The Importance Of Personality Psychology

Introduction Personality psychology is the area of psychology that focuses on personality in the context of its variations among individuals. According to Hulbert (2009), personality defines a lasting pattern of emotions, motives, thoughts and behaviors through which the manner an individual reacts to situations and other people is characterized. Personality traits differ and they can be summarized in five perspectives that include psychodynamic, behavioral, trait, learning/social and humanistic. Ideally, all the five perspectives share a commonality in the context that they attempt to explain how personalities are formed or acquired. Personality measurement and research designs were developed to determine how individuals acquire a particular

The psychodynamic approach ignores the traditional trends of behavioral psychology and focuses on an individual’s thought processes emphasizing on how personality is influenced by the experiences of childhood and the unconscious mind. According to Kornyeyeva and Boehnke (2013), a lack of self-acceptance is fostered by the experience of authoritarian experience. In agreement, Junior and Edward (2013) propose that the psychodynamic approach attempts to make sense of the relationships between an individual’s thought processes and how they perceive the

According to Gass and Odland (2012) the developer of the behaviorist school of thought, B.F. Skinner, emphasized the mutual interaction between an organism (or an individual) and its environment. Hulbert (2009) notes that by viewing personality as a habit the theorist asserted that everything done by an individual is a response to an environmental stimulus that has either been rewarded or reinforced in a certain way. Using the example of a shy child, Gass and Odland (2014) consider the harsh disciplinary style of parents as a stimulus that negatively reinforces the child to keep quiet in order to avoid punishment. The child then generalizes their approach to other adults and in the process develops the habit of shyness (Hulbert, 2009). However, as criticized by Junior and Edward (2013), behaviorism theory does not take into account social influences and mental processes in its description of