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Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and its individual differences. Its areas of focus include:
- Construction of a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes
- Investigation of individual differences
- Investigating human nature and human's similarities
"Personality" is defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person who uniquely influences his or her cognitions, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. In the theatre of the ancient Latin-speaking world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but instead was a convention employed to represent or typify that character.
Personality is connected with Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It generally explains why there are personality differences between individuals.[1]
Personality also refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors consistently exhibited over time that strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes. It also predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and stress.[2][3] There is still no universal consensus on the definition of "personality" in psychology. Gordon Allport (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 trait of extraversion. 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, and social learning perspective. However, many researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain perspective and instead take an eclectic approach. Research in this area is empirically driven, such as dimensional models, based on multivariate statistics, such as factor analysis, or emphasizes theory development, such as that of the psychodynamic theory. There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing. In psychological education and training, the study of the nature of personality and its psychological development is usually reviewed as a prerequisite to courses in abnormal psychology or clinical psychology.
- ^ Schacter, Daniel; Gilbert, Daniel; Wegner, Daniel (2011). Psychology 2nd Ed. 41 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010: Worth Publishers. p. 468. ISBN 978-1-4292-3719-2.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Winnie, J.F. & Gittinger, J.W. (1973) An introduction to the personality assessment system. Journal of Clinical Psychology, Monograph Supplement, 38,1=68
- ^ Krauskopf, C.J. & Saunders, D.R, (1994) Personality and Ability: The Personality Assessment System. University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland