Approaches to Personality

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Personality can be defined as “the sum of characteristics that make a person unique”. (Weinberg and Gould, 2007) It can be divided into three levels consisting of a person’s psychological core, their typical responses and role-related behaviour. The psychological core involves a person’s values, interests, attitudes, motives and self-worth. Typical responses are learnt throughout life and are the ways a person behaves in different environments and how they react to various situations. Role-related behaviour is how someone conducts oneself dependent upon how they have perceived their social environment. There are five different aspects to personality, three of which will be discussed in this essay: trait, situational and interactional approaches. The trait approach assumes that personality is constant and stable. This means it does not take into account the variety of situations that might make a person behave differently. It is considered that a person is hard-wired to act in a certain way all the time regardless of situation. The situation approach is on the other end of the spectrum from trait approach and is environmentally determined, as opposed to internally determined. It states that behaviour is fundamentally controlled by situation or environment. The interactional approach is in the middle of the two, suggesting that behaviour is determined by both personality and situation as co-variants. It argues that an environment is not, on its own, enough to govern behaviour. A person’s individual traits need to be taken into consideration. In sport, these different aspects of personality are important because for a coach they can help produce more effective training sessions. This is because if they can understand the way the athl...

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...e final decision. This approach sees personality as something that is always changing. The phenomenological approach is actually the most used today, and argues that behaviour is determined by both personality and situation, but the person’s personal view on the situation is taken into account. (Weinberg and Gould, 2007)
Of the three discussed in this essay, however, the interactional approach is most used by sport psychologists because it considers both the situation and the athlete’s personality traits.

Works Cited

http://stats.football.co.uk/league_tables/2013_2014/premier_league/index.shtml
Foundations of sport and exercise psychology Robert Weinberg and Daniel Gould, 2007 fourth ed
Psychological dynamics of sport and exercise Diane Gill, 2000 second ed
Coaching for the inner edge Robert Vealey, 2005
http://giftedkids.about.com/od/glossary/g/extrovert.htm

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