Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences.

Its areas of focus include:

Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes[1] Investigating individual differences - how people are unique Investigating human nature - how people are alike

"Personality" can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations.[2] The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre of the ancient Latin-speaking world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but rather was a convention employed to represent or typify that character. Personality may also refer to the patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors consistently exhibited by an individual over time that strongly influence our expectations, self-perceptions, values and attitudes, and predicts our reactions to people, problems and stress. In a phrase, personality is not just who we are, it is also how we are.[3] The pioneering American psychologist Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization, or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual. The study of personality has a broad and varied history in psychology, with an abundance of theoretical traditions. The major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist and social learning perspective. There is no consensus on the definition of "personality" in psychology. Most researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain perspective and often take an eclectic approach. Some research is empirically driven such as the "Big 5" personality model whereas other research emphasizes theory development such as psychodynamics. There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing. In psychological education and training, the study of the nature of personality and its psychological development is usually reviewed as a prerequisite to courses in abnormal or clinical psychology.

Philosophical assumptions
Many of the ideas developed by historical and modern personality theorists stem from the basic philosophical assumptions they hold. The study of personality is not a purely empirical discipline, as it brings in elements of art, science, and philosophy to draw general conclusions. The following five categories are some of the most fundamental philosophical assumptions on which theorists disagree: 1. Freedom versus Determinism

See also: Free will This is the debate over whether we have control over our own behavior and understand the motives behind it (Freedom), or if our behavior is causally determined by forces beyond our control (Determinism). Determinism has been considered unconscious, environmental, or biological by various theories. 2. Heredity versus Environment Main article: Nature versus nurture Personality is thought to be determined largely by genetics and biology, by environment and experiences, or by some combination resulting thereof. There is evidence for all possibilities. Contemporary research suggests that most personality traits are based on the joint influence of genetics and environment. One of the forerunners in this arena is C. Robert Cloninger with the Temperament and Character model. 3. Uniqueness versus Universality The argument over whether we are all unique individuals (Uniqueness) or if humans are basically similar in their nature (Universality). Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers were all advocates of the uniqueness of individuals. Behaviorists and cognitive theorists, in contrast, emphasized the importance of universal principles such as reinforcement and self-efficacy. 4. Active versus Reactive Do we primarily act through our own initiative (Active), or react to outside stimuli (Reactive)? Behavioral theorists typically believe that humans are passively shaped by their environments, whereas humanistic and cognitive theorists believe that humans are more active. 5. Optimistic versus Pessimistic Personality theories differ on whether people can change their personalities (Optimism), or if they are doomed to remain the same throughout their lives (Pessimism). Theories that place a great deal of emphasis on learning are often, but not always, more optimistic than theories that do not emphasize learning.

Personality theories
Critics of personality theory claim personality is "plastic" across time, places, moods, and situations. Changes in personality may indeed result from diet (or lack thereof), medical effects, significant events, or learning. However, most personality theories emphasize stability over fluctuation. The definition of personality that is most widely supported to date is attributed to the neurologist Paul Roe. He stated personality to be "an individual's predisposition to think certain patterns of thought, and therefore engage in certain patterns of behaviour".

Trait theories
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, personality traits are "enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts." Theorists generally assume a) traits are relatively stable over time, b) traits differ among individuals (for instance, some people are outgoing while others are reserved), and c) traits influence behavior. The most common models of traits incorporate three to five broad dimensions or factors. The least controversial dimension, observed as far back as the ancient Greeks, is simply extraversion and introversion (outgoing and physical-stimulation-oriented vs. quiet and physical-stimulation-averse).

Gordon Allport delineated different kinds of traits, which he also called dispositions. Central traits are basic to an individual's personality, while 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 research propagated a two-tiered personality structure with sixteen "primary factors" (16 Personality Factors) and five "secondary factors." Hans Eysenck believed just three traitsextraversion, neuroticism and psychoticismwere sufficient to describe human personality. Differences between Cattell and Eysenck emerged due to preferences for different forms of factor analysis, with Cattell using oblique, Eysenck orthogonal rotation to analyze the factors that emerged when personality questionnaires were subjected to statistical analysis. Today, the Big Five factors have the weight of a considerable amount of empirical research behind them, building on the work of Cattell and others. Lewis Goldberg proposed a five-dimension personality model, nicknamed the "Big Five": 1. Openness to Experience: the tendency to be imaginative, independent, and interested in variety vs. practical, conforming, and interested in routine. 2. Conscientiousness: the tendency to be organized, careful, and disciplined vs. disorganized, careless, and impulsive. 3. Extraversion: the tendency to be sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate vs. retiring, somber, and reserved. 4. Agreeableness: the tendency to be softhearted, trusting, and helpful vs. ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative. 5. Neuroticism: the tendency to be calm, secure, and self-satisfied vs. anxious, insecure, and self-pitying[4] The Big Five contain important dimensions of personality. However, some personality researchers argue that this list of major traits is not exhaustive. Some support has been found for two additional factors: excellent/ordinary and evil/decent. However, no definitive conclusions have been established.[4]

John L. Holland's RIASEC vocational model, commonly referred to as the Holland Codes, stipulates that six personality traits lead people to choose their 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.

Trait models have been criticized as being purely descriptive and offering little explanation of the underlying causes of personality. Eysenck's theory, however, does propose biological mechanisms as driving traits, and modern behavior genetics researchers have shown a clear genetic substrate to them.[vague] Another potential weakness of trait theories is that they may lead some people to accept oversimplified classificationsor worse, offer advicebased on a superficial analysis of personality. Finally, trait models often underestimate the effect of specific situations on people's behavior. It is important to remember that traits are statistical generalizations that do not always correspond to an individual's behavior.

Genetics of Personality
Personality genetics is a scientific field that examines the relationship between personality and genetics. Interest in the field is also driven by molecular genetic[5] and evolutionary ideas about personality.[6] Most studies on personality genetics rely on twin studies, which compare identical and fraternal twins. Twin studies consistently indicate moderate genetic influenceheritability estimates for most traits are about 40% and are not influenced by the environmental factors shared by twins.[7] The estimated heritabilities for the personality measures were much lower than those obtained in studies of identical and fraternal twins, which suggests that twin studies have exaggerated the degree of genetic variation in personality. Behavior genetics methods have similarities to natural experiments in which groups are found who have differences in genetic similarity or environmental similarity. The most popular method of determining human inheritance compares mono-zygotic and di-zygotic twins. Mono-zygotic twins develop from the same fertilized ovum and share the same set of inherited blueprints, often called identical twins. Another way to describe them is to say that their genotype is identical. Because mono zygotic twins are identical genetically, and observed differences between the twins can be noted to the environment. Diygotic twins develop from two separate ova. They are no more alike genetically than other brothers and sisters; on average, they share 50% of their genes. Any observed differences between fraternal twins are attributable to a combination of genetic and environmental causes. The twin method assumes that environmental influences are essentially the same for the two types of twins. If the identical twins are observed to be more similar than they fraternal twins, this difference in their correlations is ascribed to the greater genetic similarity of the identical twins. This means that the trait is influenced by genetic factors.[8] In order to examine the complications of developmental genetic influences on personality characteristics during the time of young adulthood, the study applied a longitudinal twin study. This classic twin design is a well-used method for determining the presence of genetic influences on individual differences. There were two different types of twins used in the study: monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) . Monozygotic twins share 100% of

their genes, whereas dizygotic share only 50%. If there is a strong genetic influence, monozygotic co-twins have a tendency to be more similar than dizygotic twins. A longitudinal design is a branch of this cross sectional twin design in that the twins are assessed twice in their life. A longitudinal study can find the presence of genetic influences at two different times and can determine the genetic influences that operate on a intra-individual change over a period of time. Longitudinal twin studies have been used repeatedly to investigate the behavioral and intellectual development in infants and young children. Most twin studies of adult personality characteristics have been cross-sectional. Cross-sectional studies do not show the full impact that developmental genetics has on adult personality. Even though cross-sectional methods have led to interesting findings,they are subject to associational effects and sample variation across different ages, and therefore cannot investigate intra-individual change. This study assessed a large sample of mono-zygotic and dizygotic twins when they were 20 and 25 years of age, using a shorter version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). This inventory was used to measure self-reported personality characteristics of particular behavior of genetics interest. Three primary questions were developed during this assessment:

Does the importance of genetic influences on personality characteristics change across the 5 year period? Are genetic influences important for the likeliness of co-twins to change in the same way over the period of time? Are there genetic influences on the tendency of the co-twins to change, without keeping in mind of the direction of the change

Age differences create more variables even within a family, so the best comparisons are found using twins. Twins typically share a family environment called a shared environment because they may share other aspects like teachers, school, and friends. A nonshared environment means completely different environment for both subjects. "Biologically related children who are separated after birth and raised in different families live in nonshared environments." Identical twins separated at birth and raised in different families constitute the best cases for heredity and personality because similarities between the two are due only to genetic influences.[9] Vulnerability was a factor in this study that was taken into consideration regarding the issue of genetic influences on vulnerability. The study concluded that the monozygotic co-twins would be more similar than dizygotic co-twins in change over time. To answer the questions as to whether change is genetically influenced through personality, the data concluded that there was no significant differences for either variances between the monozygotic and dizygotic co-twins.[10][11] Studies also investigate the link by genetic association studies where subjects are genotyped and their personality is quantified with a personality test. A link was found between the personality trait of neuroticism and a polymorphism called 5HTTLPR in the serotonin transporter gene, but this association was not replicated in larger studies.[12] Other candidate gene studies have provided weak evidence that some personality traits are related to AVPR1A ("ruthlessness gene") and MAOA ("Warrior gene").[13]

Genotypes, or the genetic make up of an organism, influence, but don't fully decide the physical traits of a person. Those are also influenced by the environment and behaviors they are surrounded by. For example, a person's height is affected by genetics, but if they are malnourished growth will be stunted no matter what their genetic coding says. Environment is also not completely responsible for an outcome in personality. An example from Psychobiology of Personality by Marvin Zuckerman is alcoholism: studies suggest that alcoholism is an inherited disease, but if a subject with a strong biological background of alcoholism in their family tree is never exposed to alcohol, they will not get that way regardless of their genome.[9] Another factor that can be addressed is biological versus adoptive relatives, a real-life experiment, adoption. This creates two groups: genetic relatives (biological parents and siblings) and environmental relatives (adoptive parents and siblings). So the question can be asked, are adopted children more like their biological parents, who share the same genes, or their adoptive parents, who share the same home environment? And consequently to sharing that home environment, do those adopted siblings come to share traits as well? After studying hundreds of adoptive families, the discovery was that people who grow up together, whether biologically related or not, do not much resemble one another in personality. In characteristics such as extroversion and agreeableness, adoptees are more like their biological parents than to their adoptive parents. However, the minute shared-environment effects does not mean that adoptive parenting is ineffective. Even though genetics may limit the family environment's influence on personality, parents do influence their children's attitudes, values, faith, manners and politics. In adoptive homes, child neglect and abuse and even divorce between the parents is uncommon. In accordance to that, it is not surprising, despite a somewhat greater risk of psychological disorder, most adopted children excel, especially when they're adopted as infants. In fact, seven out of eight have reported feeling a strong connection with one or even both of their adoptive parents.[14]

Type theories
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of people. Personality types are distinguished from personality traits, which come in different levels or degrees. For example, according to type theories, there are two types of people, introverts and extraverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle. The idea of psychological types originated in the theoretical work of Carl Jung[citation needed] and William Marston, whose work is reviewed in Dr. Travis Bradberry's Self-Awareness. Jung's seminal 1921 book on the subject is available in English as Psychological Types. 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 MyersBriggs Type Indicator.[15] This model was later used by David Keirsey with a different understanding from Jung, Briggs and Myers.[16] In the former Soviet Union, Lithuanian Aura Augustinaviit independently derived a model of personality type from Jung's called Socionics. The model is an older and more theoretical approach to personality, accepting extraversion 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. considering the effect on people).

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 (judgment) or to keep options open (perception).[15] This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people's behaviour in terms of opposite fixed characteristics. In these more traditional models, the sensing/intuition preference is considered the most 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 divided into the "NT" (scientist, engineer) or "NF" (author, humanitarian) temperament. An "S", by 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.[16] 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[15][16]), and thus may arise more from the need to categorize people for purposes of guiding their career choice.[17] 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. (It should be noted, however, that the MBTI is not designed to measure the "work self", but rather what Myers and McCaulley called the "shoes-off self."[18]) Some critics have argued for more or fewer dimensions while others have proposed entirely different theories (often assuming different definitions of "personality"). Type A and Type B personality theory: During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his coworkers 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.

Psychoanalytic theories
Psychoanalytic theories explain human behaviour in terms of the interaction of various components of personality. Sigmund Freud was the founder of this school. Freud drew on the physics of his day (thermodynamics) to coin the term psychodynamics. Based on the idea of converting heat into mechanical energy, he proposed psychic energy could be converted into behavior. Freud's 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 in order 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 established during childhood. According to Freud, personality is based on the dynamic interactions of these three components.[19] 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.[19] It is important to note that Freud's broad understanding of sexuality included all kinds of pleasurable feelings experienced by the human body. Freud proposed five psychosexual stages of personality development. He believed adult personality is dependent upon early childhood experiences and largely determined by age five.[19] Fixations that develop during the Infantile stage contribute to adult personality and behavior. One of Sigmund Freud's earlier associates, Alfred Adler, did agree with Freud early childhood experiences are important to development, and believed birth order may influence personality development. Adler believed the oldest was the one that set high goals to achieve to get the attention they lost back when the younger siblings were born. He believed the middle children were competitive and ambitious possibly so they are able to surpass the firstborn's achievements, but were not as much concerned about the glory. He also believed the last born would be more dependent and sociable but be the baby. He also believed that the 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 we develop our sense of self. Narcissism is the exaggerated sense of one self in which 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. These experiences allow them to thereby learn the self-soothing and other skills that are necessary for the development of a healthy sense of self. Another important figure in the world of personality theory was Karen Horney. She is credited with the development of the "real self" and the "ideal self". She believes all people have these two views of their own self. The "real self" is how you really are with regards to personality, values, and morals; but the "ideal self" is a construct you apply to yourself to conform to social and personal norms and goals. Ideal self would be "I can be successful, I am CEO material"; and real self would be "I just work in the mail room, with not much chance of high promotion".

Behaviorist theories
Behaviorists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behavior. It was a radical shift away from Freudian philosophy. This school of thought was developed by B. F. Skinner who put 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 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 as the response strength (the tendency to respond) in the presences of a group 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 modern behaviorists. Ivan Pavlov is another notable influence. He is well known for his classical conditioning experiments involving dogs. These physiological studies led him to discover the foundation of behaviorism as well as classical conditioning.

Social cognitive theories

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 ready 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:

Self-efficacy work, dealing with confidence people have in abilities to do tasks;[20] Locus of control theory[21] dealing with different beliefs people have about whether their worlds are controlled by themselves or external factors; Attributional style theory[22] dealing with different ways in which people explain events in their lives. This approach builds upon locus of control, but extends it by

stating we also need to consider whether people attribute to stable causes or variable causes, and to global causes 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.[23] Attributional style has been assessed by the Attributional Style Questionnaire,[24] the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire,[25] the Attributions Questionnaire,[26] the Real Events Attributional Style Questionnaire[27] and the Attributional Style Assessment Test.[28] 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 well as cognition. Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. 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" (defined later) 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. From his 1963 book, A Theory of Personality, pp. 103104:

Fundamental Postulate: A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which the person anticipates events. Construction Corollary: A person anticipates events by construing their replications. Individuality Corollary: People differ from one another in their construction of events. Organization Corollary: Each person characteristically evolves, for convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. Dichotomy Corollary: A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs. Choice Corollary: People choose for themselves the particular alternative in a dichotomized construct through which they anticipate the greater possibility for extension and definition of their system. Range Corollary: A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only. Experience Corollary: A person's construction system varies as the person successively construes the replication of events. Modulation Corollary: The variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose ranges of conveniences the variants lie. Fragmentation Corollary: A person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. Commonality Corollary: To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, the psychological processes of the two individuals are similar to each other.

