physics

Personality

Personality is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Personality rather than just read about it. In short: Personality describes the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that make up a person's unique time-dependent adjustment to life. Personality is relatively stable, but can change over time due to experiences and developmental processes.

Key takeaways

Personality belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Personality to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Personality from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Personality describes the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that make up a person's unique time-dependent adjustment to life. Personality is relatively stable, but can change over time due to experiences and developmental processes. Although there is no consensus on the definition of personality, most theories in personality focus on traits, motivation, skills, and identity. Research in personality psychology generally attempts to explain the characteristics of a person that underlie differences in behavior. Personality characteristics are related to many life outcomes, such as work and relationship success, mental health, well-being, and longevity. For example, an individual can develop anger during their life, or they could fall into a state of depression. Over time, psychologists have taken many different approaches to study personality, which can be organized across dispositional, biological, intrapsychic (psychodynamic), cognitive-experiential, social and cultural, and adjustment domains. The various approaches used to study personality today reflect the influence of the first theorists in the field, a group that includes Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers.

Measuring Personality can be determined through a variety of tests. Due to the fact that personality is a complex idea, the dimensions of personality and scales of such tests vary and often are poorly defined. Two main tools to measure personality are objective tests and projective measures. Examples of such tests are the: Big Five Inventory (BFI), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2), Rorschach Inkblot test, Neurotic Personality Questionnaire KON-2006, or Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R). All of these tests are beneficial because they have both reliability and validity, two factors that make a test accurate. "Each item should be influenced to a degree by the underlying trait construct, giving rise to a pattern of positive intercorrelations so long as all items are oriented (worded) in the same direction." A recent, but not well-known, measuring tool that psychologists use is the 16PF. It measures personality based on Cattell's 16-factor theory of personality. Psychologists also use it as a clinical measuring tool to diagnose psychiatric disorders and help with prognosis and therapy planning. Personality is frequently broken into factors or dimensions, statistically extracted from large questionnaires through factor analysis. When brought back to two dimensions, often the dimensions of introvert-extrovert and neuroticism (emotionally unstable-stable) are used as first proposed by Eysenck in the 1960s.

Five-factor inventory

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Personality

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Personality claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Personality before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Personality ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Personality

In research: Personality appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Personality in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Personality is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Conceptions of self, Human development, Metaphysics of mind, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Personality outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Personality in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Personality means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Personality out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Personality in simple terms?

Why does Personality matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Personality?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Personality.