Q&A

ERICA REYNOLDS, COVENTRY

IS THERE ANY LINK BETWEEN HANDWRITING AND PERSONALITY?

I remember as a child being discouraged from allowing my handwriting to slope backwards – I was warned my relaxed letters would be taken as a sign of an idle personality. Handwriting analysis, or ‘graphology’, which has its modern roots in the theories espoused by a group of 19th-Century French Catholic clergy, makes many such claims about what is revealed by a person’s writing style, some more eyebrow-raising than others. If you have low-hanging, bulbous loops on your ‘y’s and ‘g’s, for instance, this is apparently a sign of your sexual prowess. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, contemporary psychology views graphology as a joke – indeed, the claim that our handwriting reveals our personality traits is listed in , an influential book written by a team of US