Sociality Corollary: To the extent that one person construes another's construction processes, that person may play a role in a social process involving the other person.

Humanistic theories
In humanistic psychology it is emphasized people have free will and they play 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).[29] 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 a trend in dimensions of their personalities. Characteristics of self-actualizers according to Maslow include the four key dimensions: 1. 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 his or herself, and detects a unity and meaningfulness in life. Intense concentration on an activity one is involved in, such as running a marathon, may invoke a peak experience. 2. Reality and problem centered - they have tendency to be concerned with "problems" in their surroundings. 3. Acceptance/Spontaneity - they accept their surroundings and what cannot be changed. 4. Unhostile sense of humor/democratic - they do not like joking about others, which can be viewed as offensive. They have friends of all backgrounds and religions and 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. They disagree with the dark, pessimistic outlook of those in the Freudian psychoanalysis ranks, but rather view humanistic theories as positive and optimistic proposals which stress the tendency of the human personality toward growth and selfactualization. This progressing self will remain the center of its constantly changing world; a world that will help mold the self but not necessarily confine it. Rather, the self has opportunity for maturation based on its encounters with this world. This understanding attempts to reduce the acceptance of hopeless redundancy. Humanistic therapy typically relies on the client for information of the past and its effect on the present, therefore the client dictates the type of guidance the therapist may initiate. This allows for an individualized approach to therapy. Rogers found patients differ in how they respond to other people. Rogers tried to model a particular approach to therapy- he stressed the reflective or empathetic response. This response type takes the client's viewpoint and reflects back his or her feeling and the context for it. An example of a reflective response would be, "It seems you are feeling anxious about your upcoming marriage". This response type seeks to clarify the therapist's understanding while also encouraging the client to think more deeply and seek to fully understand the feelings they have expressed.

Biopsychological theories
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[30] of these psychological changes are usually exaggerated.[31][32]

Graphic by Damasio et al.[30] showing how the tamping iron may have damaged both frontal lobes. (A 2004 study by Ratiu and colleagues suggests the damage was more limited.)[33] 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. One of the founders of this area of brain research is Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin Madison. Davidson's research lab has focused on the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and amygdala in manifesting human personality. In particular, this research has looked at hemispheric asymmetry of activity in these regions. Neuropsychological experiments have suggested that hemispheric asymmetry can affect an individual's personality (particularly in social settings) for individuals with NLD (non-verbal learning disorder), which is marked by the impairment of nonverbal information controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain. Progress will arise in the areas of gross motor skills, inability to organize visual-spatial relations, or adapt to novel social situations.[clarification needed] Frequently, a person with NLD is unable to interpret non-verbal cues, and therefore experiences difficulty interacting with peers in socially normative ways. One integrative, biopsychosocial approach to personality and psychopathology, linking brain and environmental factors to specific types of activity, is the hypostatic model of personality, created by Codrin Stefan Tapu.

Personality Theories: An Introduction

Personality psychology, also known as personology, is the study of the person, that is, the whole human individual. Most people, when they think of personality, are actually thinking of personality differences - types and traits and the like. This is certainly an important part of personality psychology, since one of the characteristics of persons is that they can differ from each other quite a bit. But the main part of personality psychology addresses the broader issue of "what is it to be a person." Personality psychologists view their field of study as being at the top (of course) of a pyramid of other fields in psychology, each more detailed and precise than the ones above. Practically speaking, that means that personality psychologists must take into consideration biology (especially neurology), evolution and genetics, sensation and perception, motivation and emotion, learning and memory, developmental psychology, psychopathology, psychotherapy, and whatever else might fall between the cracks. Since this is quite an undertaking, personality psychology may also be seen as the least scientific (and most philosophical) field in psychology. It is for this reason that most personality courses in colleges still teach the field in terms of theories. We have dozens and dozens of theories, each emphasizing different aspects of personhood, using different methods, sometimes agreeing with other theories, sometimes disagreeing. Like all psychologists - and all scientists - personality psychologists yearn for a unified theory, one we can all agree on, one that is firmly rooted in solid scientific evidence. Unfortunately, that is easier said then done. People are very hard to study. We are looking at an enormously complicated organism (one with "mind," whatever that is), embedded in not only a physical environment, but in a social one made up of more of these enormously complicated organisms. Too much is going on for us to easily simplify the situation without making it totally meaningless by doing so! We need to take a look at the various research methods available to us as personality psychologists to understand where we stand... There are two broad classes of research methods: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative methods involve measurements and qualitative methods don't. Measurement is very important to science because scientists want to get beyond the purely subjective and to the more objective. If my dear wife and I are both looking at a man and I say "he's short," she may say "no, he's not - he's quite tall!" we are stuck with two subjective opinions. If we take out a tape measure, we can together measure the man to discover that he is, in fact, 5 foot 8 inches. Since I am 6 foot 2, I might think of him as short. My wife is 5 foot 2, and she might see him as tall. But there will be no argument about what the measuring tape says! (Actually, there won't be any arguing in any case, since my wife is clearly always correct.) A patch of color may seem blue to me and green to you. A piece of music may seem fast to me and slow to you. A person might seem shy to me and outgoing to you. But if we measure the wavelength of color, or the rhythm of the music, or find a way to give a number to

shyness-outgoingness, we can agree. We become "objective." Creating personality tests to measure personality traits is a common activity of personality psychologists. If you take two different forms of measurement - such as a measuring tape and a weight scale - and we measure the height and weight of a few hundred of our nearest and dearest friends, we can examine whether the two measures relate to each other somehow. This is called correlation. And, as you might expect, people's heights and weights do tend to correlate: The taller you are, generally speaking the heavier you are. Of course, there will be some folks who are tall but quite light and some who are short but quite heavy, and lots of variation in between, but there will indeed be a modest, but significant, correlation. You might be able to do the same thing with something involving personality. For example, you might want to see if people who are shy are also more intelligent than people who are outgoing. So develop a way to measure shyness-outgoingness and a way to measure intelligence (an IQ test!), and measure a few thousand people. Compare the measures and see if they correlate. In the case of this example, you would likely find little correlation, despite our stereotypes. Correlation is a popular technique in psychology, including personality. What correlation can't help you with is finding what causes what. Does height somehow cause weight? Or is it the other way around? Does being shy cause you to be smarter, or does being smarter cause you to be shy? You can't say. It could be one way or the other, or in fact there could be some other variable that is the cause of both. That's where experimentation comes in. Experiments are the "gold standard" of science, and all of us personality psychologists wish we had an easier time doing them. In the prototypical experiment, we actually manipulate one of the variables (the independent one) and then measure a second variable (the dependent one). So, for example, you can measure the degree of rotation of the volume knob on your radio, and then measure the actually volume of the music that comes out of the speakers. What you would find, obviously, is that the further you turn the knob, the louder the volume. They correlate, but this time, because the knob was actually manipulated (literally in this case) and the volume measured after, you know that the rotation of the knob is in some way a cause of the volume. Taking this idea into the world of personality, we could show people scary movies that have been rated as to how scary they are. Then we could measure their anxiety (with an instrument that measures how sweaty our hands get, for example, or with a simple test where we ask them to rate how frightened they are). Then we can see if they correlate. And, of course, they would to some degree. Plus we now know that the scarier the movie, the more scared we get. A breakthrough in psychological science! There are several things that make measurement, correlation, and experiments difficult for personality psychologists. First, it isn't always easy to measure the kinds of things we are interested in in any meaningful way. Even the examples of shyness-easygoingness and intelligence and anxiety are iffy at best. How well do people recognize their own anxiety? How well does a sweat-test relate to anxiety? Can a paper-and-pencil test really tell you if you are smart or shy?

