Abstract
In this paper, I will be discussing the psychology of personality. What it means, and what makes up your personality. How the term personality is commonly misused in everyday language and how psychologists view and study personality. I will mainly be focusing on the different approaches to personality. Specifically, five of them which consist of: the cognitive approach, the trait approach, the psychodynamic approach, the humanistic approach, and lastly, the learning approach.
Summary From a psychologist's standpoint, personality is a person's unique long-term pattern of thinking, emotions, and behavior. It is the consistency of who you are inside or who you truly are. Personality doesn't tend to change because it who
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The psychodynamic approach was shaped by the works of Sigmund Freud. He believed the id (needs and urges), the superego (morals and principals), and the ego (the balance) played a big role in psychological development and that childhood experiences affected a person's personality. In the humanistic approach, it was thought that self-actualization was really important to psychological development and personality. They needed individual experiences and free will in order to fully develop their personality. In the trait approach, I was able to learn how a person is made up of a bunch of broad traits and that using those personality traits, they are able to show to show similar or stable behavior in similar situations. Once a psychologist has identified a persons' traits, they are able to predict future behavior in order to study their patients. Another approach was the cognitive approach. In the cognitive approach, the theorists believe that thought is the first thing that goes on. Thought comes before feeling and before action. This helped me realize how everyone is able to second-guess themselves, and they have to think of what they want to do, before they do it. Otherwise they cannot function. Take for example someone in a hospital who is, "brain dead". Without his or her thoughts, they are not able to function. Although there are some kinks to this theory, it …show more content…
In this approach, learning theorists reject the fact that "inner thoughts and feelings" have anything to do with our personality. Instead, as we are growing up, we learn from what we see, or in other words, our personality is just basically everything we have witnessed around us put together.
Discussion I really enjoyed reading about personality and the many different approaches to it. It helped me see it through many points of views and have an insight of how true psychologists think. I found the cognitive and learning approach quite interesting, even though I do not entirely agree with them. I do not believe that people do absolutely everything while thinking. That's where the expression "I did it without thinking" comes from. Sometimes your body does things out of habit or out of reflexes that doesn’t really require thinking for it to be done. In the learning approach, I really didn’t like how they didn’t believe that your inner thoughts had to do with your personality because in my opinion, that’s what personality is all about. Who you are on the inside. It all has to do with how you think and act, and even though the environment can impact your personality, it doesn't have everything to do with
This course has taught me a lot about the different personality theories as well as the best known psychology theorists that have developed these theories. Personality consists of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make an individual unique. Numerous theories have been emerged to implicit the different features of personality. The main purpose of some theories is to focus on explaining how personality developed.
This topic is about personality perspectives, I will give a brief description of the theories listed in the chapters read this week. I will define what a personality is, then what traits are then compare them. First a personality is defined as the accumulation of features or assets that form an individual's distinctive character. Traits are defined as a special quality or characteristic, typically one belonging to a person. Then we have personality traits which are defined as qualities or characteristics that are the embodiment of an individual's. They are your habitual patterns of comportment, temperament and emotion. Skills, on the other hand, are the learned capacity to carry out concrete tasks. They are competences or the aptitudes to do things. Some psychologists would define personality as the agreeably put order of feeling and actions, remain flexible in our thinking and open to new ideas and behavior that determine one person from another. (Merriam Webster, 2017).
Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist, was the principle proponent of the psychoanalytic personality theory. Psychoanalytic personality theory is tells us that the majority of human behavior is motivated by the unconscious, a part of the personality that contains the memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings urges, drives, and instincts that the individual is unaware, and that only a small part of our psychological makeup is actually derived from the conscious experience. The problem is our unconscious mind disguises the meaning of the material it contains. As such, the psychoanalytic personality theory is ver...
The social-cognitive theory suggests that personality consists of learned behaviors and mental processes. The social-cognitive theory emphasizes thoughts, feelings, thinking, values and expectations.
