Type and trait theories Personality type refers to the psychological classification of people into different classes. Personality types are distinguished from
personality traits, which vary in degree. For example, in type theory, there are two types of people: introverts and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extroversion lie on a continuous dimension, with many people falling in the middle. Personality is complex; a typical theory of personality contains several propositions or sub-theories, often evolving as more psychologists explore it. The most widely accepted empirical model of durable, universal personality descriptors is the system of
Big Five personality traits:
conscientiousness,
agreeableness,
neuroticism,
openness to experience, and
extraversion-introversion. It is based on
cluster analysis of verbal descriptions in self-reporting surveys. These traits demonstrate considerable
genetic heritability. Perhaps the most ancient attempt at personality psychology is the
personality typology outlined by the Indian
Buddhist Abhidharma schools. This typology primarily focuses on negative personal traits (greed, hatred, and delusion) and the corresponding
meditation practices used to counter them. An influential European tradition 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 model was later used by
David Keirsey with a different understanding from Jung, Briggs and Myers. In the former Soviet Union,
Lithuanian Aušra Augustinavičiūtė independently developed a model of personality type based on Jung's
socionics. Later, many other tests were developed based on this model, e.g., Golden, PTI-Pro, and JTI. Theories could also be considered an "approach" to personality or psychology and are generally referred to as models. The model is an older and more theoretical approach to personality, accepting extroversion and introversion as basic psychological orientations in connection with two pairs of psychological functions: •
Perceiving functions: sensing and intuition (trust in concrete, sensory-oriented facts vs. trust in abstract concepts and imagined possibilities) •
Judging functions: thinking and feeling (basing decisions primarily on logic vs. deciding based on emotion). Briggs and Myers also added another personality dimension to their type indicator to measure whether a person prefers to use 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). —> These four are considered basic, with the other two factors in each case (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), 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 measure 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-risk. There was also a Type AB mixed profile. Health Psychology, a field of study, has been influenced by the Type A and Type B personality theories, which reveal how personality traits can impact cardiovascular health. Type A individuals, known for their competitiveness and urgency, may increase the risk of conditions like high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. Day and Jreige (2002) investigate the Type A behavior pattern as a mediator in the relationship between job stressors and psychosocial outcomes. Their study, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, demonstrates that individuals exhibiting Type A characteristics are more susceptible to adverse psychosocial effects, such as increased stress and lower job satisfaction, when exposed to workplace stressors. This research highlights the importance of considering personality traits in managing occupational health.
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 is a model of human personality that is principally used as a typology of nine interconnected personality types. It has been criticized as being subject to interpretation, making it difficult to test or validate scientifically.
John L. Holland's
RIASEC vocational model, commonly referred to as the
Holland Codes, focuses specifically on choice of occupation. It proposes that six personality types influence people's career choices. In this circumplex model, the six types are arranged in a hexagon, with adjacent types more closely related than those farther apart. The model is widely used in vocational counseling.
Psychoanalytical theories 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 proposed that psychic energy 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 superego. The
id acts according to the
pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification of its needs regardless of external environment; the
ego then must emerge 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) instills moral judgment and societal rules in the ego, compelling the ego to meet the demands of the id not only realistically but also morally. The superego is the last function of the personality to develop, and is the embodiment of parental/social ideals established 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.
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 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, emotionally "sink into," and identify with the competence of admired figures such as parents or older siblings. They also need to have their self-worth mirrored by these people. Such experiences allow them to learn self-soothing and other skills necessary for developing a healthy sense of self. Another important figure in the world of personality theory is
Karen Horney. She is credited with developing "
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 about 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 give us varying personality types and characteristics. She also places a high premium on concepts such as the Overvaluation of Love and romantic partners.
Behaviorist theories Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behavior. The approaches used to evaluate the behavioral aspect of personality are known 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 put forth a model that emphasized the mutual interaction between the person, or "the organism," and its environment. Skinner believed that children do bad things because the behavior obtains attention, which 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 the 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 question is: "Under which circumstances or antecedent 'stimuli' does the organism engage in a particular behavior or 'response', which in turn produces a particular 'consequence'?"