When we get to some of the most important ideas in personality - ideas like consciousness, anger, love, motivations, neurosis - the problem looks at present to be insurmountable. Another difficulty is the problem of control. In experiments, especially, you need to control all the irrelevant variables in order to see whether the independent variable actually affects the dependent variable. But there are millions of variables impacting us at every moment. Even our whole history as a person is right there, influencing the outcome. No sterile lab will ever control those! Even if you could control many of the variables - the psychological version of a sterile lab could you now generalize beyond that situation? People act differently in a lab than at home. They act differently when they are being observed than when they do in private. Experiments are actually social situations, and they are different from other social situations. Realism might be the answer, but how does one accomplish realism at the same time as one keeps control? Then there's the problem of samples. If a chemist works with a certain rock, he or she can be pretty confident that other samples of the same rock will respond similarly to any chemicals applied. Even a biologist observing a rat can feel pretty comfortable that this rat is similar to most rats (although that has been debated!). This is certainly not true for people. In psychology, we often use college freshmen as subjects for our research. They are convenient - easily available, easy to coax into participation (with promises of "points"), passive, docile.... But whatever results you get with college freshmen, can you generalize them to people in factories? to people on the other side of the world? to people 100 years ago or 100 years in the future? Can you even generalize to college seniors? This problem transcends the issues for quantitative methods to qualitative methods as well. What about qualitative methods, then? Qualitative methods basically involve careful observation of people, followed by careful description, followed by careful analysis. The problem with qualitative methods is clear: How can we be certain that the researcher is indeed being careful? Or, indeed, that the researcher is even being honest? Only by replicating the studies. There are as many qualitative methods as there are quantitative methods. In some, the researcher actually introspects - looks into his own experiences - for evidence. This sounds weak, but in fact it is ultimately the only way for a researcher to directly access the kinds of things that go on in the privacy of his or her own mind! This method is common among existential psychologists. Other researchers observe people "in the wild," sort of like ethologists watch birds or chimps or lions, and describe their behavior. The good thing here is that it is certainly easier to replicate observations than introspections. Anthropologists typically rely on this method, as do many sociologists. One of the most common qualitative method in personality is the interview. We ask questions, sometimes prearranged ones, sometimes by the seat of our pants, of a variety of people who have had a certain experience (such as being abducted by a UFO) or fall into a certain category (such as being diagnosed as having schizophrenia). The case study is a version of this that focusses on gaining a rather complete understanding of a single

individual, and is the basis for a great deal of personality theory. Ultimately, science is just careful observation plus careful thinking. So we personality psychologists do the best we can with our research methods. That does leave us to consider the business of careful thinking, though, and there are a couple of particulars there to consider as well. First, we must always be on guard against ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is (for our purposes) the tendency we all have to see things from the perspective of our own culture. We are born into our culture, and most of us never truly leave it. We learn it so young and so thoroughly that it becomes "second nature." Freud, for example, was born in 1856 in Moravia (part of what is now the Czech Republic). His culture - central European, German speaking, Victorian era, Jewish... - was quite different from our own (whatever that might be). One thing his culture taught was that sex was a very bad thing, an animal thing, a sinful thing. Masturbation was thought to lead to criminality, retardation, and mental illness. Women who were capable of orgasms were assumed to be nymphomaniacs, unlikely to make good wives and mothers, and possibly destined for prostitution. Freud is to be respected in that he was able to rise above his cultural attitudes about sex and suggest that sexuality - even female sexuality - was a natural (if animalistic) aspect of being human, and that repressing one's sexuality could lead to debilitating psychological disorders. On the other hand, he didn't quite see the possibility of a new western culture - our own wherein sexuality was not only accepted as normal but as something we should all be actively engaged in at every opportunity. A second thing to be on guard against is egocentrism. Again, for our purposes, we are talking about the tendency to see our experiences, our lives, as being the standard for all people. Freud was very close to his mother. She was 20 when she had him, while his father was 40. She stayed home to raise him, while his father was working the usual 16 hour days of the time. Little Freud was a child genius who could talk about adult matters by the time he was five. He was, as his mother once put it, her "golden Siggy." These circumstances are unusual, even for his time and place. Yet, as he developed his theory, he took it for granted that the mother-son connection was at the center of psychology for one and all! That, of course, was a mistake: egocentrism. Last, we need to be on guard against dogmatism. A dogma is a set of ideas that the person who holds those ideas will not permit to be criticized. Do you have evidence against my beliefs? I don't want to hear them. Do you notice some logical flaws in my arguments? They are irrelevant. Dogmas are common in the worlds of religion and politics, but they have absolutely no place in science! Science should always be open to new evidence and criticism. Science isn't "Truth;" it is just a movement in that general direction. When someone claims they have "Truth," science comes to a grinding halt. Well, sadly, Freud was guilty of dogmatism. He became so attached to his ideas that he refused to accept disagreement from his "disciples." (Notice the religious term here!) Some, like Jung and Adler, would eventually go on to develop their own theories. If only Freud had not been dogmatic, if only he had been open to new ideas and new evidence and allowed his

theory to evolve openly, we might all be "Freudians" today - and "Freudian" would mean something quite different and much grander. Enough of this beating around the bush. Let's get started. Where should we start? At the beginning, of course. And that would be the great master himself, Sigmund Freud.

SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA BUDDHA 566 bc - 486 bc

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography There was a small country in what is now southern Nepal that was ruled by a clan called the Shakyas. The head of this clan, and the king of this country, was named Shuddodana Gautama. His wife, Mahamaya, was expecting her first born. In the small town of Lumbini, she asked her handmaidens to assist her to a nearby grove of trees for privacy, where she gave birth to a son. She named him Siddhartha, which means "he who has attained his goals." Sadly, Mahamaya died only seven days after the birth. After that Siddhartha was raised by his mothers kind sister, Mahaprajapati. When it came time for him to marry, he won the hand of Yashodhara, and they married when both were 16 years old. Siddhartha was kept in one or another of their three palaces, and was prevented from experiencing much of what ordinary folk might consider quite commonplace. He was not permitted to see the elderly, the sickly, the dead, or anyone who had dedicated themselves to spiritual practices. Siddhartha grew increasing restless and curious about the world beyond the palace walls and he finally demanded that he be permitted to see his people and his lands.

The king carefully arranged that Siddhartha should not see the kind of suffering that he feared would lead him to a religious life. But, inevitably, he saw old people, sick people, and even death. He asked his friend and squire Chandaka the meaning of all these things, and Chandaka informed him of the simple truths that Siddhartha should have known all along: That all of us get old, sick, and eventually die. Siddhartha also saw an ascetic, a monk who had renounced all the pleasures of the flesh. The peaceful look on the monks face would stay with Siddhartha for a long time to come. Later, he would say this about that time: When ignorant people see someone who is old, they are disgusted and horrified, even though they too will be old some day. I thought to myself: I dont want to be like the ignorant people. After that, I couldnt feel the usual intoxication with youth anymore. When ignorant people see someone who is sick, they are disgusted and horrified, even though they too will be sick some day. I thought to myself: I dont want to be like the ignorant people. After that, I couldnt feel the usual intoxication with health anymore. When ignorant people see someone who is dead, they are disgusted and horrified, even though they too will die some day. I thought to myself: I dont want to be like the ignorant people. After that, I couldnt feel the usual intoxication with life anymore. At the age of 29, Siddhartha came to realize that he could not be happy living as he had been. He wanted more than anything to discover how one might overcome suffering. After kissing his sleeping wife and newborn son Rahula goodbye, he snuck out of the palace and into the forests of northern India. He then began to practice the austerities and self-mortifications practiced by a group of five ascetics. For six years, he practiced. The sincerity and intensity of his practice were so astounding that, before long, the five ascetics became followers of Siddhartha. But the answers to his questions were not forthcoming. He redoubled his efforts, refusing food and water, until he was in a state of near death. For six years, he practiced the ascetic life, eating only what he found on the ground, drinking only rain water, wearing nothing but a loin cloth. When the answers he was seeking wouldn't come to him, he tried even harder. But Siddhartha realized that these extreme practices were leading him nowhere, that in fact it might be better to find some middle way between the extremes of the life of luxury and the life of self-mortification. Outside of the town of Bodh Gaya, Siddhartha decided that he would sit under a certain fig tree as long as it would take for the answers to the problem of suffering to come. He sat there for many days, first in deep concentration to clear his mind of all distractions, then in mindfulness meditation, opening himself up to the truth. On the full moon of May, with the rising of the morning star, Siddhartha finally understood the answer to the question of suffering and became the Buddha, which means he who is awake. At the deer park in Sarnath near Benares, about one hundred miles from Bodh Gaya, he preached his first sermon, which is called setting the wheel of the teaching in motion. In it, he explained to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. The king of Magadha, having heard Buddhas words, granted him a monastery for use during the rainy season. This and

