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What is personality in psychology?
What is evolutionary psychology relative to personality development?
Are individual differences in personality Universal?
Is personality a theory or a technique?
Conclusion. Individual differences in personality are universal in that they are found in all human populations. The roots of individual differences are no doubt bedded in evolutionary history, selected because of their improved adaptiveness to conditions in the environment.
- Introduction
- Objective Tests
- Basic Types of Objective Tests
- Other Ways of Classifying Objective Tests
- Projective and Implicit Tests
- Behavioral and Performance Measures
- Conclusion
Personality is the field within psychology that studies the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, goals, and interests of normal individuals. It therefore covers a very wide range of important psychological characteristics. Moreover, different theoretical models have generated very different strategies for measuring these characteristics. For example, hum...
Definition
Objective tests (Loevinger, 1957; Meyer & Kurtz, 2006) represent the most familiar and widely used approach to assessing personality. Objective tests involve administering a standard set of items, each of which is answered using a limited set of response options (e.g., true or false; strongly disagree, slightly disagree, slightly agree, strongly agree). Responses to these items then are scored in a standardized, predetermined way. For example, self-ratings on items assessing talkativeness, as...
Self-report measures
Objective personality tests can be further subdivided into two basic types. The first type—which easily is the most widely used in modern personality research—asks people to describe themselves. This approach offers two key advantages. First, self-raters have access to an unparalleled wealth of information: After all, who knows more about you than you yourself? In particular, self-raters have direct access to their own thoughts, feelings, and motives, which may not be readily available to oth...
Informant ratings
Another approach is to ask someone who knows a person well to describe his or her personality characteristics. In the case of children or adolescents, the informant is most likely to be a parent or teacher. In studies of older participants, informants may be friends, roommates, dating partners, spouses, children, or bosses (Oh et al., 2011; Vazire & Carlson, 2011; Watson et al., 2000). Generally speaking, informant ratings are similar in format to self-ratings. As was the case with self-repor...
Comprehensiveness
In addition to the source of the scores, there are at least two other important dimensions on which personality tests differ. The first such dimension concerns the extent to which an instrument seeks to assess personality in a reasonably comprehensive manner. At one extreme, many widely used measures are designed to assess a single core attribute. Examples of these types of measures include the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Bagby, Parker, & Taylor, 1994), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenbe...
Breadth of the target characteristics
Second, personality characteristics can be classified at different levels of breadth or generality. For example, many models emphasize broad, “big” traits such as neuroticism and extraversion. These general dimensions can be divided up into several distinct yet empirically correlated component traits. For example, the broad dimension of extraversion contains such specific component traits as dominance (extraverts are assertive, persuasive, and exhibitionistic), sociability (extraverts seek ou...
Projective Tests
As noted earlier, some approaches to personality assessment are based on the belief that important thoughts, feelings, and motives operate outside of conscious awareness. Projective tests represent influential early examples of this approach. Projective tests originally were based on the projective hypothesis(Frank, 1939; Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000): If a person is asked to describe or interpret ambiguous stimuli—that is, things that can be understood in a number of different ways—their r...
Implicit Tests
In recent years, researchers have begun to use implicit measures of personality (Back, Schmuckle, & Egloff, 2009; Vazire & Carlson, 2011). These tests are based on the assumption that people form automatic or implicit associations between certain concepts based on their previous experience and behavior. If two concepts (e.g., meand assertive) are strongly associated with each other, then they should be sorted together more quickly and easily than two concepts (e.g., me and shy) that are less...
A final approach is to infer important personality characteristics from direct samples of behavior. For example, Funder and Colvin (1988) brought opposite-sex pairs of participants into the laboratory and had them engage in a five-minute “getting acquainted” conversation; raters watched videotapes of these interactions and then scored the participa...
No single method of assessing personality is perfect or infallible; each of the major methods has both strengths and limitations. By using a diversity of approaches, researchers can overcome the limitations of any single method and develop a more complete and integrative view of personality.
- David Watson
- 2019
Jan 3, 2024 · Sigmund Freud developed a theory of personality which postulates that each individual’s personality is comprised of three entities: the id, the ego, and the superego. Each of these entities can be thought of as psychological energies that operate within the human psyche. Each has its own objectives and ways of being expressed.
Aug 30, 2023 · 6) Conclusion. What is Personality Development? Personality Development is like a journey where we learn about ourselves and how we act. It's about getting better and changing in different ways. Imagine it as a puzzle where some parts are inherited from our families, like how we look, and some of our behaviours.
Conclusion. Human personality is a complex area of study. Not only is human nature complex, but also each individual has a unique combination of inherent abilities and preferences and learned responses.
Personality refers to the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave in specific ways. Our personality is what makes us unique individuals.
In accordance with this conclusion, (1) most classical personality theorists proposed an affective (or affective–motivational) system as a core system of the mind (see, e.g., Shand, 1914; Murray, 1938), and emotions also play a prominent role in recent theories of personality (e.g., Mischel & Shoda, 1995).
