Abstract
In this paper, I will be discussing the psychology of personality. What it means, and what makes up your personality. How the term personality is commonly misused in everyday language and how psychologists view and study personality. I will mainly be focusing on the different approaches to personality. Specifically, five of them which consist of: the cognitive approach, the trait approach, the psychodynamic approach, the humanistic approach, and lastly, the learning approach.
Summary From a psychologist's standpoint, personality is a person's unique long-term pattern of thinking, emotions, and behavior. It is the consistency of who you are inside or who you truly are. Personality doesn't tend to change because it who
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The psychodynamic approach was shaped by the works of Sigmund Freud. He believed the id (needs and urges), the superego (morals and principals), and the ego (the balance) played a big role in psychological development and that childhood experiences affected a person's personality. In the humanistic approach, it was thought that self-actualization was really important to psychological development and personality. They needed individual experiences and free will in order to fully develop their personality. In the trait approach, I was able to learn how a person is made up of a bunch of broad traits and that using those personality traits, they are able to show to show similar or stable behavior in similar situations. Once a psychologist has identified a persons' traits, they are able to predict future behavior in order to study their patients. Another approach was the cognitive approach. In the cognitive approach, the theorists believe that thought is the first thing that goes on. Thought comes before feeling and before action. This helped me realize how everyone is able to second-guess themselves, and they have to think of what they want to do, before they do it. Otherwise they cannot function. Take for example someone in a hospital who is, "brain dead". Without his or her thoughts, they are not able to function. Although there are some kinks to this theory, it …show more content…
In this approach, learning theorists reject the fact that "inner thoughts and feelings" have anything to do with our personality. Instead, as we are growing up, we learn from what we see, or in other words, our personality is just basically everything we have witnessed around us put together.
Discussion I really enjoyed reading about personality and the many different approaches to it. It helped me see it through many points of views and have an insight of how true psychologists think. I found the cognitive and learning approach quite interesting, even though I do not entirely agree with them. I do not believe that people do absolutely everything while thinking. That's where the expression "I did it without thinking" comes from. Sometimes your body does things out of habit or out of reflexes that doesn’t really require thinking for it to be done. In the learning approach, I really didn’t like how they didn’t believe that your inner thoughts had to do with your personality because in my opinion, that’s what personality is all about. Who you are on the inside. It all has to do with how you think and act, and even though the environment can impact your personality, it doesn't have everything to do with
Our book was divided into different chapters on various theorists and explained the major theories of personality that were proposed by the different psychologists. One of the theories that we learned about was the trait theories. Gordan Allport introduced the trait theory and his theory suggested that individual personalities are primarily composed of broad dispositions’. Eysenck’s three dimensions of Personality was also a part of the trait theory. Eysenck developed that model of personality upon three universal trails. And at last, the trait theory had the Big five dimensions which proposed that there are give basic dimensions of personality. One of the four conclusions in our textbook suggested that “until more unambiguous empirical research is available, the best one can do is to evaluate the various theories personally, and to accept concepts that make sense and reject those that do not”(531).
This topic is about personality perspectives, I will give a brief description of the theories listed in the chapters read this week. I will define what a personality is, then what traits are then compare them. First a personality is defined as the accumulation of features or assets that form an individual's distinctive character. Traits are defined as a special quality or characteristic, typically one belonging to a person. Then we have personality traits which are defined as qualities or characteristics that are the embodiment of an individual's. They are your habitual patterns of comportment, temperament and emotion. Skills, on the other hand, are the learned capacity to carry out concrete tasks. They are competences or the aptitudes to do things. Some psychologists would define personality as the agreeably put order of feeling and actions, remain flexible in our thinking and open to new ideas and behavior that determine one person from another. (Merriam Webster, 2017).
Every single individual has a personality; it is the very quintessence of human existence. Personality drives our interactions with others, our desires – conscious and unconscious, our perceived needs, and to a certain extent, even our actions. Psychodynamic approaches to personality are focused on the belief that we have virtually no control over our own personality, that it is primarily controlled by unconscious powers. Social cognitive approaches to personality centers around the belief that we still have little to no control over our own personality, and that the cognitive influence, that is to say thoughts, feelings, expectations and values – along with the observation of others behavior is the primary influence on personality. These two approaches to personality are so radically different, and yet both have their own merits – they are two of many, and nobody is quite sure what the truth is.
The social-cognitive theory suggests that personality consists of learned behaviors and mental processes. The social-cognitive theory emphasizes thoughts, feelings, thinking, values and expectations.
