Introduction to Personality

 

A photograph shows two children running outside through an open doorway.

What makes two individuals have different personalities? (credit: modification of work by Nicolas Alejandro)

Consider two brothers. One of these siblings will grow up to become a world leader. The other will struggle with alcohol and drugs, eventually spending time in jail. What about each of their personalities propelled them to take the path they did?

Three months before William Jefferson Blythe III was born, his father died in a car accident. He was raised by his mother, Virginia Dell, and grandparents, in Hope, Arkansas. When he turned 4, his mother married Roger Clinton, Jr., an alcoholic who was physically abusive to William’s mother. Six years later, Virginia gave birth to another son, Roger. William, who later took the last name Clinton from his stepfather, became the 42nd president of the United States. While Bill Clinton was making his political ascendance, his half-brother, Roger Clinton, was arrested numerous times for drug charges, including possession, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and driving under the influence, serving time in jail. Two brothers, raised by the same people, took radically different paths in their lives. Why did they make the choices they did? What internal forces shaped their decisions? Personality psychology can help us answer these questions and more.

References

Adler, A. (1930). Individual psychology. In C. Murchison (Ed.), Psychologies of 1930 (pp. 395–405). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.

Adler, A. (1937). A school girl’s exaggeration of her own importance. International Journal of Individual Psychology, 3(1), 3–12.

Adler, A. (1956). The individual psychology of Alfred Adler: A systematic presentation in selections from his writings. (C. H. Ansbacher & R. Ansbacher, Eds.). New York: Harper.

Adler, A. (1961). The practice and theory of individual psychology. In T. Shipley (Ed.), Classics in psychology (pp. 687–714). New York: Philosophical Library

Adler, A. (1964). Superiority and social interest. New York: Norton.

Akomolafe, M. J. (2013). Personality characteristics as predictors of academic performance of secondary school students. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 4(2), 657–664.

Allport, G. W. & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Albany, NY: Psychological Review Company.

Aronow, E., Weiss, K. A., & Rezinkoff, M. (2001). A practical guide to the Thematic Apperception Test. Philadelphia: Brunner Routledge.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 191–215.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A. (1995). Self-efficacy in changing societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Benassi, V. A., Sweeney, P. D., & Dufour, C. L. (1988). Is there a relation between locus of control orientation and depression? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97(3), 357.

Ben-Porath, Y., & Tellegen, A. (2008). Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-RF. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Benet-Martínez, V. & Karakitapoglu-Aygun, Z. (2003). The interplay of cultural values and personality in predicting life-satisfaction: Comparing Asian- and European-Americans. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 34, 38–61.

Benet-Martínez, V., & Oishi, S. (2008). Culture and personality. In O. P. John, R.W. Robins, L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research. New York: Guildford Press.

Beutler, L. E., Nussbaum, P. D., & Meredith, K. E. (1988). Changing personality patterns of police officers. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 19(5), 503–507.

Bouchard, T., Jr. (1994). Genes, environment, and personality. Science, 264, 1700–1701.

Bouchard, T., Jr., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Science, 250, 223–228.

Burger, J. (2008). Personality (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thompson Higher Education.

Carter, J. E., and Heath, B. H. (1990). Somatotyping: Development and applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Carter, S., Champagne, F., Coates, S., Nercessian, E., Pfaff, D., Schecter, D., & Stern, N. B. (2008). Development of temperament symposium. Philoctetes Center, New York.

Cattell, R. B. (1946). The description and measurement of personality. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.

Cattell, R. B. (1957). Personality and motivation structure and measurement. New York: World Book.

Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Furnham, A. (2008). Personality, intelligence, and approaches to learning as predictors of academic performance. Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 1596–1603.

Cheung, F. M., van de Vijver, F. J. R., & Leong, F. T. L. (2011). Toward a new approach to the study of personality in culture. American Psychologist, 66(7), 593–603.

