. Each sense organ is connected to a particular part of the brain and that is why the sense-impression (sensation) results.

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According to Piaget, young children go through two distinct phases or sub-stages in cognitive development. During the Symbolic Function sub-stage, children master the ability to picture, remember, understand, and replicate objects in their minds that are not immediately in front of them. Children’s play will move from simple make-believe to plots involving more characters and scenarios, games with sophisticated rules, etc. According to Piagset, playing isn’t just fun; it is an important part of brain development.

These new cognitive abilities are helpful to young children’s everyday experiences. Children can talk about people who are traveling, or who live somewhere else, like Grandma. Piaget suggests that their thinking is rather rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time. This style of thinking leads to characteristic errors, he says.

Conservation is a person’s ability to understand that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even if their appearance has changed. To demonstrate the concept of Conservation, Piaget showed young children two identical cups filled with identical volumes of water. To these children, the taller cup looked like it had more volume even though the same amount of fluid filled both cups. Transformation is a young person’s able to understand how certain physical characteristics change while others remain the Same in a logical, cause and effect sequence. According to Piagets, Preoperational Children do not readily understand how things can change from one form to another. The concept of conservation can apply to numbers as well, such as rearranging six keys to make a different formation does not change the number of items present.

Piaget: Preoperational children have a style of thinking characterized by Egocentrism. Piaget believes that children under the age of 4 can’t organize things into hierarchical categories. Young children are unable to group items in larger sub-groups and smaller sub- Groups based on similarities and differences, he says. PreOperational children also believe that things are alive or have human characteristics because they grow or move, a type of thinking called Animism.

Research suggests that Piaget’s ideas about Preoperational children were not entirely correct. When young children are tested using ideas and objects that are familiar to their everyday lives, they are better able to demonstrate their abilities. Psychologists think that animism is a way that children express their imagination and process how objects work in a fashion that’s easy for them to understand. Most children know that inanimate objects aren’t alive, and can group their toys into hierarchies. In the preoperational stage children often display egocentric thought, particularly toward the end of this stage.

The next sub-stage in Piaget’s Preoperational cognitive development is the “Intuitive Thought” which spans ages 4-7 years. Children in this stage of development learn by asking questions such as, “Why?” and “How come?” These children typically hone in on one characteristic of someone or something and base their decisions or judgment on that one characteristic. De-centering, combined with the concept of conservation are prerequisites to more sophisticated logical thinking abilities.

Children in the Intuitive Thought sub-stage show many advances in cognitive skills. They shift from depending on magical beliefs to using rational beliefs to explain situations. Very young children may explain that a new house “grew out of the ground”.