External Locus of Identity

Being a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist Leonard Hofstader's mom, gave a hard hitting statement on people who go into performing arts suffer from an external locus of identity. Beautiful Penny could not imagine that something of this could come out, so she burst into tears by the time Leonard's mom and Penny reach to apartment 4A. Can it be possible, that people like Penny being beautiful and smart (not nerd) can sufferer from External Locus of Identity, according to Leonard's mom people who perform in arts, do so because they seek approval from others about themselves, typically due to unmet childhood emotional needs. 

What is the concept in totality.. Here's the explanation which refers to as personality psychology which came into relevance in 1954, by Julian B. Rotter, in other words individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Locus in Latin means place or location, which is conceptualised as internal or external.

People with a high internal locus believe that they can control their life from their own actions; and if these people are unable to perform well then they would blame it on lack of preparedness on their part. People with a high internal locus also tend to exhibit better control of their behaviour and attempt to influence others, they are also more politically involved, and  believes that their likelihood to their efforts being successful.

But when a person with a high external locus does poorly on a given particular test, they might attribute this to the difficulty of the test questions, they tend to put the things as they didn’t go well with them, giving explanations to all sorts of things involved in surroundings, or distorting environment, examiner being tuff which they cannot influence and so on. If they performed well on a test, they might think the teacher was lenient or that they were lucky.

Dr. Beverly Hofstadter might have recognised Penny’s eternal locus as she cannot influence on the situations in front of her when she was a child and might need others to give approval so that she could make herself satisfy for the fact that her needs were not completed when she a kid. Think about it..