What makes personality

View this video for a brief overview of some of the psychological perspectives on personality. Personality has been studied for over 2, years, beginning with Hippocrates.

Other perspectives then emerged in reaction to the psychodynamic perspective, including the learning, humanistic, biological, trait, and cultural perspectives. How would you describe your own personality? Do you think that friends and family would describe you in much the same way? Why or why not? What are some of your positive and negative personality qualities? How do you think these qualities will affect your choice of career?

The particular quality or trait must be part of an enduring behavior pattern, so that it is a consistent or predictable quality. Skip to main content. Chapter 9 — Personality. Search for:. What Is Personality? Research into these five philosophical questions has branched into several different approaches to studying personality. The major theories include the psychodynamic, neo-Freudian, learning or behaviorist , humanistic, biological, trait or dispositional , and cultural perspectives.

Sigmund Freud : Sigmund Freud advanced a psychodynamic view of human personality that implicated the id, ego, and superego as the main determinants of individual differences in personality. With any of these theories, it is important to keep in mind that the culture in which we live is one of the most important environmental factors that shapes our personalities.

Western ideas about personality are not necessarily applicable to other cultures, and there is evidence that the strength of personality traits varies across cultures. The biological perspective on personality emphasizes the influence of the brain and genetic factors on personality. The biological perspective on personality emphasizes the internal physiological and genetic factors that influence personality.

It focuses on why or how personality traits manifest through biology and investigates the links between personality, DNA, and processes in the brain. This research can include the investigation of anatomical, chemical, or genetic influences and is primarily accomplished through correlating personality traits with scientific data from experimental methods such as brain imaging and molecular genetics.

For example, Thomas and Chess found that babies could be categorized into one of three temperaments: easy, difficult, or slow to warm up. For example, one person may immediately respond to a new stimulus with a high level of anxiety while another barely notices it. The field of behavioral genetics focuses on the relationship between genes and behavior and has given psychologists a glimpse of the link between genetics and personality. A large part of the evidence collected linking genetics and the environment to personality comes from twin studies, which compare levels of similarity in personality between genetically identical twins.

Genetics : The expression of inherited genes plays a role in determining personality. In the field of behavioral genetics, the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart—a well-known study of the genetic basis for personality—conducted research with twins from to These findings suggest the heritability of some personality traits, implying that some aspects of our personalities are largely controlled by genetics.

Multiple twin studies have found that identical twins do have higher correlations in personality traits than fraternal twins. While identical twins may have some similar personality traits, however, they still have distinct personalities, suggesting that genetics are not the only factor in determining personality.

One study measuring genetic influence on twins in five different countries found that correlations for traits between identical twins were 0. Many personality studies today investigate the activation and expression of genes and how they relate to personality. How DNA interacts with the environment determines what part of the DNA code is actually activated within an individual—in other words, which genes will be expressed.

The biological approach to personality has also identified areas and pathways within the brain that are associated with the development of personality. A number of theorists, such as Hans Eysenck, Gordon Allport, and Raymond Cattell, believe that personality traits can be traced back to brain structures and neural mechanisms, such as dopamine and seratonin pathways. Researchers using a biological perspective will seek to understand how hormones, neurotransmitters, and different areas of the brain all interact to affect personality.

One of the first documented cases that demonstrated the link between personality and the brain was that of Phineas Gage. In , Gage was working as a blasting foreman for a railroad company. Due to a faulty blast, a railroad spike was blown through his head; miraculously, he survived the accident.

One strength of the biological perspective is its strict adherence to scientific methodology. All factors are reduced to quantifiable variables that can be reliably measured by personality trait models and questionnaires. The personality measures are standardized across measurements, and these measures of personality are very compatible with statistical analyses, providing an easily administered and measurable definition of personality.

This method can also be deterministic, meaning that some factors are identified as causal—i. Because of this, the biological perspective can be useful in identifying causes of and effective treatments for personality and mood disorders. For example, identifying seratonin imbalance as a cause of depression led to the development of selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors SSRIs , which have been found to be an effective treatment for depression.

A limitation of this perspective is that it focuses almost exclusively on the nature side of the nature vs. Someone who is extremely talkative at one specific party may sometimes be reticent to speak up during class and may even act like a wallflower at a different party.

However, it is also true that if psychologists assess a broad range of behaviours across many different situations, there are general tendencies that emerge. Personality traits give an indication about how people will act on average, but frequently they are not so good at predicting how a person will act in a specific situation at a certain moment in time.

Thus, to best capture broad traits, one must assess aggregate behaviours, averaged over time and across many different types of situations. Most modern personality researchers agree that there is a place for broad personality traits and for the narrower units such as those studied by Walter Mischel. Please use the rating scale below to describe how accurately each statement describes you.

Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know of the same sex as you are, and roughly your same age.

Please read each statement carefully, and put a number from 1 to 5 next to it to describe how accurately the statement describes you. Scoring: The first thing you must do is to reverse the items that are worded in the opposite direction. In order to do this, subtract the number you put for that item from 6. So if you put a 4, for instance, it will become a 2. Cross out the score you put when you took the scale, and put the new number in representing your score subtracted from the number 6.

Next, you need to add up the scores for each of the five OCEAN scales including the reversed numbers where relevant. Place the sum next to each scale below. Compare your scores to the norms below to see where you stand on each scale. If you are low on a trait, it means you are the opposite of the trait label. For example, low on Extraversion is Introversion, low on Openness is Conventional, and low on Agreeableness is Assertive.

This is a student-made video which cleverly describes, through song, common behavioural characteristics of the Big 5 personality traits. This is a student-made video that looks at characteristics of the OCEAN traits through a series of funny vignettes.

It also presents on the Person vs Situation Debate. Video 3: David M. This is a student-made video that makes a very important point about the relationship between personality traits and behaviour using a handy weather analogy. Allport, G. Trait names: A psycholexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47 , Ashton, M. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 11 , — Caspi, A. Personality development: Stability and change. Annual Reviews of Psychology, 56 , — Donnellan, M.

Psychological Assessment, 18 , — Goldberg, L. An alternative description of personality: The Big Five personality traits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59 , — Gray, J. Eysenck Ed. New York: Springer Verlag. The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system second edition.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthews, G. Personality traits. McCrae, R. Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 , 81— An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of Personality, 60 , — Paunonen, S. Big five factors and facets and the prediction of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 , — Roberts, B.

The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes.