Introduction to Personality

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Introduction to Personality

Debbie Noonan

PSY 405

October 8, 2012

Sarah Lind


Introduction to Personality

Few concepts can be as difficult to pin down as personality.  An individual’s personality cannot be touched, held, examined under a microscope, or identified as a group of neurons in the brain. Evidence does exist for its existence however, as we daily access, experience, and describe individual behaviors, characteristics, thoughts, and feelings in ourselves and others.  To further understand the term personality and what it means one must not only examine the definition, but also the various avenues that psychologists use to understand how and why individuals behave as they do.

According to Theories of Personality, personality can be loosely defined as “a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior” (Feist & Feist, 2009, p.1 para 6). Traits are those attitudes, skills, social endowments, and other attributes that allow individual differences in behavior.  Characteristics include body type, intelligence, and temperament. Personality also can be said to be the visible parts of an individual who others see, the essential character of a person.   The basic framework for identifying personality leads the researcher into investigating where it comes from which in turn has led to many theoretical approaches to personality.

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The definition of a scientific theory is a set of related assumptions that allows scientists to use logical deductive reasoning to formulate testable hypotheses (Feist & Feist, 2009).  This simply means that a theory has more than one related assumption, permits a flow of deductive reasoning, and is measurable.  A hypothesis is a testable educated guess or prediction more specific than theories.  Theories or personality are created by scientific means and the researchers are generally psychologists or from a related field.  That being the case, it is not so clear as to why there are so many theories related to ...

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