Topic summary
Personality psychology
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
- Describing what personality is.
- Documenting how personalities develop.
- Explaining the mental processes of personality and how they affect functioning.
- Providing a framework for understanding individuals.
"Personality" is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by an individual that uniquely influences their environment, cognition, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word personality originates from the Latinpersona, which means "mask".
Personality also pertains to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors persistently exhibited over time that strongly influence one's expectations, self-conceptions, values, and attitudes. Environmental and situational effects on behaviour are influenced by psychological mechanisms within a person. Personality also predicts human reactions to other people and their behavior, problems, and stress. Gordon Allport, in 1937, described two major ways to study personality: the and the .Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization or the traits of extraversion and introversion. 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. Many researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with only one perspective and instead take an eclectic approach. Research in this area is empirically driven—such as dimensional models based on multivariate statistics like factor analysis—or emphasizes theory development, such as psychodynamic theory. There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing.