| Personality Psychology
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology which studies
personality and individual difference processes - that which makes
us into a person. One emphasis in personality psychology is on trying
to create a coherent picture of a person and all his or her major
psychological processes. Another emphasis views personality psychology
as the study of individual differences. These two views work together
in practice. Personality psychologists are interested in a broad
view of the individual's psychological processes. This often leads
to an interest in the most visible individual differences among
people.
In psychology, personality is a collection of emotion, thought,
and behavior patterns unique to a person. There are several theoretical
perspectives on personality in psychology, which involve different
ideas about the relationship between personality and other psychological
constructs, as well as different theories about the way personality
develops.
Some parts of personality include personality traits. The most
common models of traits incorporate four or five broad dimensions
or factors. The least controversial dimension, observed as far back
as the ancient Greeks, is:
- extraversion vs. introversion (outgoing and physical-stimulation-oriented
vs. quiet and physical-stimulation-averse)
The so-called five-factor models or Big Five models add the following
four factors:
- emotional stability (calm, unperturbable, optimistic vs. emotionally
reactive, prone to negative emotions),
- agreeableness (affable, friendly, conciliatory vs. aggressive,
dominant, disagreeable),
- conscientiousness (dutiful, planful, and orderly vs. spontaneous,
flexible, and unreliable), and
- openness (open to new ideas and change vs. traditional and staid).
The Big Five factors have the weight of a considerable amount
of empirical research behind them.
An older, more theoretically-motivated, but quite popular approach
to personality traits is a Jungian model Big Four that accepts Extraversion
vs. Introversion as basic, and adds the following three only:
- Intuition vs. Sensing (trust in conceptual/abstract models of
reality versus concrete sensory-oriented facts)
- Thinking vs. Feeling (thinking as the prime-mover in decision-making
vs. feelings as the prime-mover in decision-making)
- Perceiving vs. Judging (desire to perceive events vs. desire
to have things done so judgements can be made)
This model was based on the observations of Carl Jung and elaborated
on to an important degree by the mother-daughter team of Katharine
C. Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers during WWII and later on by David
Keirsey.
In these more traditional models, the intuition factor is considered
the most basic, dividing people into "N" or "S"
personality types. An "N" is further assumed to be guided
by the thinking or objectication habit, or feelings, and be divided
into "NT" (scientist, engineer) or "NF" (author,
human-oriented leader) personality. An "S", by contrast,
is assumed to be more guided by the perception axis, and thus divided
into "SP" (performer, craftsman, artisan) and "SJ"
(guardian, accountant, bureaucrat) personality. These four are considered
basic, with the other two factors in each case (including always
extraversion) less important.
Critics of this traditional view have observed that the types are
quite strongly stereotyped by professions, and thus may arise more
from the need to categorize people for purposes of guiding their
career choice. This among other objections led to the emergence
of the five factor view, which is less concerned with behavior under
work stress and more concerned with behavior in personal and emotional
circumstances.
Some critics have argued for more or fewer dimensions while others
have proposed entirely different theories (often assuming different
definitions of "personality").
One criticism of trait models of personality as a whole is that
they lead professionals in clinical psychology and laypeople alike
to accept classifications, or worse offer advice, based on superficial
analysis of one's profile.
Apart from the factor models, there are many other views on personality
psychology, one of them George Kelly's personal construct theory.
Important contributors to the field are Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud,
Erik Erikson, Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Albert Ellis,
Erich Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Hans Eysenck, Albert Bandura, Gordon
Allport, Snygg and Combs, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Ludwig Binswanger,
Medard Boss, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Jean Piaget. The fields
of Sociobiology and Buddhist Psychology are also of interest in
this context.
Personality psychology is often closely associated with social
psychology.
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