PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY

The word personality is well known to each and everyone in this world. Hardly there may be few who would know what personality denotes and they also would be in a position to explain others what the word personality means. Most will describe what their personality is and try to analyze their friend’s personality, but most of the people don't know that personality is the most researched aspect of psychology. There are many theories based on personality psychology, before going deep into it, we must first understand what personality means?

The word "personality" originates from the Latin root persona. Persona means mask. Ancient Latin meaning of persona is typify the character. Personality can be defined as a set of characteristics possessed by a person that unambiguously molds his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. Gordon Willard Allport, an American psychologist was the first person to focus on the study of the personality psychology.

Allport discussed two major modes to study personality; they are nomothetic psychology and the idiographic psychology.

• Nomothetic psychology deals with most common scientific and analytic ways like as the principle of self-actualization, or the trait of extraversion to deal with different people.
• Idiographic psychology deals with understanding uniqueness of the individual.

There are number of personality theories, were some explain how personality develops while others are concerned with individual differences in personality. We will discuss one in detail.

Trait Theory:

Gordon Allport discusses different kinds of traits, which he also called dispositions.

• Central traits are basic to an individual's personality. This trait is the general characteristic found in some degree in every person.
• Secondary traits are more peripheral.
• Common traits are those recognized within a culture and thus may vary from culture to culture.
• Cardinal traits are those by which an individual may be strongly recognized.

Raymond Cattell's developed a two-tiered personality structure with sixteen "primary factors" (16 Personality Factors) and five "secondary factors."

Hans Eysenck proposed three traits—extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism that were sufficient to describe human personality.

Big Five Theory by Lewis Goldberg

 Goldberg proposed a five-dimension personality model,

• Openness to Experience: the tendency to be imaginative, independent, and interested in variety vs. practical, conforming, and interested in routine.
• Conscientiousness: the tendency to be organized, careful, and disciplined vs. disorganized, careless, and impulsive.
• Extraversion: the tendency to be sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate vs. retiring, somber, and reserved.
• Agreeableness: the tendency to be softhearted, trusting, and helpful vs. ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative.
• Neuroticism: the tendency to be calm, secure, and self-satisfied vs. anxious, insecure, and self-pitying.