Clark, A. L., & Watson, D. (2008). Temperament: An organizing paradigm for trait psychology. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Previn (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 265–286). New York: Guilford Press.

Conrad, N. & Party, M.W. (2012). Conscientiousness and academic performance: A Mediational Analysis. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 6 (1), 1–14.

Cortés, J., & Gatti, F. (1972). Delinquency and crime: A biopsychological approach. New York: Seminar Press.

Costantino, G. (1982). TEMAS: A new technique for personality research assessment of Hispanic children. Hispanic Research Center, Fordham University Research Bulletin, 5, 3–7.

Cramer, P. (2004). Storytelling, narrative, and the Thematic Apperception Test. New York: Guilford Press.

Damon, S. (1955). Physique and success in military flying. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 13(2), 217–252.

Donnellan, M. B., & Lucas, R. E. (2008). Age differences in the big five across the life span: Evidence from two national samples. Psychology and Aging, 23(3), 558–566.

Duzant, R. (2005). Differences of emotional tone and story length of African American respondents when administered the Contemporized Themes Concerning Blacks test versus the Thematic Apperception Test. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Chicago, IL.

Exner, J. E. (2002). The Rorschach: Basic foundations and principles of interpretation (Vol. 1). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Eysenck, H. J. (1990). An improvement on personality inventory. Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences, 22(18), 20.

Eysenck, H. J. (1992). Four ways five factors are not basic. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 667–673.

Eysenck, H. J. (2009). The biological basis of personality (3rd ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Eysenck, H. J. (1970). The structure of human personality. London, UK: Methuen.

Eysenck, S. B. G., & Eysenck, H. J. (1963). The validity of questionnaire and rating assessments of extroversion and neuroticism, and their factorial stability. British Journal of Psychology, 54, 51–62.

Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, M. W. (1985). Personality and individual differences: A natural science approach. New York: Plenum Press.

Eysenck, S. B. G., Eysenck, H. J., & Barrett, P. (1985). A revised version of the psychoticism scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 6(1), 21–29.

Fazeli, S. H. (2012). The exploring nature of the assessment instrument of five factors of personality traits in the current studies of personality. Asian Social Science, 8(2), 264–275.

Fancher, R. W. (1979). Pioneers of psychology. New York: Norton.

Freud, S. (1920). Resistance and suppression. A general introduction to psychoanalysis (pp. 248–261). New York: Horace Liveright.

Freud, S. (1923/1949). The ego and the id. London: Hogarth.

Freud, S. (1931/1968). Female sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. &Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21). London: Hogarth Press.

Funder, D. C. (2001). Personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 197–221.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Holaday, D., Smith, D. A., & Sherry, Alissa. (2010). Sentence completion tests: A review of the literature and results of a survey of members of the society for personality assessment. Journal of Personality Assessment, 74(3), 371–383.

Hothersall, D. (1995). History of psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hoy, M. (1997). Contemporizing of the Themes Concerning Blacks test (C-TCB). Alameda, CA: California School of Professional Psychology.

Hoy-Watkins, M., & Jenkins-Moore, V. (2008). The Contemporized-Themes Concerning Blacks Test (C-TCB). In S. R. Jenkins (Ed.), A Handbook of Clinical Scoring Systems for Thematic Apperceptive Techniques (pp. 659–698). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Genovese, J. E. C. (2008). Physique correlates with reproductive success in an archival sample of delinquent youth. Evolutionary Psychology, 6(3), 369-385.

Jang, K. L., Livesley, W. J., & Vernon, P. A. (1996). Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facts: A twin study. Journal of Personality, 64(3), 577–591.

Jang, K. L., Livesley, W. J., Ando, J., Yamagata, S., Suzuki, A., Angleitner, A., et al. (2006). Behavioral genetics of the higher-order factors of the Big Five. Personality and Individual Differences, 41, 261–272.

