Personality theories
Personality type described to the psychological classification of people into different classes. Personality types are distinguished from personality traits, which come in different degrees. There are many theories of personality, but each one contains several and sometimes many sub theories. A "theory of personality" constructed by any condition psychologist will contain group relating theories or sub theories often expanding as more psychologists explore the theory. For example, according to type theories, there are two types of people, introverts and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extroversion are element of a non-stop dimension with many people in the middle. The opinion of psychological types originated in the theoretical work of Carl Jung, specifically in his 1921 book Psychologische Typen Psychological Types and William Marston.
Building on the writings and observations of Jung during World War II, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine C. Briggs, delineated personality types by constructing the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. This good example was later used by David Keirsey with a different understanding from Jung, Briggs and Myers. In the former Soviet Union, Lithuanian Aušra Augustinavičiūtė independently derived a service example of personality type from Jung's called socionics. Later on many other tests were developed on this model e.g. Golden, PTI-Pro and JTI.
Theories could also be considered an "approach" to personality or psychology and is loosely referred to as a model. The model is an older and more theoretical approach to personality, accepting extroversion and introversion as basic psychological orientations in connective with two pairs of psychological functions:
Briggs and Myers also added another personality dimension to their type indicator to measure whether a adult prefers to usage a judging or perceiving function when interacting with the external world. Therefore, they included questions designed to indicate whether someone wishes to come to conclusions judgement or to keep options open perception.
This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people's behavior in terms of opposite constant characteristics. In these more traditional models, the sensing/intuition preference is considered the almost basic, dividing people into "N" intuitive or "S" sensing personality types. An "N" is further assumed to be guided either by thinking or feeling and dual-lane into the "NT" scientist, engineer or "NF" author, humanitarian temperament. An "S", in contrast, is assumed to be guided more by the judgment/perception axis and thus divided into the "SJ" guardian, traditionalist or "SP" performer, artisan temperament. These four are considered basic, with the other two factors in each issue including always extraversion/introversion less important. Critics of this traditional view have observed that the types can be quite strongly stereotyped by professions although neither Myers nor Keirsey engaged in such stereotyping in their type descriptions, and thus may occur more from the need to classify people for purposes of guiding their career choice. This among other objections led to the emergence of the five-factor view, which is less concerned with behavior under work conditions and more concerned with behavior in personal and emotional circumstances. The MBTI is not designed to degree the "work self", but rather what Myers and McCaulley called the "shoes-off self."
Type A and Type B personality theory: During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his co-workers defined what they called Type A and Type B behavior patterns. They theorized that intense, hard-driving Type A personalities had a higher risk of coronary disease because they are "stress junkies." Type B people, on the other hand, tended to be relaxed, less competitive, and lower in risk. There was also a Type AB mixed profile.
John L. Holland's RIASEC vocational model, usually referred to as the Holland Codes, stipulates that six personality types lead people totheir career paths. In this circumplex model, the six types are represented as a hexagon, with adjacent types more closely related than those more distant. The model is widely used in vocational counseling.
Eduard Spranger's personality-model, consisting of six or, by some revisions, 6 +1 basic types of value attitudes, described in his book Types of Men Lebensformen; Halle Saale: Niemeyer, 1914; English translation by P. J. W. Pigors - New York: G. E. Stechert Company, 1928.
The Enneagram of Personality, a model of human personality which is principally used as a typology of nine interconnected personality types. It has been criticized as being subject to interpretation, creating it unmanageable to test or validate scientifically.
Perhaps the nearly ancient attempt at personality psychology is the personality typology outlined by the Indian Buddhist Abhidharma schools. This typology mostly focuses on negative personal traits greed, hatred, and delusion and the corresponding positive meditation practices used to counter those traits.
Psychoanalytic theories explain human behavior in terms of the interaction of various components of personality. Sigmund Freud was the founder of this school of thought. He drew on the physics of his day thermodynamics to coin the term psychodynamics. Based on the idea of converting heat into mechanical energy, Freud present psychic power could be converted into behavior. His theory places central importance on dynamic, unconscious psychological conflicts.
Freud divides human personality into three significant components: the id, ego and super-ego. The id acts according to the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification of its needs regardless of external environment; the ego then must emerge in configuration to realistically meet the wishes and demands of the id in accordance with the outside world, adhering to the reality principle. Finally, the superego conscience inculcates moral judgment and societal rules upon the ego, thus forcing the demands of the id to be met not only realistically but morally. The superego is the last function of the personality to develop, and is the embodiment of parental/social ideals setting during childhood. According to Freud, personality is based on the dynamic interactions of these three components.
The channeling and release of sexual libidal and aggressive energies, which ensues from the "Eros" sex; instinctual self-preservation and "Thanatos" death; instinctual self-annihilation drives respectively, are major components of his theory. it is important to note that Freud's broad understanding of sexuality included all kinds of pleasurable feelings professional by the human body.
Freud filed five psychosexual stages of personality development. He believed grown-up personality is dependent upon early childhood experiences and largely determined by age five. Fixations that develop during the infantile stage contribute to adult personality and behavior.
One of Sigmund Freud's earlier associates, Alfred Adler, agreed with Freud that early childhood experiences are important to development, and believed birth sorting may influence personality development. Adler believed that the oldest child was the individual who would set high achievement goals in order to gain attention lost when the younger siblings were born. He believed the middle children were competitive and ambitious. He reasoned that this behavior was motivated by the idea of surpassing the firstborn's achievements. He added, however, that the middle children were often not as concerned approximately the glory attributed to their behavior. He also believed the youngest would be more dependent and sociable. Adler finished by surmising that an only child loves being the center of attention and matures quickly but in the end fails to become independent.
Heinz Kohut thought similarly to Freud's idea of transference. He used narcissism as a model of how people develop their sense of self. Narcissism is the exaggerated sense of self in which one is believed to exist in order to protect one's low self-esteem and sense of worthlessness. Kohut had a significant impact on the field by extending Freud's theory of narcissism and introducing what he called the 'self-object transferences' of mirroring and idealization. In other words, children need to idealize and emotionally "sink into" and identify with the idealized competence of admired figures such as parents or older siblings. They also need to have their self-worth mirrored by these people. Such experiences permit them to thereby learn the self-soothing and other skills that are essential for the developing of a healthy sense of self.
Another important figure in the world of personality theory is Karen Horney. She is credited with the development of "Feminist Psychology". She disagrees with Freud on some key points, one being that women's personalities are not just a function of "Penis Envy", but that girl children have separate and different psychic lives unrelated to how they feel approximately their fathers or primary male role models. She talks about three basic Neurotic needs "Basic Anxiety", "Basic Hostility" and "Basic Evil". She posits that to any anxiety an individual experiences they would have one of three approaches, moving toward people, moving away from people or moving against people. it is these three that afford us varying personality types and characteristics. She also places a high premium on concepts like Overvaluation of Love and romantic partners.
Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behavior. The approaches used to evaluate the behavioral aspect of personality are call as behavioral theories or learning-conditioning theories. These approaches were a radical shift away from Freudian philosophy. One of the major tenets of this concentration of personality psychology is a strong emphasis on scientific thinking and experimentation. This school of thought was developed by B. F. Skinner who increase forth a model which emphasized the mutual interaction of the person or "the organism" with its environment. Skinner believed children do bad things because the behavior obtains attention that serves as a reinforcer. For example: a child cries because the child's crying in the past has led to attention. These are the response, and consequences. The response is the child crying, and the attention that child gets is the reinforcing consequence. According to this theory, people's behavior is formed by processes such as operant conditioning. Skinner put forward a "three term contingency model" which helped promote analysis of behavior based on the "Stimulus - Response - Consequence Model" in which the critical impeach is: "Under which circumstances or antecedent 'stimuli' does the organism engage in a particular behavior or 'response', which in reshape produces a particular 'consequence'?"
