Arthur Fleischmann's Carly's Voice and Emotionality (O3)

Carly's Voice, by Arthur Fleischmann and his daughter Carly, is a memoir of a girl with severe nonverbal autism who, around age eleven, reached over and began to type, revealing a sharp, feeling mind that no one had known was there. What she typed was often about the storm of sensation inside her. In an ABC News 20/20 feature, Carly wrote, "You don't know what it feels like to be me, when you can't sit still because your legs feel like they are on fire or it feels like a hundred ants are crawling up your arms." How vividly you feel your inner states, and how central they are to your experience, is, in the Big Five, one facet.

The intensity of inner feeling is the Emotionality facet

That facet is Emotionality (O3), under Openness, how strongly and vividly you feel your inner emotional and sensory states. A high scorer lives with feeling turned up loud and attends closely to it; a low scorer runs cooler and less aware of the inner weather. Carly's typed words are a window into an extreme of high O3, an inner world so intense it was overwhelming, hidden all along behind a body that could not speak it. The book's power is that it lets a reader feel how much was being felt where nothing showed. It is worth being clear that autism is not a personality facet, and this is not a substitute for treatment; the trait here is the intensity of inner feeling.

What the book adds to the trait is a caution against reading the inside from the outside. Carly's silence was taken for absence until she proved otherwise, a reminder that a quiet or flat exterior can hide a roaring inner life. That intense feeling sits close to a rich Imagination (O1), since a vivid inner world draws on both feeling and invention, though O3 is specifically the depth and force of emotion itself. Carly gave that inner intensity a voice, and the book honors it.

For a reader placing themselves, your O3 is a fair read on how vividly you feel and how much your inner states shape your days. High on it and Carly's Voice will resonate, a portrait of how much can be felt inside. Low on it and the book is a window into an inner intensity that others live with constantly. Where you sit on Emotionality tells you how strongly your feelings run, and we take the facet apart in Emotionality (O3).

Read the book: Carly's Voice: Breaking Through Autism by Arthur Fleischmann.

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