Judge, T. A., Livingston, B. A., & Hurst, C. (2012). Do nice guys-and gals- really finish last? The joint effects of sex and agreeableness on income. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(2), 390–407.

Jung, C. G. (1923). Psychological types. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Jung, C. G. (1928). Contributions to analytical psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. New York: Doubleday and Company.

Jung, C., & Kerenyi, C. (1963). Science of mythology. In R. F. C. Hull (Ed. & Trans.), Essays on the myth of the divine child and the mysteries of Eleusis. New York: Harper & Row.

Launer, J. (2005). Anna O. and the ‘talking cure.’ QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, 98(6), 465–466.

Lecci, L. B. & Magnavita, J. J. (2013). Personality theories: A scientific approach. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education.

Lefcourt, H. M. (1982). Locus of control: Current trends in theory and research (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Lecci, L. B. & Magnavita, J. J. (2013). Personality theories: A scientific approach. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education.

Likert, R. (1932). A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 140, 1–55.

Lilienfeld, S. O., Wood, J. M., & Garb, H. N. (2000). The scientific status of projective techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 1(2), 27–66.

Maltby, J., Day, L., & Macaskill, A. (2007). Personality, individual differences and intelligence (3rd ed.). UK: Pearson.

Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper & Row.

Maslow, A. H. (1950). Self-actualizing people: A study of psychological health. In W. Wolff (Ed.), Personality Symposia: Symposium 1 on Values (pp. 11–34). New York: Grune & Stratton.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1997). Personality trait structure as a human universal. American Psychologist, 52(5), 509–516.

McCrae, R. R., et al. (2005). Universal features of personality traits from the observer’s perspective: Data from 50 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 547–561.

Mischel, W. (1993). Introduction to personality (5th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Mischel, W., Ayduk, O., Berman, M. G., Casey, B. J., Gotlib, I. H., Jonides, J., et al. (2010). ‘Willpower’ over the life span: Decomposing self-regulation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6(2), 252–256.

Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Raskoff Zeiss, A. (1972). Cognitive and attentional mechanisms of delay in gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21(2), 204–218.

Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102(2), 246–268.

Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989, May 26). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244, 933-938.

Motley, M. T. (2002). Theory of slips. In E. Erwin (Ed.), The Freud encyclopedia: Theory, therapy, and culture (pp. 530–534). New York: Routledge.

Noftle, E. E., & Robins, R. W. (2007). Personality predictors of academic outcomes: Big Five correlates of GPA and SAT scores. Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 93, 116–130.

Noga, A. (2007). Passions and tempers: A history of the humors. New York: Harper Collins.

Oyserman, D., Coon, H., & Kemmelmier, M. (2002). Rethinking individualism and collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 3–72.

Parnell, R.W. (1958). Behavior and physique: An introduction to practical somatometry. London, UK: Edward Arnold Publishers LTD.

Peterson, J., Liivamagi, J., & Koskel, S. (2006). Associations between temperament types and body build in 17–22 year-old Estonian female students. Papers on Anthropology, 25, 142–149.

Piotrowski, Z. A. (1987). Perceptanalysis: The Rorschach method fundamentally reworked, expanded and systematized. London, UK: Routledge.

Rafter, N. (2007). Somatotyping, antimodernism, and the production of criminological knowledge. Criminology, 45, 805–833.

Rentfrow, P. J., Gosling, S. D., Jokela, M., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Potter, J. (2013, October 14). Divided we stand: Three psychological regions of the United States and their political, economic, social, and health correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 996–1012.

Roesler, C. (2012). Are archetypes transmitted more by culture than biology? Questions arising from conceptualizations of the archetype. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57(2), 223–246.

Rogers, C. (1980). A way of being. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Rosenbaum, R. (1995, January 15). The great Ivy League posture photo scandal. The New York Times, pp. A26.

Rothbart, M. K. (2011). Becoming who we are: Temperament and personality in development. New York: Guilford Press.

