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Ö÷²¥´óÐã One's landmark series, Child Of Our Time, is inviting the British public to take part in a ground-breaking online scientific study that hopes to discover how important our personalities are in shaping the direction of our lives. Do our personalities shape our lives?

Launching on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Lab UK website, The Big Personality Test aims to be the largest experiment of its kind and will reveal a unique personality profile of the nation.

With tens of thousands of people expected to take part in the online study, the results will be announced in a Child Of Our Time programme in Spring 2010. Presenters Professor Robert Winston and Sophie Raworth are inviting people to take part at bbc.co.uk/childofourtime.

Our personalities are as unique as our fingerprints, but strong evidence suggests that we all share just five key personality traits. Everyone who takes part in The Big Personality Test will receive personalised video feedback from Professor Winston about their dominant personality traits, as well as insights about their own results from a host of celebrities – including Fay Ripley, Lauren Laverne, Jo Whiley, Dan Snow and Evan Davis.

Professor Winston said: "This is an extremely ambitious project. With the help of people from all over the UK, from Land's End to John O'Groats, this stands to be the largest ever profile of British personality. It will help scientists answer one of the biggest questions in psychology: How much does personality shape our destiny?"

The Big Personality Test, designed by Lab UK in collaboration with Professor Michael Lamb and Jason Rentfrow of Cambridge University, will gather vital scientific research data.

This data will help scientists understand how influential personality is in shaping our lives, compared to other factors, like education, where we live and our own personal experiences. The five traits examined in the Big Personality Test are: extroversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Professor Lamb said: "What makes each of us an individual is a fundamental question that has been debated for thousands of years and is a subject of interest to us all. Through the research, we hope to learn a great deal about personality - its origins, its effect on our relationships, experiences, attitudes and the ways in which these in turn affect our personalities."

The results will be revealed in The Big Personality Test – a two-part Child Of Our Time special. Child Of Our Time, co-produced with The Open University, is half-way through its ambitious 20-year mission. The new series brings together the 25 children whose development has been followed by the programme since birth, along with their families, to investigate how individual personality traits may have influenced their decisions and paths in life.

Notes to Editors

The Big Personality Test is the second experiment designed and built by Lab UK (bbc.co.uk/labuk) an exciting new "citizen science" project from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã that carries out mass-participation experiments online with the help of the public. Each Lab UK experiment seeks to create new knowledge and uses approved scientific methods such as ethical and peer review to conduct real scientific research.

Lab UK's first experiment was Brain Test Britain, an online clinical trial designed to determine if brain training works (bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/braintestbritain).

Child of Our Time is halfway through its ambitious 20 year mission – following 25 children, from their births in the year 2000, to find out what makes them, and us, who we are. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the series there will be two hour-long Big Personality Test programmes which will bring all the children and their families together to test their personalities and investigate how personality shapes our choices and our success in real life outcomes like career, health and relationships.

Fay Ripley, Lauren Laverne, Jo Whiley, Dan Snow, Evan Davis, Carol Kirkwood, Sophie Raworth, Sian Williams, Liz Bonnin and Ed Wardle have all taken part online.

The Child of Our Time series is produced in partnership with the Open University (OU).

EL2