There are many people in this world; no two people are the same. When considering personality theories it is important to note that not all theories apply to all situations or all people. Different theories have different approaches. It is important to know the person before making assumptions about the proper theory to apply to the person or in any given situation. The purpose of this paper is to analysis how different personality theorists could interoperate different individual circumstances and behaviors based on case examples provided by the instructor.
The psychodynamic theory encompasses both Freud and Erikson. Freud believed the three components of personality were the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is responsible for all needs and urges, while the superego for ideals and moral. The ego moderates between the demands of the id, the superego, and reality. However, Erikson believed that personality progressed through a series of stages, with certain conflicts arising at each stage. Success in any stage depended upon successfully overcoming these conflicts. The advantage to psychodynamic is that it encompasses the individual, meaning that the theory looks at personality from childhood all the way into adulthood. The disadvantages of this theory are that it cannot be tested validly. Therefore,
Personality is a branch of scientific discipline that studies temperament and its variation among people. It is a dynamic and a set of characteristics possessed by their atmosphere, cognitions, emotions, motivations and behaviours in various things. Personality conjointly refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments and behaviour consistently exhibited over time that powerfully influences one’s exceptions, self-perceptions, values and attitudes. It also predicts human reactions to different folks, problems and stress.
A Comparison of the Main Approaches to Personality Psychology Psychology of personality is a difficult concept to define and quantify, therefore most personality theories, however different they may be in other respects, share the basic assumption, that personality is a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking, that prevails across time and situations and differentiates one person from another. Most theories attempting to explain personality represent part of the classic psychological Nature verse Nurture debate. In other words, is personality “inherited”, or developed through our interactions with the environment. In addition, we shall compare and contrast two of the main approaches to personality psychology by concentrating on Psychoanalytical Theory (Freud) and Social Learning Theory (Bandura). By looking at the Psychodynamic approach, developed by Freud, we can argue that it emphasizes the interplay of unconscious psychological processes in determining human thought, feelings, and behaviours.
Personality can affect many things in a person’s life. This includes how a person will react to a situation. One can attribute different personality traits to different dispositional or learning theories, such as linking the dehumanizing of a victim to social cognitive theory. One can make an association between interpersonal relational aspects and some of these theories. Personality is an aspect of the self that people often think about but most never truly contemplate the meaning or depth of personality.
One way in which the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) of personality differs from the Trait Theory (FFT), is that the SCT represents a bottom-up approach (Cervone, 1997; Shadel, Niaura and Abrams, 2000; Zelli and Dodge, 1999). In other
In the centre of the humanistic approach stands the subjective experience of individuals, the emphasis is that humans rather choose how to behave based on their free will (Derobertis, 2013). The approach rejects that behaviour is bound by past or current circumstances or ruled by uncontrollable forces, but rather believes that humans make decisions regarding their actions based on their own choices and that people are generally good (Glassman & Hadad, 2009). The main dominator of personality development is the self-actualization (Rogers, 1959). The pioneers of the humanistic approach are Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and George Kelly. Carl Rogers named the person seeking treatment a client and not a patient, he established the client-centred
Theorists’ in this branch of psychology have not agreed on a specific definition for personality, as one theory is an onset of another. Nevertheless, the different theoretical approach...
The first personality theory covered is psychoanalytic, or psychodynamic. The perspective of psychoanalysis is one of the more famous and historical ways of thinking about psychology, finding its roots with Sigmund Freud, and was mostly agreed upon by theorists such as Carl Jung and Erik Erikson. Freud put a strong emphasis on childhood having a strong impact on one’s unconscious, and that most of one’s personality is formed during childhood. Freud divided the personality into three parts. The id, ego, and superego. The id is very basic, and is developed during childhood, and consists of animal-like instincts, and what Freud called the “pleasure principle”. The id tends to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and not much else. The ego is the conscious part, and the smallest, but is the manager of the rest of the personality. The
The study of personality theories of psychology is the section of psychology which studies individuals’ personalities and differences. A theory is a model that helps us predict or explain an outcome; in this case it is personality or behavior. Our personality is what makes us unique or different from other people. Many personality theorists may not feel the same about the development of personality or behavior but, they all are interested in the commonalities among people. How are people “put together,” how do they “work,” and how do they “fall apart.”
The concept of personality has numerous definitions (Fatahi, Moradi, & Kashani-Vahid, 2016). Schultz and Schultz (2009), define personality in its broad sense as the manner of an individual’s behaviour in different situations. This essay explores the nature of personality, with the intention of highlighting its flexibility. The results of numerous empirical research studies are examined in order to investigate if, and how personality changes over time. It will be argued that an individual’s personality has the ability to change throughout their life.