Richard Herrnstein extended this theory by accounting for attitudes and traits. An attitude develops when the response strength (the tendency to respond) to a set of stimuli becomes stable. Rather than describing conditionable traits in non-behavioral language, response strength in a given situation accounts for the environmental portion. Herrnstein also saw traits as having a large genetic or biological component, as do most modern behaviorists. These include Witkin's (1965) work on field dependency, Gardner's (1953) discovery that people had consistent preferences for the number of categories they used to categorize heterogeneous objects, and Block and Petersen's (1955) work on confidence in line discrimination judgments. Baron relates the early development of cognitive approaches of personality to
ego psychology. More central to this field have been: •
Attributional style theory dealing with different ways in which people explain events in their lives. This approach builds upon locus of control but extends it by stating that we also need to consider whether people attribute outcomes to stable or variable causes, and to global or specific causes. Various scales have been developed to assess both attributional style and
locus of control. Locus of control scales include those used by Rotter and later by Duttweiler, the Nowicki and Strickland (1973) Locus of Control 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. • Achievement style theory focuses upon the identification of an individual's Locus of Control tendency, such as by Rotter's evaluations, and was found by Cassandra Bolyard Whyte to provide valuable information for improving the academic performance of students. Individuals with internal control tendencies are likely to persist to better academic performance levels, presenting an achievement personality, according to
Cassandra B. Whyte. 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 stimulus encoding, affect, goal-setting, and self-regulatory beliefs. The term "Cognitive Affective Units" indicates that his approach considers both affect and cognition.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) is another cognitive personality theory. Developed by Seymour Epstein, CEST posits that humans operate through two independent information-processing systems: the experiential and the rational systems. The experiential system is fast and emotion-driven. The rational system is slow 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 use 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 (mental disorders.) From the theory, Kelly derived a
psychotherapy approach and a technique called
The Repertory Grid Interview, which helped his patients 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 theories Humanistic psychology emphasizes that people have
free will and that this plays an active role in shaping their behavior. Accordingly, humanistic psychology focuses on the subjective experiences of persons rather than on externally imposed, 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 who worked together for a decade to produce the
Journal of Humanistic Psychology. This journal primarily focused on viewing individuals as a whole rather than on separate traits and processes within the individual.
Robert W. White wrote the book
The Abnormal Personality that became a standard text on
abnormal psychology. He also investigated the human need to strive for positive goals, such as competence and influence, to counterbalance Freud's emphasis 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 growth move towards self-actualizing (growth, happiness, satisfaction) views. Many of these people demonstrate trends in the dimensions of their personalities. Characteristics of self-actualizers according to Maslow include the four key dimensions: •
Awareness – maintaining constant enjoyment and awe of life. These individuals often experienced a "peak experience". He defined a peak experience as an "intensification of any experience to the degree there is a loss or transcendence of self". A peak experience is one in which an individual perceives an expansion of the self and detects unity and meaning in life. Intense concentration on an activity one is involved in, such as running a marathon, may invoke a peak experience. •
Reality and problem centered – tending to be concerned with "problems" in surroundings. •
Acceptance/Spontaneity – accepting surroundings and what cannot be changed. •
Unhostile sense of humor/democratic – do not take kindly to joking about others, which can be viewed as offensive. They have friends from all backgrounds and religions, and they hold very close friendships. Maslow and Rogers emphasized a view of the person as an active, creative, experiencing human being who lives in the present and subjectively responds to current perceptions, relationships, and encounters. Some of the earliest thinking about possible biological bases of personality grew out of the case of
Phineas Gage. In an 1848 accident, a large iron rod was driven through Gage's head, and his personality apparently changed as a result, although descriptions of these psychological changes are usually exaggerated. In general, patients with brain damage have been difficult to find and study. In the 1990s, researchers began to use
electroencephalography (EEG),
positron emission tomography (PET), and, more recently,
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is now the most widely used imaging technique to help localize personality traits in the brain. This line of research has led to the developing field of
personality neuroscience, which uses neuroscientific methods to study the neural underpinnings of personality traits.
Genetic basis of personality Ever since the
Human Genome Project enabled a much deeper understanding of genetics, there has been ongoing controversy over heritability, personality traits, and the relative influence of environment vs. genetics on personality. The human genome is known to play a role in personality development. Previously, genetic personality studies focused on specific genes correlating to specific personality traits. Today's view of the gene-personality relationship focuses primarily on the activation and expression of genes related to personality and forms part of what is referred to as
behavioral genetics. Genes provide numerous options for which cells are expressed; however, the environment determines which are activated. Many studies have noted this relationship in varying ways in which our bodies can develop, but the interaction between genes and the shaping of our minds and personality is also relevant to this biological relationship.
