Daniel Siegel's Mindsight and the Emotionality Facet (O3)
Mindsight, by the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, gives a name to a skill most of us use unevenly: the capacity to turn attention inward and actually see what is happening in your own mind, then use that sight to reshape it. Siegel defines the term simply. In an article on PsychAlive he writes, "Mindsight is a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds." How closely you attend to your own inner life is, in the Big Five, one facet.
Attending to your own inner life is the Emotionality facet
That facet is Emotionality (O3), under Openness, how aware you are of your own feelings and inner states and how much you value them as worth attending to. A high scorer notices the fine grain of their moods and can name what they feel; a low scorer runs on the surface and leaves the inner weather unread. Siegel's mindsight is O3 turned into a practiced skill, the deliberate act of looking inward and seeing clearly rather than being run by feelings you never examine. His claim is that this seeing is not fixed but trainable, a muscle for the inner life.
What the book adds to the trait is the promise that attention changes what it touches. Siegel argues that seeing your own mind clearly lets you reshape it, calming a storm you can finally name, which turns O3 from a passive sensitivity into a tool. That inward seeing extends outward too, into the empathy that reads others' minds, tying O3 to the Sympathy (A6) that feels with them, though mindsight begins at home, with your own interior. The book is an argument that knowing your inner life is a skill worth building.
For a reader placing themselves, your O3 is a fair read on how vividly you feel your inner states and how often you turn to look at them. High on it and Mindsight gives a name and a method to something you already do, seeing your own mind. Low on it and the book is an invitation to a kind of attention you may rarely spend. Where you sit on Emotionality tells you how central your inner life is to how you live, and we take the facet apart in Emotionality (O3).
Read the book: Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel Siegel.
See Where You Fall
Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test
Research Citations
Siegel, D. J. (2010). Mindsight: The new science of personal transformation. Bantam Books.
Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007). Attending to the present: Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313-322.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.