other generous donations permitted the community of converts to continue their practice throughout the years, and gave many more people an opportunity to hear the teachings of the Buddha. His aunt and wife asked to be permitted into the Sangha, or monastic community, which was originally composed only of men. The culture of the time ranked women far below men in importance, and at first it seemed that permitting women to enter the community would weaken it. But the Buddha relented, and his aunt and wife became the first Buddhist nuns. The Buddha said that it didnt matter what a persons status in the world was, or what their background or wealth or nationality might be. All were capable of enlightenment, and all were welcome into the Sangha. The first ordained Buddhist monk, Upali, had been a barber, yet he was ranked higher than monks who had been kings, only because he had taken his vows earlier than they! Buddha had achieved his enlightenment at the age of 35. He would teach the Dharma (the way) throughout northeast India for another 45 years. When the Buddha was 80 years old, he ate some spoiled food and became very ill. He went into a deep meditation under a grove of sala trees and died. His last words were... Impermanent are all created things; Strive on with awareness. Soon after Buddha's death, five hundred monks met at the first council at Rajagrha, under the leadership of Kashyapa. Upali recited the monastic code (Vinaya) as he remembered it. Ananda, Buddha's cousin, friend, and favorite disciple -- and a man of prodigious memory! -recited Buddha's lessons (the Sutras). The monks debated details and voted on final versions. These were then committed to memory by other monks, to be translated into the many languages of the Indian plains. It should be noted that Buddhism remained an oral tradition for over 200 years. In the next few centuries, the original unity of Buddhism began to fragment. The most significant split occurred after the second council, held at Vaishali 100 years after the first. After debates between a more liberal group and traditionalists, the liberal group left and labeled themselves the Mahasangha -- "the great sangha." They would eventually evolve into the Mahayana tradition of northern Asia. The traditionalists would become known as Theravada or "way of the elders," and be the tradition of Sri Lanka and most of southeast Asia.

Theory Buddhism is an empirical philosophy. Buddha was very clear that we should judge the truth of any philosophy by its consequences. In the Kalama Sutra, he makes this particularly clear: It is proper for you... to doubt, to be uncertain.... Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher....'

What do you think...? Does greed appear in a man for his benefit or harm? Does hate appear in a man for his benefit or harm? Does delusion appear in a man for his benefit or harm?... being given to greed, hate, and delusion, and being overwhelmed and vanquished mentally by greed, hate, and delusion, this man takes life, steals, commits adultery, and tells lies; he prompts another too, to do likewise. Will that be long for his harm and ill?" ... ...when you yourselves know: 'These things are bad; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill,' abandon them. Buddhism is also a philosophy that is detached from theological considerations. Buddha, in fact, refused to answer questions concerning eternity and the afterlife. In the Kalama Sutra again, he notes how his philosophy helps whatever your beliefs about the afterlife may be: The disciple... who has a hate-free mind, a malice-free mind, an undefiled mind, and a purified mind, is one by whom four solaces are found here and now. Suppose there is a hereafter and there is a fruit, result, of deeds done well or ill. Then it is possible that at the dissolution of the body after death, I shall arise in the heavenly world, which is possessed of the state of bliss. This is the first solace... Suppose there is no hereafter and there is no fruit, no result, of deeds done well or ill. Yet in this world, here and now, free from hatred, free from malice, safe and sound, and happy, I keep myself. This is the second solace... Suppose evil results befall an evil-doer. I, however, think of doing evil to no one. Then, how can ill results affect me who do no evil deed? This is the third solace... Suppose evil results do not befall an evil-doer. Then I see myself purified in any case. This is the fourth solace... The structure of the mind Buddhists describe the person as composed of five skandhas ("aggregates"): 1. The body (rupa), including the sense organs. 2. Sensations and feelings (vedana), coming out of contact between sense organs and objects. 3. Perceptions and ideas (samja), especially manifest in our ability to recognize things and ideas. 4. Mental acts (samskara), especially will power and attention. 5. Basic consciousness (vijana). The last four are called naman, name, meaning the psyche. Namarupa (name-form) is therefore the Buddhist term for the person, mental and physical, which is nevertheless anatman, without soul or essence.

Buddhism also differentiates among six "fields" (ayatana) for the five skandhas: sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and mind, as well as the objects of these six senses. Mahayana Buddhism adds alaya-vijana, storehouse consciousness, to the skandhas. This is similar to Jungs idea of the collective unconscious. What is stored there are called bijas or seeds, which are inborn tendencies to perceive the world in a certain way and result from our karmic history. They combine with manas or ego to form the illusion that is ordinary existence. By quieting this ego and becoming less self-centered, your mind realizes the "emptiness" (sunyata) of all things. Then you have peace.

The Four Noble Truths The Four Noble Truths sound like the basics of any theory with therapeutic roots: 1. Life is suffering. Life is at very least full of suffering, and it can easily be argued that suffering is an inevitable aspect of life. If I have senses, I can feel pain; if I have feelings, I can feel distress; if I have a capacity for love, I will have the capacity for grief. Such is life. Duhkha, the Sanskrit word for suffering, is also translated as stress, anguish, and imperfection. Buddha wanted us to understand suffering as a foundation for improvement. One key to understanding suffering is understanding anitya, which means that all things, including living things, our loved ones, and ourselves, are impermanent. Our peculiar position of being mortal and being aware of it is a major source of anxiety, but is also what makes our lives, and the choices we make, meaningful. Time becomes important only when there is only so much of it. Doing the right thing and loving someone only have meaning when you don't have an eternity to work with. Another key concept is anatman, which means that all things -- even we -- have no "soul" or eternal substance. With no substance, nothing stands alone, and no one has a separate existence. We are all interconnected, not just with our human world, but with the universe. 2. Suffering is due to attachment. We might say that at least much of the suffering we experience comes out of ourselves, out of our desire to make pleasure, happiness, and love last forever and to make pain, distress, and grief disappear from life altogether. We are not therefore to avoid all pleasure, happiness, and love. Nor are we to believe that all suffering comes only from ourselves. It's just not necessary, being shot once with an arrow, to shoot ourselves again, as the Buddha put it. Attachment is one translation of the word trishna, which can also be translated as thirst, desire, lust, craving, or clinging. When we fail to recognize that all things are imperfect, impermanent, and insubstantial, we cling to them in the delusion that they are indeed perfect, permanent, and substantial, and that by clinging to them, we, too, will be perfect, permanent, and substantial. Our lack of "essence" or preordained structure, our "nothingness," leads us to crave solidity. We are, you could say, whirlwinds who wish they were rocks. We cling to things in the hopes

