When writing Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey each completed a personality test that was included in one of the book’s chapters.
Its results categorize everyone who takes the test into one of four types: the Mad Scientist, who strongly experiences both positive and negative emotions; the Cheerleader, whose positive emotions predominate; the Poet, who leans toward the negative; and the Judge, who reacts calmly to both positive and negative emotions. The PANAS test is intended to measure how a person experiences emotions, both positive and negative.
Brooks is a Mad Scientist kind of professor and writer who formerly served as CEO of a think tank for a number of years. “That means I am a happy person, but I’m also an unhappy person because you can be both,” he says in this week’s issue of PEOPLE.
In contrast, Oprah is a Judge, someone whose emotional equilibrium prevents her from going through the highest highs or the lowest lows.
This, according to Brooks, maybe one reason she has been able to live a happy and genuine life while achieving a degree of popularity that can be unstable for others.
“I’ve known a lot of politicians and presidents, only because of the job that I had before. But since I wrote From Strength to Strength, I’ve known a lot of actors and athletes, because that was a book about strivers who struggle to move on with their lives. So I’ve met a lot of people really, really, really in the public eye. Most are not what they seem,” Brooks explains. “And the reason is because people struggle to maintain an image a lot because they need to. I’m super sympathetic to that.”
But Oprah is unique, he continues.
“Oprah is literally what she seems, and the reason is because she has cracked the code on how to be a public person and to be privately content and happy at the same time,” he says. “I’ve rarely met anybody like that. Rarely have I met somebody like that… she’s at peace.”
It all comes from her personality as a Judge. “That means she doesn’t freak out about good or bad things,” he explains. “And the reason is because she’s a peaceful person. If she weren’t, she’d be out of her mind.”
“She’s probably one of the five most famous people in the world, and she would lose her mind, which famous people do,” Brooks adds.
Even while many people believe they would adore fame, Brooks warns that it’s not as enjoyable as it would seem.
“Fame is super hard on the brain,” he says. “And so people who get famous before they’re 15, for example, many never recover because the reward circuits are just blinkered forever.”
