Personality has been defined in a variety of ways, but two main meanings have emerged as a psychological concept. The first is concerned with people’s consistent differences; in this sense, personality research focuses on classifying and explaining relatively stable human psychological characteristics.
The second meaning emphasizes the qualities that unite all people and distinguish psychological man from other species; it directs the theorist to look for the regularities that define man’s nature as well as the factors that influence the course of lives among all people.
This duality can help clarify the two directions taken by personality research: the study of increasingly specific qualities among people; the search for the organized whole psychological tasks which emphasized the interaction between organic and psychological events in humans and those surrounding social and biological events.
The dual definition is intertwined in the majority of the topics discussed below. However, there has been no universal acceptance in this field by a definition.
Personality is a unique set of patterns that influence a person’s behavior, thought, motivation, and emotion.
It referred to as the combination of traits and patterns that influence a person’s behavior, thought, motivation, and emotion.
It is what motivates people to think, feel, and act in certain ways on a consistent basis; it is, in essence, what distinguishes each person.
These patterns have a significant impact on personal expectations, perceptions, values, and attitudes over time. The study of human personality and how it differs between individuals and populations is known as personality psychology. Personality study can be said to be based on the fundamental idea that people are differentiated by the distinctive way in which they go, talk, furnish their living space or express their urges by their characteristic individual behavioral patterns.
Regardless of the course, individualists—as persons who are called to systematically study the personality—examine how people differ and try to determine the causes of these differences. Although many of the same functions and processes are studied in other fields of psychology, such as attention, thinking, and motivation, the personologist focuses on how these processes interact and become integrated to give each person a unique identity. Psychiatric case studies focusing on lives in distress, philosophy, which explores the nature of man, and physiology, anthropology, and social psychology have all contributed to the systematic psychological study of personality.
History
The systematic study of personality as a distinct discipline within psychology can be said to have begun in the 1930s, with the publication in the United States of two textbooks, Ross Stagner’s Psychology of Personality (1937) and Gordon W. Allport’s Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937), followed by Henry A. Murray’s Explorations in Personality (1938), which contain material on personality (1947).
However, personology can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, who proposed a biochemical theory of personality.
Approaches to Study Personality
The study of personality has taken various distinct directions as a result of research into these five philosophical problems.
Psychodynamic, Neo-Freudian, learning (or behaviourist), humanistic, biological, trait (or dispositional), and cultural perspectives are among the key theories.
Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic theory states that human behavior is the result of interactions between various components of the mind (the id, ego, and superego), and that persona develops through a series of psychosexual developmental stages.
Neo-Freudian theorists like Adler, Erikson, Jung, and Horney built on Freud’s theories by focusing on the social environment and the effects of culture on personality.
Learning theories like behaviourism consider a person’s actions to be ultimately responses to external stimuli. According to social learning theory, an individual’s cognition about the world influences their personality and behavior.
According to humanistic theory, the most important determinant of behavior is an individual’s subjective free will. People strive to become self-actualized, or the “best version” of themselves, according to humanistic psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
Personality, according to trait theorists, can be defined as a set of common traits, or characteristic ways of behaving, that everyone exhibits to some degree. Such traits, according to this viewpoint, vary from person to person but remain consistent within an individual over time and space.
When considering any of these theories, it’s important to remember that the culture in which we live is one of the most influential environmental factors in shaping our personalities. There is evidence that the strength of personality traits varies across cultures, and Western ideas about it are not always applicable to other cultures.
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