that they will provide us with a certain "weight." We try to turn our loved ones into things by demanding that they not change, or we try to change them into perfect partners, not realizing that a statue, though it may live forever, has no love to give us. We try to become immortal, whether by anxiety-driven belief in fairy-tales, or by making our children and grand-children into clones of ourselves, or by getting into the history books or onto the talk shows. We even cling to unhappy lives because change is too frightening. Another aspect of attachment is dvesha, which means avoidance or hatred. To Buddha, hatred was every bit as much an attachment as clinging. Only by giving those things which cause us pain permanence and substance do we give them the power to hurt us more. We wind up fearing, not that which can harm us, but our fears themselves. The most frightening things we've seen in this century are the mass movements -- the Nazis, the Red Guard, the Ku Klux Klan, terrorist groups, and on and on. The thought seems to be that, if I'm just a little puff of wind, maybe by joining others of my kind, I can be a part of a hurricane! Beyond these are all the petty movements -- political ones, revolutionary ones, religious ones, antireligious ones, ones involving nothing more than a style or fashion. And hatred is the glue that holds them together. A third aspect of attachment is avidya, meaning ignorance. At one level, it refers to the ignorance of these Four Noble Truths -- not understanding the truth of imperfection and so on. At a deeper level, it also means "not seeing," i.e. not directly experiencing reality, but instead seeing our personal interpretation of it. More than that, we take our interpretation of reality as more real than reality itself! In some sutras, Buddha adds one more aspect of attachment: anxiety. Fear, like hatred, ties us to the very things that hurt us. 3. Suffering can be extinguished. At least that suffering we add to the inevitable suffering of life can be extinguished. Or, if we want to be even more modest in our claims, suffering can at least be diminished. With decades of practice, some monks are able to transcend even simple, direct, physical pain. I don't think, however, that us ordinary folk in our ordinary lives have the option of devoting those decades to such an extreme of practice. For most of us, therapy is a matter of specifically diminishing mental anguish rather than eliminating all pain. Nirvana is the traditional name for the state of being (or non-being, if you prefer) wherein all clinging, and so all suffering, has been eliminated. It is often translated as "blowing out," with the idea that we eliminate self like we blow out a candle. Another interpretation is that nirvana is the blowing out a fire that threatens to overwhelm us, or even taking away the oxygen that keeps the fires burning. By "blowing out" clinging, hate, and ignorance, we "blow out" unnecessary suffering. Perhaps an even more useful translation for nirvana is freedom! 4. And there is a way to extinguish suffering. This is what all therapists believe -- each in his or her own way. Buddha called it the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path

The Eightfold Path is the equivalent of a therapy program, but one so general that it can apply to anyone. The first two segments of the path are refered to as praja, meaning wisdom: Right view -- understanding the Four Noble Truths, especially the nature of all things as imperfect, impermanent, and insubstantial and our self-inflicted suffering as founded in clinging, hate, and ignorance. Right aspiration -- having the true desire, the dedication, to free oneself from attachment, hatefulness, and ignorance. The idea that improvement comes only when the sufferer takes the first step of aspiring to improvement is apparently 2500 years old. Therapy is something neither the therapist nor the client takes lying down -- if you will pardon the pun. The therapist must take an assertive role in helping the client become aware of the reality of his or her suffering and its roots. Likewise, the client must take an assertive role in working towards improvement -- even though it means facing the fears they've been working so hard to avoid, and especially facing the fear that they will "lose" themselves in the process. The next three segments of the path provide more detailed guidance in the form of moral precepts, called sila: Right speech -- abstaining from lying, gossiping, and hurtful speech generally. Speech is often our ignorance made manifest, and is the most common way in which we harm others. Modern psychologists emphasize that one should above all stop lying to oneself. But Buddhism adds that by practicing being true to others, and one will find it increasingly difficult to be false to oneself. Right action -- behaving oneself, abstaining from actions that hurt others such as killing, stealing, and irresponsible sex. Traditionally, Buddhists speak of the five moral precepts, which are...

Avoid harming others; Avoid taking what is not yours; Avoid harmful speech; Avoid irresponsible sex; Avoid drugs and alcohol.

A serious Buddhist may add five more:

One simple meal a day, before noon: Avoid frivolous entertainments: Avoid self-adornment: Use a simple bed and seat: Avoid the use of money.

Monks and nuns living in monastic communities add over 100 more rules! Right livelihood -- making one's living in an honest, non-hurtful way. Here's one we don't talk about much in our society today. One can only wonder how much suffering comes out of the greedy, cut-throat, dishonest careers we often participate in. This by no means means we

must all be monks: Imagine the good one can do as an honest, compassionate, hard-working business person, lawyer, or politician! This is a good place to introduce another term associated with Buddhism: karma. Basically, karma refers to good and bad deeds and the consequences they bring. In some branches of Buddhism, karma has to do with what kind of reincarnation to expect. But other branches see it more simply as the negative (or positive) effects one's actions have on one's integrity. Beyond the effects of your selfish acts have on others, for example, each selfish act "darkens your soul," and makes happiness that much harder to find. On the other hand, each act of kindness, as the gypsies say, "comes back to you three times over." To put it simply, virtue is its own reward, and vice its own hell. The last three segments of the path are the ones Buddhism is most famous for, and concern samadhi or meditation. For simple instructions, go to my page on meditation. Right effort -- taking control of your mind and the contents thereof. Simple, direct practice is what it takes, the developing of good mental habits: When bad thoughts and impulses arise, they should be abandoned. This is done by watching the thought without attachment, recognizing it for what it is (no denial or repression!), and letting it dissipate. Good thoughts and impulses, on the other hand, should be nurtured and enacted. Make virtue a habit, as the stoics used to say. Right mindfulness -- mindfulness refers to a kind of meditation involving an acceptance of thoughts and perceptions, a "bare attention" to these events without attachment. This mindfulness is also extended to daily life. It becomes a way of developing a fuller, richer awareness of life, and a deterent to our tendency to sleepwalk our way through life. One of the most important moral precepts in Buddhism is the avoidance of consciousnessdiminishing or altering substances -- i.e. alcohol or drugs. This is because anything that makes you less than fully aware sends you in the opposite direction of improvement into deeper ignorance. But there are other things besides drugs that diminish consciousness. Some people try to avoid life by disappearing into food or sexuality. Others disappear into work, mindless routine, or rigid, self-created rituals. Others still drown themselves in television and other entertainment. We can also drown awareness in material things -- fast cars, extravagant clothes, and so on. Shopping has itself become a way of avoiding life. Worst of all is the blending of materiality with entertainment. While monks and nuns avoid frivolous diversions and luxurious possessions, we surround ourselves with commercials, infomercials, and entire shopping networks, as if they were effective forms of "pain control!" Right concentration -- meditating in such a way as to empty our natures of attachments, avoidances, and ignorance, so that we may accept the imperfection, impermanence, and insubstantiality of life. This is usually thought of as the highest form of Buddhist meditation, and full practice of it is pretty much restricted to monks and nuns who have progressed considerably along the path.

But just like the earlier paths provide a foundation for later paths, later ones often support earlier ones. For example, a degree of "calm abiding" (shamatha), a version of concentration, is essential for developing mindfulness, and is taught to all beginning meditators. This is the counting of breaths or chanting of mantras most people have heard of. This quieting of the mind is, in fact, important to mindfulness, effort, all moral practice, and even the maintaining of view and aspiration. I believe that this simple form of meditation is the best place for those who are suffering to begin -- though once again, the rest of the eightfold path is essential for long-term improvement. Most therapists know: Anxiety is the most common manifestation of psychological suffering. And when it's not anxiety, it's unresolved anger. And when it's not anger, it's pervasive sadness. All three of these can be toned done to a manageable level by simple meditation. Meditation will not eliminate these things -- that requires wisdom and morality and the entire program -- but it will give the sufferer a chance to acquire the wisdom, morality, etc! Bodhisattvas A Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have chosen not to leave the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, but rather to remain in samsara (this existence) until they can bring all of life into nirvana with them. Think of them as the Buddhist version of saints. In northern Buddhism, they believe we all should strive to become Bodhisattvas. How can you tell a bodhisattva from ordinary beings? They will have four outstanding qualities, called the Brahma Vihara: Loving kindness to all creatures; Compassion for all who suffer; Sympathetic joy for all who are happy; And equanimity, a pervading calm. In northern Buddhism, the Bodhisattva has achieved "emptiness," sunyata. What this means is that they have gone beyond the usual dualistic mind. You and I think in terms of "this and that," "you versus me," "us and them," "either-or" and so on. The enlightened person sees that all things blend into each other, we are all human, everything is one. We are "empty." In one form of Zen Buddhism, there is a tradition that involves asking young monks and nuns unusual questions called koans. The monk or nun meditates on the koan in the hopes of achieving a breakthrough into nondualistic mind. These questions are designed to frustrate our usual way of thinking and perceiving the universe. The most famous of them is "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" The question has no answer in the ordinary sense: Any sound would, of course, be incorrect, but then silence isn't really the answer either, because one hand clapping is not just silent, it is a Silent beyond silence. The dimension from silence to sound doesn't apply to something that cannot have either. It is like asking for the taste of blue or the smell of an E minor chord. If you like, you could say that the answer is emptiness. The "answer" that the master is looking for from his students is some clear indication that they understand this emptiness. In Zen tradition, there are stories about how monks and nuns responded correctly (or incorrectly) to these questions, which stories then become new koans themselves. Some of these students respond by knocking over their master, by walking

