Temple University psychologist Frank Farley, an expert on extreme behavior including extreme risk, is available to discuss Felix Baumgartner’s Oct. 8 attempt at the highest, fastest skydive ever, from a balloon 23 miles high over New Mexico.
Farley, a former president of the American Psychological Association, argues that personality--what he labels the "Type T Personality" or risk-taking/thrill-taking personality--is a key element in such high-risk behaviors. “With a high tolerance of uncertainty, with a need for novelty, innovation, challenge, and with high self-confidence, this personality is often essential to the task of exploring the limits of human and machine,” says Farley.
Baumgartner’s free-fall from a near oxygen-free environment at approximately minus-70 degree temperature will challenge the long-standing record of a 19.5-mile dive by Joe Kittinger in 1960. Farley worked with Kittinger in Moscow several years ago in a real-life demonstration of ballooning for Russian space scientists.
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