Personality in Psychology

It isn't just a cliche: Personality is important.

It plays a role in how others treat us, and how we treat them as well. Our intelligence and relative privilege can take us far in life, but a great personality will drive home our overall success. People give a fair amount of thought to personality, even speaking in terms of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (MBTI) when describing themselves.

How do we develop our personality? And what happens when our personality seems slightly off?

• What is personality?
• What are key theories of personality in psychology?
• What are characteristics of personality?

A multitude of people, with one smiling person standing out, pixabay.com

A Definition of Personality in Psychology

What exactly is personality, and how does it develop?

Personality Theories in Psychology

The understanding of personality development in psychology has produced several influential theories.

Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality

Freud believed that our personality was influenced by our childhood sexual development and our unconscious desires, conflicts, and motivations. Our mind's effort to express our pleasure-seeking or aggressive urges in an acceptable and guilt-free way is the basis of our personality.

Freud believed that much of our mind was hidden from us. We can liken his notion of the mind to an iceberg. The part of an iceberg that is above water is the conscious mind. It is what we are fully aware of. Just below the water is the preconscious, a hazy area where we can retrieve thoughts or emotions that are outside of our consciousness. The remaining bulk of the iceberg, stretching deep into the water, is our unconscious mind where our desires, memories, and urges are stored.

Neo-Freudian Theories of Personality

Although Freud's ideas have left a lasting mark on the field of psychology, they were intensely criticized at the time and remain so today. Nonetheless, Freud went on to inspire many important thinkers. His work provided the foundation for the Psychodynamic, or Neo-Freudian, theories of personality, and the work of psychologists like Carl Jung, Karen Horney, and Alfred Adler.

The Neo-Freudians agreed with the importance of early childhood experiences and the unconscious, and they supported fundamental concepts like the id, ego, and superego. However, they did not place such great importance on sexual motivations, citing one's social relationships and environment as strong motivating elements. They also had a much richer concept of the unconscious, believing that it contained more than repressions and frustrations.

Humanistic Theory of Personality

Instead of focusing on managing our dark desires like Freud did, the humanistic theory of personality focused on self-fulfillment and our inner desire to cultivate ourselves and grow. According to this theory, we are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.

Self-actualization and self-transcendence are the goals of the humanist theory. We meet the needs of self-actualization by realizing our potential. We achieve self-transcendence when we actualize our purpose beyond the self.

Self-concept is an important feature in humanistic theory. If we define ourselves negatively, we often have a negative view of the world. If we have a positive self-concept, we often see the world positively as well.

Trait Theory of Personality

Trait theory is concerned with patterns of behavior and motivation called traits. It holds that people are made up of an individualized cocktail of traits, and our personality is influenced by where we fall on a scale of each trait. Two important traits of personality in early research of trait theory were introversion-extraversion, and stability-instability. However, today's researchers have established a broader basic set called "the big five factors": conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion. These factors hold up cross-culturally and are found in people of varying backgrounds.

Trait theory is good at predicting someone's average conscientiousness or agreeableness across situations, but can't predict exactly how someone will behave in a specific situation. For this reason, tests designed to measure personality traits draw some criticism.

Social-Cognitive Theory of Personality

This theory is focused on behavior and thoughts within a social context. It sees personality as partly a product of conditioning, and partly of our innate reaction to and interpretation of a given event or situation. Our past experiences, memories, and predictions work together to produce our behavior. Our cognition, or the way we interpret past experiences, is how we can predict behavior in similar situations in the future.

Personality Development in Psychology

Let's take a look at how each theory interprets the various factors that influence personality development in psychology.

Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development

Freud believed that personality was developed throughout the five stages of psychosexual development; the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. Each stage has an associated erogenous zone from which our motivation stems. Erogenous zones are areas of heightened arousal or stimulation in the body. If our needs go unmet, or excessively indulged, we may end up fixated in a particular stage of development.

1. The oral stage is centered on the mouth, which derives pleasure, sustenance, and information by sucking or biting.

2. The anal stage is centered on the bowels and is tasked with finding an acceptable means of addressing our biological needs.

3. The phallic stage is centered on the genitals, particularly the penis. In this stage, the male child must manage their desire for the mother and resentment for the father, resulting in the "Oedipus complex", and "castration anxiety", i.e., fear of punishment for these conflicting desires. Female children are said to experience penis envy in this stage.

4. The latency stage is centered on an inactivity of sexual feelings. Here children focus on developing knowledge, relationships, values, and skills outside of the family unit.

5. The genital stage is centered on the genitalia and a growing sexual interest. One develops a mature sexual interest and a growing concern for the welfare of others and for the community.

Humanistic Theory of Personality

Humanistic theory emphasized the importance of one's environment in the development of personality. In a hostile or antagonizing environment, there is little or no provision for our greater or even basic needs. Those who grow up in areas of conflict will remain concerned with meeting their basic needs of food, sleep, and sufficient shelter before they can move on to considering education, relationships, or a career. If we grow up in an abusive home, we might grow up to be fearful or pessimistic in our personal relationships. However, humanistic theorists have asserted that people are fundamentally good, and would naturally seek to self-actualize if their environment supported their needs.

Trait Theory of Personality

Trait theory proposes a potential biological element in personality development. While looking at the trait of extraversion versus introversion, researchers found that there is less activity in the frontal lobes of those with a more extroverted personality type. There was also evidence of greater levels of dopamine activity in the brains of extroverts. Research has found that those with a higher nervous system reactivity tended to be more anxious, shyer, and introverted, and those with larger frontal lobes tended to be more conscientious.

Trait theorists also believe that our personality continues to develop and stabilize into adulthood.

Social-Cognitive Theory of Personality

This theory emphasizes the importance of one's environment and previous experiences in the development of personality. Much of our behavior reflects the ways we have processed previous experiences, and the things we have learned through conditioning. This includes things we have learned by way of our family unit, community, and culture.

Social-cognitive theorists also suggest a gene-environment interaction, asserting that our genetically or biologically influenced traits can be reduced or amplified by the nature of our environment.