Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel developed a new program to evaluate prominent individuals' personalities.

The program automates classification of personality traits of prominent individuals -- both friend and foe - according to a study that will soon be published in the American Intelligence Journal.

"This new field, termed 'Computational Personality,' gives us the ability to better understand the minds of military and political leaders, which is an important aspect of strategic intelligence," said researcher Yair Neuman of the Homeland Security Institute. "Psychologists have been building personality profiles manually for years; however, there are serious methodological difficulties associated with this practice."

The new computer-supported methodology for personality profiling uses "vector semantics." This involves constructing a number of vectors representing personality dimensions and disorders and measuring the similarity with texts written by the human subject.

The research team used the new program to evaluate President Obama's State of the Union addresses from 2009 and his most recent in 2014.

"Both State of the Union speeches are 'assertive' and 'organized' as expected from a political leader," Neuman explained. "However, the main difference in the 2014 speech is the 'loner' personality trait that appears. This dimension reveals a type of withdrawal from painful social interaction. In addition, the 2014 speech exhibits higher levels of 'anger' and 'fear'."

While the methodology can be applied to any leader with available texts and speeches, the actual paper was a case study on former Egyptian President Mohammed Morisi's speech to the United Nations in 2012. The takeaway from that analysis was simply that Morisi is an "obsessive" personality who was out of touch with the Egyptian people and did not see the big picture.