Personality Psychology

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Jeradine Young

Personality Psychology

May 30, 2006

Introduction

The field of personality psychology is flourishing. In many respects the current aspects of the field reflects important shifts, both methodological and conceptual, that have occurred over the past two decades. Some of these changes arose in response to conceptual crises within the field, particularly the Great Trait Debate that occupied much of the field in the seventies. Other shifts reflect the gradual maturing of intellectual agendas that were present at the modern inception of academic personality psychology in the nineteen thirties (Craik, 1986).

Personality Psychology

Personality psychology is the scientific discipline that studies the personality system. The discipline seeks to understand a person's major psychological patterns and how those patterns are expressed in an individual's life. Personality psychologists conduct scientific research on personality, teach about personality (usually at the college and university level) and participate in the broader discipline of psychology (Phares, 1991).

        Personality psychology studies how psychological systems work together.  The field can act as a unifying resource for the broader discipline of psychology.  Yet, personality’s current field-wide organization promotes a fragmented view of the person, seen through such competing theories as the psychodynamic, trait, and humanistic (Pervin, 2003).  

        Unlike some of the others areas of psychology, personality psychology has no single accepted theoretical framework (Burger, 1993). There is, of course, a consensus within the field about the important questions (that's what makes it a field in the first place), but the kinds of answers that satisfy one personality researcher can, and often do, differ radically from the kinds of answers that satisfy another. Why is this? One reason may be that the goal of personality psychology, to make sense of the whole person, is inherently controversial (Burger, 2000).

 Personality psychologists strive to understand the impact that one person can have on others in the social environment. Although it is a concern that personality psychologists and lay observers both share, the more evaluative connotations of personality are largely absent from the scientific study of personality. In the scientific approach, there is much less interest in what constitutes a "good" or "bad" personality. Although every personality psychologist knows very well, in her or her private life, which personalities are "good" and "bad," and although he or she might work very hard to ensure that others regard him or her as having a "good" personality, each will strive to leave these issues at the door when he or she enters the laboratory to undertake research on personality. To do otherwise would be like a chemist judging one atom to be "good" and another "bad" or a physicist judging gravitational forces to be "good" while electrical forces to be "bad." (Pervin, 2003)

What is Personality?

What is personality? How do we know personality when we see it? How do we distinguish one personality from another? These are reasonable questions, but it may help to start with a slightly different one: What is personality not? To begin with, personality is not something you can point your finger at. You can't see it, touch it, or smell it. Few of us doubt, however, that personality exists. In fact, there is general agreement that all people have a personality. We perceive others to have personality based on their behavior in the situations in which we observe them. When we see a child sharing her candy with her brother, we often conclude that she is a nice person. Based on this assumption, we may expect that she will be likely to act nicely towards others in the future (Burger, 2000).

We also use information about the situation to make this type of judgment. For instance, we might not assume that the little girl is a nice person if we hear her mother tell her she can't go to a movie unless she shares her candy. This example highlights that two distinct factors influence behavior: our personality and the situations in which we find ourselves. Personality psychologists focus on the role personality processes play in guiding our actions, but they use knowledge of the situation to infer when personality processes are operating (Burger, 2000).

Researchers and theorists have argued for centuries about the nature of personality. One ancient Greek theorist, Hippocrates, hypothesized that personality is the result of four bodily humors (or fluids), and that an overabundance of one type of humor leads to a particular personality. Following in this tradition, more modern researchers have identified other biological processes that influence personality. Other researchers believe the origins of personality reside in deep rooted psychological conflicts or prior learning experiences. The diversity of these theoretical perspectives is one of the things that make personality psychology such a rich and interesting area of study (Hogan & Johnson, 1997).

The Study of Personality

There are a number of different techniques that are used in the study of personality. Each technique has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Experimental methods are those in which the researcher controls and manipulates the variables of interests and takes measures of the results. This is the most scientific form of research, but experimental research can be difficult when studying aspects of personality such as motivations, emotions, and drives. These ideas are internal, abstract, and extremely difficult to measure (Funder, 2001).

Case studies and self-report methods rely on in-depth analysis of an individual as well as information provided by the individual. Case studies rely heavily on the interpretation of the observer, while self-report methods depend upon the memory of the individual of interest. Because of this, these methods tend to be highly subjective and it is difficult to generalize the findings to a larger population (Funder, 2001).

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Clinical research relies upon information gathered from clinical patients over the course of treatment. Many personality theories are based upon this type of research, but because the research subjects are unique and exhibit abnormal behavior, this research tends to be highly subjective and difficult to generalize (Funder, 2001).

Theory and Method in the Study of Personality

In the 20th century, two very different perspectives have been taken on the study of personality.  The psychodynamic tradition has been characterized by an emphasis on intensive observation of human behavior in clinical settings as the basis for developing and modifying theories, with little focus ...

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