away, by putting their shoes on top of their heads, quoting Buddhist sayings, or remaining quiet. For all the apparent nonsense, their responses indicate their understanding. Another koan is "if you speak, I will hit you; if you don't speak I will hit you." Perhaps you can see that there is no answer to this dilemma, no way out. But that means it is not a dilemma at all! There is no either-or. You will get hit. It is inevitable. And so it is nothing at all. You are totally free to do whatever it is you would do if you had never been confronted by the koan at all. The trick, of course, is to show that freedom. That's not so easy! Buddhists have an expression: "nirvana is samsara." It means that the perfected life is this life. While there is much talk about great insights and amazing enlightenments and even paranormal events, what Buddhism is really all about is returning to this life, your very own little life, with a "new attitude." By being more calm, more aware, a nicer person morally, someone who has given up envy and greed and hatred and such, who understands that nothing is forever, that grief is the price we willingly pay for love.... this life becomes at very least bearable. We stop torturing ourselves and allow ourselves to enjoy what there is to enjoy. And there is a good deal to enjoy! Buddhists often use the term "practice" for what they do. They encourage each other to "keep on practicing." Nobody is too terribly concerned if they aren't perfect -- they don't expect that. As long as you pick yourself up and practice a little more. A good basis for therapy.

The Ultimate Theory of Personality

Dr. C. George Boeree

After a semester of Personality theories -- Freud and Jung and Rogers and Frankl and Bandura and Eysenck, etc., etc., etc. -- students often ask, once again, isnt there one theory we can trust and use with confidence? Cant we narrow it down a bit? Tell us, what is right and what is not! Well, unfortunately, Personality is not yet a science, at least not in the sense that Biology or Chemistry are sciences. In those fields, although there is disagreement about details and the latest findings, there is a common body of knowledge that few people in the field argue about. Not so, obviously, in Personality. However, there are slowly emerging ideas that seem to pop up again and again in different theories, often with different names, but there none-the-less. Sometimes they occur in theories that are otherwise quite different, or that come from a different perspective, such as clinical versus experimental versus factor analysis versus phenomenological. Perhaps the field will indeed become a science, perhaps not too far in the future! I know Im excited! So, I have taken the bull by the cojones, so to speak, and have compiled this little list of things I see as being, if not universal, at least more likely features of the future ultimate theory of personality. Here goes...

Consciousness and the unconscious This, of course, is one of Freuds greatest contribution. Even if he didnt invent the terms, he certainly was responsible for popularizing them! Many theories postulate some sort of unconscious, not necessarily as a place where our worst fears bubble and boil, but as a way of accounting for the many things that influence us without our full awareness. We can pick out three aspects of the unconscious. The first is biological. We come into this life with something like Freud's id or Jung's collective unconscious in place. It is likely composed of whatever instincts remain a part of our human nature, plus our temperament or inborn personality, and perhaps the preprogramming for stages of life. This biological unconscious overlaps in part with the existentialist concept of thrownness. As for possible instincts, I would nominate three complexes of them: A mating complex, an assertive complex, and a nurturant (or social) complex. Second, there is the social unconscious (as Fromm calls it), which actually resembles Freuds superego more than Freud's id. It might include our language, social taboos, cultural habits, and so on. It includes all the cultural things we were surrounded with in our childhood and have learned so well that they have become "second nature" to us! The negative aspects of the social unconscious overlaps with the existential idea of fallenness and with Rogers idea of conditions of worth. And third, there is the personal unconscious (to borrow Jungs term), perhaps understood as the unconscious aspect of the ego. It is composed of our idiosyncratic habits, the more personal things we have learned so well we no longer need to be conscious of them in order to enact them -- like knowing how to drive so well that we can comb our hair, talk on a cell phone, light a cigarette, and notice the attractive person in the rear view mirror all at the same time (at least until you run off the road into a tree). Included among those well-learned things might be the defense mechanisms. With these we ignore, with habitual efficiency, uncomfortable realities in order to save our sense of selfworth. More a little later....

But let's not get overly enthusiastic about the unconscious! Few psychologists today view it as the location of our true selves, the answer to all our problems, or some deep psychic well that connects us with the universe or God! It is where the more-or-less automatic processes of instinct and the well-learned do their thing. All this is in contrast to (in fact defined in contrast to) consciousness or awareness. Other than instincts and perhaps a few associations learned by classical conditioning, it seems that all things going into or out of our psyches pass through awareness. What consciousness is will be a question for a good while longer. Its not terribly available to traditional research methods! But for now, we can see it as the ability to experience reality (outer and inner) together with its meaning or relevance to ourselves (as biological, social, and even individual organisms). Or the ability to be open to the world while maintaining a degree of separation in the form of an integrated self. I would add that it may be consciousness that also provides us with the freedom to choose among the choices available to us -- i.e. self-determination (if not full-blown free will). Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about consciousness is that it is personal. It is yours and yours alone. And it is within this personal consciousness that all of your "psychology" takes place. Everything you feel, perceive, think, and do is phenomenological, i.e. experience that is not just based on a reality that stands outside of you, but on your subjective view of reality as well, a view which may be significantly different from mine! Therefore, in order to understand people, we need to understand them from the inside. This little fact is what makes psychology so much more difficult than the physical sciences!

Self-determination Free will doesn't fit very well with science. It seems to require "supernatural" involvement in the natural world. But we really don't have to be "above" the natural world in order to have a degree of freedom within that world.

The baby begins life nearly as intimately connected with his or her world as in the womb. As we develop from babies into adults, we gradually separate ourselves from the world. Our interior causal processes - especially mental processes - become increasingly independent of the causal processes outside of us. A gap develops that allows us to be influenced by outside situations, but not necessarily determined by them.

This gap is like a large river: The man on the opposite bank can wave and jump and yell all he wants -- he cannot directly affect us. But we can listen to him or interpret his semaphore signals. We can treat his antics as information to add to all the information we have gathered over our lives, and use that information to influence our decisions -- influence, but not cause. By the end of life, some of us are nearly impervious to what others think about us, can rise above nearly any threat or seductive promise, can ignore nearly any kind of urge or pain. We are still determined - but little in our immediate situation is more than information we utilize in making our decisions. This may not be free will in the absolute sense, but it is certainly self-determination. As a middle-aged man, I have dozens of years of experiences -- my childhood, my cultural inheritance, the books I've read, conversations with friends, my own thoughts -- that have made me who I am today. All this is on top of my unique genetics and other physical realities of who I am. The things that happen to me now are experienced through this mass of uniqueness, and my responses depend, not only on my present situation, but on all that I am.

Stages Stages are something most personality theorists shy away from. Freud and Erikson are the obvious exceptions, as is the developmentalist Piaget. And yet there is a very biological basis for the idea. We can, on pure biology, separate out at least three stages: the fetus, the child,

and the adult. This is, in fact, completely parallel to the egg, caterpillar, butterfly example we learned in high school biology! In addition, we can see three transitional stages: infancy, adolescence, and senescence. Infancy is not, actually, found in more primitive animals, and is greatly exaggerated in humans. We are, in a sense, all born prematurely. Perhaps this was the result of an evolutionary dilemma: How can an upright creature give birth to a baby with a large head without killing the mom? Thats right: Give birth before it gets too big! What that does for us is more than just let us live long enough to give birth again. It lets the infant soak up information much earlier, and in a different way. It would seem that for the first 6 to 12 months, our neural development is as yet incomplete. As we learn, we actually create certain neural paths, rather than just tightening synapses as we do later in life. Its as if we were actually learning instincts! Adolescence also qualifies, I believe, as a stage. The transition from child to adult involves rather massive hormonal changes accompanied by a growth spurt like you hadnt seen since you were two! It is hard for me to conceive of these changes not having some effect on us psychologically. Senescence is, strictly speaking, the last year or so of a full life, during which time the organs begin to deteriorate and shut down. We don't usually see this as a stage, and in fact most people never reach it (accidents and diseases usually beat senescence to the punch). But socially speaking, in our culture we certainly prepare ourselves for this inevitability, and that might constitute a social stage, if not a biological one. As this last point suggests, there are certainly cultural additions we can make. In our culture, there is a sharp transition from preschool child to school child, and another sharp transition from single adult to married adult. For all the power of biology, these social stages can be every bit as powerful.

