Personality psychology
[1] Its areas of focus include: "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.
Personality also pertains to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors persistently exhibited over time that strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes.
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:[6] Personality type refers to the psychological classification of people into different classes.
[15] In the former Soviet Union, Lithuanian Aušra Augustinavičiūtė independently derived a model of personality type from Jung's called socionics.
[13] This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people's behavior in terms of opposite fixed characteristics.
An "S", in contrast, is assumed to be guided more by the judgment/perception axis and thus divided into the "SJ" (guardian, traditionalist) or "SP" (performer, artisan) temperament.
Type A individuals, known for their competitiveness and urgency, may increase the risk of conditions like high blood pressure and coronary heart disease.
Their study, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, demonstrates that individuals exhibiting Type A characteristics are more susceptible to adverse psychosocial effects, such as increased stress and lower job satisfaction, when exposed to workplace stressors.
Adler believed that the oldest child was the individual who would set high achievement goals in order to gain attention lost when the younger siblings were born.
Kohut had a significant impact on the field by extending Freud's theory of narcissism and introducing what he called the 'self-object transferences' of mirroring and idealization.
She disagrees with Freud on some key points, one being that women's personalities are not just a function of "Penis Envy", but that girl children have separate and different psychic lives unrelated to how they feel about their fathers or primary male role models.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences.
[32] Recognition that the tendency to believe that hard work and persistence often results in attainment of life and academic goals has influenced formal educational and counseling efforts with students of various ages and in various settings since the 1970s research about achievement.
[34] Counseling aimed toward encouraging individuals to design ambitious goals and work toward them, with recognition that there are external factors that may impact, often results in the incorporation of a more positive achievement style by students and employees, whatever the setting, to include higher education, workplace, or justice programming.
Kelly's fundamental view of personality was that people are like naive scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organized systems of construction, which they use to anticipate events.
But because people are naive scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation.
)[37] From the theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapy approach and also a technique called The Repertory Grid Interview that helped his patients to uncover their own "constructs" with minimal intervention or interpretation by the therapist.
Accordingly, humanistic psychology focuses on subjective experiences of persons as opposed to forced, definitive factors that determine behavior.
He also investigated the human need to strive for positive goals like competence and influence, to counterbalance the emphasis of Freud on the pathological elements of personality development.
[22] They disagree with the dark, pessimistic outlook of those in the Freudian psychoanalysis ranks, but rather view humanistic theories as positive and optimistic proposals which stress the tendency of the human personality toward growth and self-actualization.
Today's view of the gene-personality relationship focuses primarily on the activation and expression of genes related to personality and forms part of what is referred to as behavioral genetics.
Personality viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology places a great deal of emphasis on specific traits that are most likely to aid in survival and reproduction, such as conscientiousness, sociability, emotional stability, and dominance.
Such characteristics of this social hierarchy include the sharing of important resources, family and mating interactions, and the harm or help organisms can bestow upon one another.
[55][56] Dollard and Miller's belief in the importance of acquired drives led them to reconceive Sigmund Freud's theory of psychosexual development.
[56] Dollard and Miller gave many examples of how secondary drives impact our habitual responses – and by extension our personalities, including anger, social conformity, imitativeness or anxiety, to name a few.
Projective tests assume personality is primarily unconscious and assess individuals by how they respond to an ambiguous stimulus, such as an ink blot.
Using these specific scoring methods, the therapist will then attempt to relate test responses to attributes of the individual's personality and their unique characteristics.
[22] Common examples of these "scenes" include images that may suggest family relationships or specific situations, such as a father and son or a man and a woman in a bedroom.
Defining personality using inner experiences has been expanding due to the fact that solely relying on behavioral principles to explain one's character may seem incomplete.
