Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
Describing what personality is. Documenting how personalities develop. Explaining the mental processes of personality and how they affect functioning. Providing a framework for understanding individuals. "Personality" is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by an individual that uniquely influences their environment, cognition, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means "mask". Personality also pertains to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors persistently exhibited over time that strongly influence one's expectations, self-conceptions, values, and attitudes. Environmental and situational effects on behaviour are influenced by psychological mechanisms within a person. Personality also predicts human reactions to other people and their behavior, problems, and stress. Gordon Allport, in 1937, described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic.Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization or the traits of extraversion and introversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual. The study of personality has a broad and varied history in psychology, with an abundance of theoretical traditions. The major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist, evolutionary, and social learning perspective. Many researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with only one perspective and instead take an eclectic approach. Research in this area is empirically driven—such as dimensional models based on multivariate statistics like factor analysis—or emphasizes theory development, such as psychodynamic theory. There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing.
Philosophical assumptions Many of the ideas conceptualized by historical and modern personality theorists stem from their basic philosophical assumptions. The study of personality is not a purely empirical discipline, as it brings in elements of art, science, and philosophy to draw general conclusions. The following five categories are some of the most fundamental philosophical assumptions on which theorists disagree:
Freedom versus determinism: This is the question of whether humans have control over their own behavior and understand the motives behind it, or if forces beyond their control causally determine their behavior. Behavior is categorized as being either unconscious, environmental, or biological by various theories. Heredity (nature) versus environment (nurture): Personality is thought to be determined largely either by genetics and biology, or by environment and experiences. Contemporary research suggests that most personality traits are based on the joint influence of genetics and environment. One of the forerunners in this arena is C. Robert Cloninger, who pioneered the Temperament and Character model. Uniqueness versus universality: This question discusses the extent of each human's individuality (uniqueness) or similarity in nature (universality). Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers were all advocates of the uniqueness of individuals. Behaviorists and cognitive theorists, in contrast, emphasize the importance of universal principles, such as reinforcement and self-efficacy. Active versus reactive: This question explores whether humans primarily act through individual initiative (active) or through outside stimuli. Traditional behavioral theorists typically believed that humans are passively shaped by their environments, whereas humanistic and cognitive theorists believe that humans play a more active role. Most modern theorists agree that both are important, with aggregate behavior being primarily determined by traits and situational factors being the primary predictor of behavior in the short term. Optimistic versus pessimistic: Personality theories differ concerning whether humans are integral in changing their own personalities. Theories that place a great deal of emphasis on learning are often more optimistic than those that do not.
Personality theories
Type and trait theories
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of people into different classes. Personality types are distinguished from personality traits, which vary in degree. For example, in type theory, there are two types of people: introverts and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extroversion lie on a continuous dimension, with many people falling in the middle. Personality is complex; a typical theory of personality contains several propositions or sub-theories, often evolving as more psychologists explore it.
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