Richard Herrnstein extended this theory by accounting for attitudes and traits. An attitude develops as the response strength the tendency toin the presences of a multiple of stimuli become stable. Rather than describing conditionable traits in non-behavioral language, response strength in a given situation accounts for the environmental portion. Herrstein also saw traits as having a large genetic or biological component, as do most innovative behaviorists.
Ivan Pavlov is another notable influence. He is living known for his classical conditioning experiments involving dogs, which led him to discover the foundation of behaviorism.
In cognitive theory, behavior is explained as guided by cognitions e.g. expectations about the world, especially those about other people. Cognitive theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes, such as thinking and judging.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his "Bobo doll experiment". During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting complete to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modeling.
Early examples of approaches to cognitive style are listed by Baron 1982. These include Witkin's 1965 work on field dependency, Gardner's 1953 discovering people had consistent preference for the number of categories they used to categorise heterogeneous objects, and Block and Petersen's 1955 work on confidence in line discrimination judgments. Baron relates early development of cognitive approaches of personality to ego psychology. More central to this field have been:
Various scales have been developed to assess both attributional style and locus of control. Locus of a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. scales include those used by Rotter and later by Duttweiler, the Nowicki and Strickland 1973 Locus of predominance Scale for Children and various locus of control scales specifically in the health domain, most famously that of Kenneth Wallston and his colleagues, The Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale. Attributional style has been assessed by the Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Attributions Questionnaire, the Real Events Attributional Style Questionnaire and the Attributional Style Assessment Test.
Recognition that the tendency to believe that tough work and persistence often results in attainment of life and academic goals has influenced formal educational and counseling efforts with students of various ages and in various managers since the 1970s research about achievement. Counseling aimed toward encouraging individuals to design ambitious goals and work toward them, with recognition that there are external factors that may impact, often results in the incorporation of a more positive achievement style by students and employees, whatever the setting, to include higher education, workplace, or justice programming.
Walter Mischel 1999 has also defended a cognitive approach to personality. His work refers to "Cognitive Affective Units", and considers factors such as encoding of stimuli, affect, goal-setting, and self-regulatory beliefs. The term "Cognitive Affective Units" shows how his approach considers affect as alive as cognition.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory CEST is another cognitive personality theory. Developed by Seymour Epstein, CEST argues that humans operate by way of two freelancer information processing systems: experiential system and rational system. The experiential system is fast and emotion-driven. The rational system is late and logic-driven. These two systems interact to determine our goals, thoughts, and behavior.
Personal construct psychology PCP is a theory of personality developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. Kelly's fundamental view of personality was that people are like naive scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organized systems of construction, which they usage to anticipate events. But because people are naive scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation. A system of construction that chronically fails to characterize and/or predict events, and is not appropriately revised to comprehend and predict one's changing social world, is considered to underlie psychopathology or mental illness.
From the theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapy approach and also a technique called The Repertory Grid Interview that helped his patients to uncover their own "constructs" with minimal intervention or interpretation by the therapist. The repertory grid was later adapted for various uses within organizations, including decision-making and interpretation of other people's world-views.
Humanistic psychology emphasizes that people have free will and that this plays an active role in determining how they behave. Accordingly, humanistic psychology focuses on subjective experiences of persons as opposed to forced, definitive factors that determine behavior. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were proponents of this view, which is based on the "phenomenal field" theory of Combs and Snygg 1949. Rogers and Maslow were among a group of psychologists that worked together for a decade to produce the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. This journal was primarily focused on viewing individuals as a whole, rather than focusing solely on separate traits and processes within the individual.
Robert W. White wrote the book The Abnormal Personality that became a specification text on abnormal psychology. He also investigated the human need to strive for positive goals like competence and influence, to counterbalance the emphasis of Freud on the pathological elements of personality development.
Maslow spent much of his time studying what he called "self-actualizing persons", those who are "fulfilling themselves and doing the best they are capable of doing". Maslow believes all who are interested in groth come on towards self-actualizing growth, happiness, satisfaction views. Many of these peoplea trend in dimensions of their personalities. Characteristics of self-actualizers according to Maslow include the four key dimensions: