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PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY

Pre-reading task: Think about answers to these questions.

1. How is the term ‘personality’ defined? Why is it difficult to define it?

2. What makes us who we are? What influences our personality?

3. Do you know any personality theories?

4. How would you define the following terms: temperament, extrovert/introvert?

What is Personality

We are all familiar with the term personality, and most of us can describe our own or our friend's
personality. What most don't know, however, is that personality is one of the most theorized and most
researched aspects of psychology.

What exactly is personality? To understand this concept, we need to understand the difference between
a trait and a state. A trait is a relatively permanent individual characteristic. For example, most of us
know people who are outgoing, friendly, confident, or shy. A state, on the other hand, is a temporary
change in one's personality. Examples of states might be angry, depressed, fearful, or anxious. We
typically use states to describe a person's reaction to something.

The key to understanding the difference is to think about how the person typically is (trait) and how the
person has temporarily changed (state) in response to something.

What is Personality Psychology

Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its
areas of focus include:

• Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes
• Investigating individual differences—how people are unique
• Investigating human nature—how people are alike

"Personality" can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person
that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various
situations. The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. This may
sound confusing but actually, in the theatre of the ancient Latin-speaking world, the mask was not used
to disguise the identity of a character. It was used to represent that character (e.g. the performer
representing a god wore a gold-colored mask).The masks helped the audience to distinguish sex, age,
and social status of the characters.
Personality refers to the patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors consistently exhibited by an
individual over time that strongly influence our expectations, self-perceptions, values and attitudes, and
predicts our reactions to people, problems and stress.

If we were given a task of designing a questionnaire to assess human personality, we would probably
include many different personality traits, as people can be very different from each other. However,
most personality theories propose a very small number of personality traits, such as the Big Five theory.
So why do individual differences in personality traits exist? They depend both on environment
(individual experiences in life) and genetic factors.

Eysenck’s Personality Theory

Hans Eysenck's theory, proposed in 1960s, is based primarily on physiology and genetics. Eysenck
considered personality differences as growing out of our genetic inheritance. He was primarily
interested in what is usually called temperament. Temperament is that aspect of our personalities that
is genetically based, inborn, from birth or even before.

Eysenck focused on a small number of personality dimensions, or factors – he defined three major
traits, or “supertraits”. The first two traits, Extraversion and Neuroticism, were described in his 1947
book Dimensions of Personality. It is common practice in personality psychology to refer to the
dimensions by the first letters, E and N.

E and N provided a two-dimensional space to describe individual differences in behavior. Also,

High N and High E = Choleric type

High N and Low E = Melancholic type

Low N and High E = Sanguine type

Low N and Low E = Phlegmatic type

The third dimension, Psychoticism, was added to the model in the late 1970s.

Comparison with other theories

Currently, the most widely used model of personality is the Big Five model (Costa & McCrae, 1985),
which sees personality as consisting of five major traits. The Big Five approach identifies the
following factors (the first letters of which form the word OCEAN):

Openness (curious, imaginative, creative)

READING COMPREHENSION TASKS:

1. Define the following terms:

Personality

Personality Psychology

2. What is the difference between a trait and a state?

3. What are the goals of personality psychology?

4. Read the following words describing personality traits and assign them to one of the four
temperaments: impulsive, pleasure-seeking, aggressive, talkative, relaxed, boisterous, creative,
optimistic, quiet, independent, thoughtful, bossy, ambitious, moody, dominating, self-reliant, worried,
rational, observant, shy.

Sometimes one trait can be assigned to more than one temperament.

• Sanguinic
• Choleric
• Melancholic
• Phlegmatic

5. Supply words with the opposite meaning.

Talkative
Relaxed
Quiet
Optimistic
Rational
Shy
Independent
Thoughtful

6. How does Eysenck’s theory explain individual differences?

7. How does this theory relate to the four temperaments’model?

8. In what way did Eysenck’s model influence other theories? Do you know any other examples?

9. Explain the meaning of the traits in the Big Five model as you understand them.