One way in which the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) of personality differs from the Trait Theory (FFT), is that the SCT represents a bottom-up approach (Cervone, 1997; Shadel, Niaura and Abrams, 2000; Zelli and Dodge, 1999). In other
There are many people in this world; no two people are the same. When considering personality theories it is important to note that not all theories apply to all situations or all people. Different theories have different approaches. It is important to know the person before making assumptions about the proper theory to apply to the person or in any given situation. The purpose of this paper is to analysis how different personality theorists could interoperate different individual circumstances and behaviors based on case examples provided by the instructor.
Personality is a branch of scientific discipline that studies temperament and its variation among people. It is a dynamic and a set of characteristics possessed by their atmosphere, cognitions, emotions, motivations and behaviours in various things. Personality conjointly refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments and behaviour consistently exhibited over time that powerfully influences one’s exceptions, self-perceptions, values and attitudes. It also predicts human reactions to different folks, problems and stress.
The basis of this approach is that psychological factors play a major role in determining behaviour and shaping personality. Freud argued that personality is composed of three major systems the id, the ego, and the superego. The id (biological part of personality) is present at birth and consists of inherited instincts and all psychological energies. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, seeking to reduce tension, avoid pain and obtain pleasure. The ego (executive part of personality) is conscious part of the mind, the “real” us.
Personality can affect many things in a person’s life. This includes how a person will react to a situation. One can attribute different personality traits to different dispositional or learning theories, such as linking the dehumanizing of a victim to social cognitive theory. One can make an association between interpersonal relational aspects and some of these theories. Personality is an aspect of the self that people often think about but most never truly contemplate the meaning or depth of personality.
The psychodynamic theory encompasses both Freud and Erikson. Freud believed the three components of personality were the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is responsible for all needs and urges, while the superego for ideals and moral. The ego moderates between the demands of the id, the superego, and reality. However, Erikson believed that personality progressed through a series of stages, with certain conflicts arising at each stage. Success in any stage depended upon successfully overcoming these conflicts. The advantage to psychodynamic is that it encompasses the individual, meaning that the theory looks at personality from childhood all the way into adulthood. The disadvantages of this theory are that it cannot be tested validly. Therefore,
The personality of the human brain can be a very curious thing to most. Over years of study, psychologists still debate and question how personality actually works. However, the theories of personality have been boiled down to just four major theories. Psychoanalytic, humanistic, trait, and social-cognitive. While none of these are perfect, they all have certain distinguishing characteristics, advantages, and drawbacks, that differ them from each other.
Alongside Freud there was Karen Horney and Carol Jung. Horney rejected the classical psychodynamic concept. Her view emphasized women’s positive qualities and self-evaluation. Jung believed that the roots of personality dates back all the way to the dawn of human existence. Jung’s theory contained the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Along with the psychodynamic theory we have the humanistic theory, the humanistic theory views stressing a person’s capacity for growth and positive human qualities. Abraham Maslow thought that we would better understand personality by focusing on examples ...
The distinctive characteristics and qualities of any one person is one way to define personality. According to Feist & Feist (2009) personality is described as a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior. These traits are the precursor of behavior as per individuality, and that of behavior that is consistent throughout life. Although a person can argue the fact that traits is a disposition of genetic predisposition of certain characteristics, the pattern in which these are characterized are different. Each person’s anatomy, intelligence, and temperament are differently and each owns a unique personality, different from parents, grandparents, and any other individual on this planet. Personality theorists’ however may not concur.
In the centre of the humanistic approach stands the subjective experience of individuals, the emphasis is that humans rather choose how to behave based on their free will (Derobertis, 2013). The approach rejects that behaviour is bound by past or current circumstances or ruled by uncontrollable forces, but rather believes that humans make decisions regarding their actions based on their own choices and that people are generally good (Glassman & Hadad, 2009). The main dominator of personality development is the self-actualization (Rogers, 1959). The pioneers of the humanistic approach are Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and George Kelly. Carl Rogers named the person seeking treatment a client and not a patient, he established the client-centred
The concept of personality has numerous definitions (Fatahi, Moradi, & Kashani-Vahid, 2016). Schultz and Schultz (2009), define personality in its broad sense as the manner of an individual’s behaviour in different situations. This essay explores the nature of personality, with the intention of highlighting its flexibility. The results of numerous empirical research studies are examined in order to investigate if, and how personality changes over time. It will be argued that an individual’s personality has the ability to change throughout their life.