Rothbart, M. K., Ahadi, S. A., & Evans, D. E. (2000). Temperament and personality: Origins and outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 122–135.

Rothbart, M. K., & Derryberry, D. (1981). Development of individual differences in temperament. In M. E. Lamb & A. L. Brown (Eds.), Advances in developmental psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 37–86). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Rothbart, M. K., Sheese, B. E., Rueda, M. R., & Posner, M. I. (2011). Developing mechanisms of self-regulation in early life. Emotion Review, 3(2), 207–213.

Rotter, J. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcements. Psychological Monographs, 80, 609.

Rotter, J. B., & Rafferty, J. E. (1950). Manual the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank College Form. New York: The Psychological Corporation.

Sanford, R. N., Adkins, M. M., Miller, R. B., & Cobb, E. A. (1943). Physique, personality, and scholarship: A cooperative study of school children. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 8(1), 705.

Schmitt, D. P., Allik, J., McCrae, R. R., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2007). The geographic distribution of Big Five personality traits: Patterns and profiles of human self-description across 56 nations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38, 173–212.

Scott, J. (2005). Electra after Freud: Myth and culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Segal, N. L. (2012). Born together-reared apart: The landmark Minnesota Twin Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sheldon, W. H. (1940). The varieties of human physique: An introduction to constitutional psychology. New York: Harper and Row.

Sheldon, W. H. (1942). The varieties of temperament: A psychology of constitutional differences. New York: Harper and Row.

Sheldon, W.H. (1949). Varieties of delinquent youth: An introduction to constitutional psychology. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: The Free Press.

Sotirova-Kohli, M., Opwis, K., Roesler, C., Smith, S. M., Rosen, D. H., Vaid, J., & Djnov, V. (2013). Symbol/meaning paired-associate recall: An “archetypal memory” advantage? Behavioral Sciences, 3, 541–561. Retrieved from http://www2.cnr.edu/home/araia/Myth_%20Body.pdf

Stelmack, R. M., & Stalikas, A. (1991). Galen and the humour theory of temperament. Personal Individual Difference, 12(3), 255–263.

Terracciano A., McCrae R. R., Brant L. J., Costa P. T., Jr. (2005). Hierarchical linear modeling analyses of the NEO-PI-R scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Psychology and Aging, 20, 493–506.

Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and development. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Tok, S. (2011). The big five personality traits and risky sport participation. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 39(8), 1105–1111.

Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Triandis, H. C., & Suh, E. M. (2002). Cultural influences on personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 133–160.

Wagerman, S. A., & Funder, D. C. (2007). Acquaintance reports of personality and academic achievement: A case for conscientiousness. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 221–229.

Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1984). Negative affectivity: The disposition to experience aversive emotional states. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 465–490.

Weiner, I. B. (2003). Principles of Rorschach interpretation. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Whyte, C. (1980). An integrated counseling and learning center. In K. V. Lauridsen (Ed.), Examining the scope of learning centers (pp. 33–43). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Whyte, C. (1978). Effective counseling methods for high-risk college freshmen. Measurement and Evaluation in Guidance, 6(4), 198–200.

Whyte, C. B. (1977). High-risk college freshman and locus of control. The Humanist Educator, 16(1), 2–5.

Williams, R. L. (1972). Themes Concerning Blacks: Manual. St. Louis, MO: Williams.

Wundt, W. (1874/1886). Elements du psychologie, physiologique (2ieme tome). [Elements of physiological psychology, Vol. 2]. (E. Rouvier, Trans.). Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Bailliere et Cie.

Yang, K. S. (2006). Indigenous personality research: The Chinese case. In U. Kim, K.-S. Yang, & K.-K. Hwang (Eds.), Indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context (pp. 285–314). New York: Springer.

Young-Eisendrath, P. (1995). Myth and body: Pandora’s legacy in a post-modern world. Retrieved from http://www2.cnr.edu/home/araia/Myth_%20Body.pdf