Personality Theory Case

Personality Theory

Rajpreeti Grewal

Psy/405

July30th2013

Cole Powers

Personality Theory

Personality is defined as physical, mental, emotional and social characteristics that a individual might possess.(Dictionary .com,LLC,2011) .No two individuals are the same, even twins have  their own personality.  Individual’s characteristics begin to form as a child and continue to grow as he or she grows. “ To put it in another way the choices a individual makes in life churn out the personality that we carry with us.  The process of improving or transforming the personality is called personality development.”(Factors that  influence Personality, 2010).In this paper we are going to define personality, discuss theoretical approaches in studying personality and analyze factors that may influence an individual’s personality.

The theoretical approaches that are used to study  personalities include psychodynamic, humanistic/existential, dispositional, and learning theories. The psychodynamic theory is based upon a individual’s internal drives wants and desires.(McLeod ,2007).The humanistic/existentialist is a study on the  individual as a whole (McLeod,2007).The dispositional theory, here the researchers look at the consistent traits that are present when a person deals with others (Feist & Feist ,2009 )The learning theories is based on a individual s’own learning experiences(Feist ,2009).These different theories show that researchers have different points of views what one researcher might view as his view a other researchers thought process might be very different  from the other The personality of each researcher play a big role  in the way he or she chooses the topic to research and the way they reach at their decision. “Thus the researcher is able to develop his or her own theory, create a hypothesis, complete his or her research and come to his or her own conclusion” (Feist & Feist ,2009).The biggest example is the every- day life of a student, each student has a different personality and each person has his or her own way of studying, the student might be learning the same information but each student has his or her own study method to learn the information. As stated there is no wrong way of learning. “The pattern of an individual’s traits is different for each individual and characteristics are unique qualities of an  individual which includes such as attributes as temperament physique and intelligence”(Fiest &Fiest,2009). According to Tumblod (2010) “scientist have argued for many years what are the factors that shape us ,is it our genes ,or is it our environment the answer to this question is, it is both” The nature of  an individual falls into different categories within the field that studies observable behavior There are 6 different personalities classified in the text 1)Similarities vs unique characteristics  2)Unconscious vs. Conscious 3)Optimism and pessimism 4.)Free will .5) Teleology and causality and last one is Environmental vs .biological predisposition. With proper cognitive processing humans do have a free will this is often behaviors that are created by internal and external influences that direct our personality, through positive and negative attitudes a person might possess it usually gives a picture of the person’ general personality. The environmental and biological traits, it talks about here how a individual ‘s behavior and personality is effected by the cognitive development and his life experiences .With the positions of Teleology and causality the behaviors of an individual stems from his past experiences and thru such teleology behaviors that occur in present times occurs thru mediation of events that will take place in the future. All of these six dimensions show tha  human nature can be quantified and generalized into a set of dualistic sub-categories. According to  Feist (2009) “to improve the ability to predict personality psychologist have developed a number of assessments, techniques and also personality inventories.  These inventories can be reliable but yet lack validity or be accurate”. There are 2 types of validity that the psychologist are concerned with , “Construct Validity, it is the  extent to which and instrument measures some hypothetical question & predictive validity is the extent to which a test predicts some future behavior”.( Feist,2009)

Factors that that influence a person’s personality development are parenting, environment at home , self- image and inner desires.(My- self Developmrnt,2010),  .and even more so a person ,intelligence ,attitude    and physical appearance  also plays a important role in how his or her personality develops (Feist & Feist,2009) .A parents traits will be passed on to their children and these traits will be seen as the child is growing up. Our book discusses the 5 traits Extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. According to Feist (2009) “Theorist such as Freud Adler, Jung ,Rotter, Hans and the five Factor theorists have created a number of personality inventories to measure units of personality and create their theoretical models” .These assessments are used in clinics today to assist psychologist in understanding individual  behaviors and to help in the decision of what type of treatment  is needed.