DNA-Environmental interactions are important in the development of personality because this relationship determines what part of the DNA code is actually made into proteins that will become part of an individual. While the genome offers different choices, in the end, the environment is the ultimate determinant of what is activated. Small changes in DNA among individuals lead to the uniqueness of each person, as well as differences in appearance, abilities, brain function, and other factors that culminate in the development of a cohesive personality.
Cattell and
Eysenck have proposed that genetics has a powerful influence on personality. A large part of the evidence collected linking genetics and the environment to personality has come from
twin studies. This "twin method" compares levels of personality similarity using genetically identical
twins. One of the first of these twin studies measured 800 twin pairs, examined numerous personality traits, and found that identical twins are most similar in their general abilities. Personality similarities were found to be less related for self-concepts, goals, and interests. Twin studies have also been important in the development of the
five-factor personality model: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Neuroticism and extraversion are the two most widely studied traits. Individuals scoring high in trait extraversion more often display characteristics such as impulsiveness, sociability, and activeness. Individuals scoring high in trait neuroticism are more likely to be moody, anxious, or irritable. Identical twins, however, have higher correlations in personality traits than fraternal twins.
Evolutionary theory Charles Darwin is the founder of the
theory of the evolution of the species. The evolutionary approach to personality psychology is based on this theory. This theory examines how individual personality differences are based on
natural selection. Through natural selection, organisms change over time by adapting and being selected. Traits develop, and certain genes are expressed based on an organism's environment and on how these traits aid its survival and reproduction.
Polymorphisms, such as sex and blood type, are forms of diversity that evolve to benefit a species as a whole. The theory of evolution has wide-ranging implications for personality psychology. Personality viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology places a great deal of emphasis on specific traits that are most likely to aid in survival and reproduction, such as conscientiousness, sociability, emotional stability, and dominance. The social aspects of personality can be seen through an evolutionary perspective. Specific character traits develop and are selected for because they play important, complex roles in the social hierarchy of organisms. Such characteristics of this social hierarchy include the sharing of important resources, family and mating interactions, and the harm or help organisms can bestow upon one another. In
Specialised Minds (2022), Hunt argues that temperament or personality traits like neuroticism, extraversion, or empathy may in some cases be risk factors for diagnosable conditions, depending on environmental context and degree of variation.
Drive theories In the 1930s,
John Dollard and
Neal Elgar Miller met at
Yale University, and began an attempt to integrate drives (see
Drive theory) into a theory of personality, basing themselves on the work of
Clark Hull. They began with the premise that personality could be equated with an individual's habitual responses – their habits. From there, they determined that these habitual responses were built on secondary, or acquired drives. Secondary drives are internal needs that direct an individual's behavior and are learned. Acquired drives are learned, by and large, in the manner described by
classical conditioning. When we are in a certain environment and experience a strong response to a stimulus, we internalize cues from the said environment. Indeed, many primary drives are actively repressed by society (such as the sexual drive). Dollard and Miller believed that the acquisition of secondary drives was essential to childhood development. As children develop, they learn not to act on their primary drives, such as hunger, but acquire secondary drives through reinforcement. Friedman and Schustack describe an example of such developmental changes, stating that if an infant engaging in an active orientation towards others brings about the fulfillment of primary drives, such as being fed or having their diaper changed, they will develop a secondary drive to pursue similar interactions with others – perhaps leading to an individual being more gregarious. Dollard and Miller's belief in the importance of acquired drives led them to reconceive
Sigmund Freud's theory of psychosexual development. They found themselves to agree with the timing Freud used but believed that these periods corresponded to the successful learning of certain secondary drives. Dollard and Miller gave many examples of how secondary drives impact our habitual responses – and, by extension, our personalities, including anger, social conformity, imitativeness, and anxiety, to name a few. In the case of anxiety, Dollard and Miller note that people who generalize the situation in which they experience the anxiety drive will experience anxiety far more than they should. These people are often anxious all the time, and anxiety becomes part of their personality. This example shows how drive theory can have ties with other theories of personality – many of them look at the trait of neuroticism or emotional stability in people, which is strongly linked to anxiety. ==Personality tests==