Personality Psychology

Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and its variation among individuals. It is a scientific study which aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:

construction of a coherent picture of the individual and their major psychological processes
investigation of individual psychological differences
investigation of human nature and psychological similarities among individuals

"Personality" is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences their environment, cognition, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means "mask."

Personality also refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors consistently exhibited over a period of time that strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes. Personality also predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and stress. 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, evolutionary, 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.

x----x

This post is sponsored by Red Ribbon Bakeshop.

Comments

Stoichiometry

Stoichiometry refers to the relationship between the quantities of reactants and products before, during, and following chemical reactions. Stoichiometry was founded on the law of conservation of mass where the total mass of the reactants equals the total mass of the products, leading to the insight that the relations among qualities of reactants and products typically form a ratio of positive integers. This means that if the amounts of separate reactants are known, then the amount of the product can be calculated. Conversely, if one reactant has a known quantity and the quantity of the products can be empirically determined, then the amount of other reactants can also be calculated. This is illustrated in this example, where the balanced equation is: CH4 + 2O4 -----> CO2 + 2H2O Here, one molecule of methane reacts with two molecules of oxygen gas to yield one molecule of carbon dioxide and two molecules of water. This particular chemical...

Gospel Harmony

A gospel harmony is an attempt to collate the Christian canonical gospels into a single account. Harmonies are constructed by some writers in order to make the gospel story available to a wider audience, both religious and secular. Harmonies can be studied by scholars to establsh a coherent chronology of the events depicted in the four canonical gospels in the life of Jesus, to better understand how the accounts relate to each other, and to critically evaluate their differences. The terms harmony and synopsis have been used to several different approaches to consolidating the canonical gospels. Technically, a "harmony" weaves together sections of scripture into a single narrative, merging the four gospels. There are four main types of harmony : radical, synthetic, sequential, and parallel. By a contrast, a "synopsis," much like a parallel harmony, juxtaposes similar texts or accounts in parallel format, synchronized by time, while preserving their individual iden...

Abnormal Psychology

Abnormal psychology is the branch of psychology that studies unusual patterns of behavior, emotion, and thought, which may or may not be understood as precipitating a mental disorder. Although many behaviors could be considered as abnormal, this branch of psychology typically deals with behavior in a clinical context. There is a long history of attempts to understand and control behavior deemed to be aberrant or deviant (statistically, functionally, morally or in some other sense), and there is often cultural variation in the approach taken. The field of abnormal psychology identifies multiple causes for different conditions, employing diverse theories from the general field of psychology and elsewhere, and much still hinges on what exactly is meant by "abnormal." There has traditionally been a divide between psychological and biological explanations, reflecting philosophical dualism in regard to the mind-body problem. There have also been different approaches in trying to ...

Search This Blog