To venture a guess as to the psychological side of these biological stages: The fetus focuses on biological development, which is transformed by the presence of others in the infant into ego development in the child. In turn, the ego development of the child is transformed by the advent of sexuality in adolescence into the trans-ego or social development of the adult. Another way to look at it goes like this: In the fetal and infancy stages, we lay the groundwork and develop our temperaments (founded in hormones and neurotransmitters). In the child stage, we develop a personality (founded in habits). In adolescence, continuing into adulthood, we develop character (based on conscious decision-making).

Temperament Temperament is what we call that part of our personalities or characters that is built-in to us genetically. Consequentially, although there is always a degree of flexibility allowed, to a large extent we "are" our temperaments for our whole lives. Temperament is very in right now, and justifiably so. Jung led the way, Eysenck made it more scientifically acceptable, and the Big Five made it official. Nearly everyone I know of accepts two dimensions of personality as established before birth, probably genetically:

emotional stability (AKA neuroticism...) and extraversion-introversion (AKA sociability, surgency...).

Three more seem to have popular approval:

conscientiousness (AKA anality, judging-perceiving...) agreeableness (AKA warmth, feeling-thinking...) openness (AKA culture, intellect, intuiting-sensing...) - possibly an aspect of intelligence

And there are three other contenders that are a little harder to place:

psychoticism (Eysenck) - perhaps a combination of dis-agreeableness and nonconscientiousness impulsivity (Buss and Plomin) - perhaps an aspect of non-conscientiousness activity (Buss and Plomin) - perhaps an aspect of extraversion

But we need to beware: These results of factor analysis may be as much a reflection of language as of true genetic foundations of personality. As we continue to develop our understanding of genetics and the precise relationships of protein synthesis to brain function, we may find that there are hundreds of "temperaments," or find instead that the concept doesn't hold up at all.

Learning With the exception of Skinner, Bandura, Kelly, and a few others, learning is rather taken for granted by most personality theorists. But I suspect it shouldnt be. We can postulate at least three kinds of learning: basic, social, and verbal. Basic learning includes the behaviorist Pavlovian and Skinnerian conditioning, of course -getting feedback from your environment. It also includes the latent learning that E. C. Tolman talked about: We learn about our environment just by being in it! George Kellys way of looking at basic learning derives from the work of Snygg and Combs, which in turn derives from the Gestalt psychologists: We learn to differentiate one thing from another on the basis of the consequences. Either way, behaviorist or gestalt, this kind of learning requires little in the way of consciousness. There is also environmental learning that involves other people. When junior does something that mom or dad does not approve of -- he may be punished in some fashion. Likewise, he

may be rewarded when he does something right for a change. This is also usually called conditioning, but the fact that it involves others means it is also social learning, and so fraught with extra difficulties. For example, if every time your run into a tree your head hurts, you will stop running into the tree. On the other hand, if every time you say "shit!" your dad hits you upside the head, you may stop... or you may avoid dad, say shit under your breath, begin to hate your father and authority in general, start beating up little kids after school, and so on, until prison effectively stops the behavior. These kind of things seldom happen with trees. Social learning includes vicarious learning (noticing and recalling the kinds of environmental feedback and social conditioning other people get) and imitation (Banduras modeling). This kind of learning is probably the most significant for the development of personality. It can be either conscious, as when we are watching an artist to learn their technique, or unconscious, as when we grow up to be disconcertingly like our parents. And theres verbal learning -- learning not from the environment or the behavior of others, but from words. Culturally, this is, of course, a highly significant form of learning. Most of the learning we do in our many many years of schooling is verbal. And yet we dont know that much about it at all! One thing is certain: The old models of the rat with his conditioned and shaped behavior, and of the computer with its programming, are not very good ones. If you really need a simple metaphor for human learning, you are better off thinking of people - especially children - as sponges!

Emotions Emotions or feelings have always been a key point of interest in personality theories. At the lowest level, we have pain and pleasure, which are really more like sensations than feelings. There is also psychological pain and pleasure -- call them distress and delight -- which may be the root of all other emotions. Distress is what we feel when the events of the world are more than we can handle. Delight is what we feel when we discover that we can handle them after all! Anxiety is a favorite topic in personality theories. Although many definitions have been proposed for anxiety, they tend to revolve around unnecessary or inappropriate fear. Kelly notes that it is actually the anticipation of a fearful situation, accurately or not. Fear, in turn, is usually understood as involving the perception of imminent harm, physical or psychological. These definitions serve well for most circumstances. Guilt is another key emotion. Related to shame, it is usually understood as the feelings aroused when one contravenes internalized social rules. Kelly provides a useful elaboration: He defines it as the feeling we get when we contravene our own self-definition (which may or may not involve those standard social rules!). Existentialists add another detail by suggesting that guilt is closely related to the sense of regret about opportunities not taken. Sadness is the experience of the world not being as it should be, with the added notion that we have no power to alter the situation. Instead, there is a need to alter ourselves -something we are innately reluctant to do! Grief would be the obvious extreme example, and

depression could be defined as unrealistic sadness that continues long after the original situation. Anger is similar to sadness: The world is not as it should be. But now, there's the added notion that we must energize ourselves to change the situation. When we act on our anger, it becomes aggression. Anger and aggression are not necessarily bad: It is our anger at social injustices, for example, and aggressive action to correct them, that makes for positive social change! Unrealistic anger, the kind we hang on to despite the suffering it causes us and the people around us, could be labelled hostility. There are, of course, many other emotions and emotional shadings we could try to define, but that's for another time and place. Just one more thing should be noted: It appears that, where there is consciousness, there is emotion -- at very least an emotional tone or mood. As the existentialists point out, we just cannot not care.

Motivation Now heres a more difficult one: Motivation is central to most theories of personality, and the variety seems unending! But perhaps a little organization will help.

First, there are the biological motivations, mostly instinctual (although addictions are acquired). There is our need for air, water, food. There is the need for pain-avoidance. There is the need for pleasure: pleasant touch, comforting, sex. We may want to add the instinct complexes mentioned earlier: mating, assertiveness, nurturance. All theories accept the idea of biological motivation, although they differ wildly about their importance relative to each other as well as to other kinds of motivation. Second, there are the social motivations. They may build on the biological motivations, especially the instinct complexes, but they vary enormously depending upon culture and even individual social situations and learning. Because they are learned so well and early, we could borrow Maslows term and call them instinctoid. Social motivation may include our

need for acceptance, attention, and approval (Rogers positive regard), as well as those forms of self-esteem that are based on such approval. Shame and guilt are clearly factors in social motivation, as is pride. Parallel to the idea of a personal unconscious, we might also postulate personal motivations. These would be learned from our unique and idiosyncratic experiences. Last, but not least, there are higher motivations. These are conscious and we perceive them as providing our lives with meaning. There appear to be two broad kinds: The first, self-enhancement. Here we find those motivations that lead us to extend ourselves beyond mere survival and comfort, that lead us to be "all that we can be." It includes such motives as desire to learn more than is needed, attain mastery beyond mere competence, and creativity. Adler might call it striving for superiority or perfection. The second, self-transcendence, Most clearly defined by Viktor Frankl, it is an outgrowth of our natural tendencies to care about our children, families, friends, and lovers, and our innate capacity for empathy. It includes altruism, love, compassion, and Adlers social concern. Perhaps it also includes other experiences that take us out of ourselves, such as music, art, literature, dance, and the beauty of nature. Erikson in particular talks about these two motives, especially in the adult stages. Whether they are simply derivatives of the lower needs or are indeed something more, will remain a point of discussion for many years into the future! It seems to me that all of the preceding, and probably a few Ive missed, qualify as motivations. Disagreements as to which are most significant are perhaps misguided -perhaps that differs from individual to individual! And the possibility that higher motivations derive from lower ones in no way diminishes their significance. Rollo May's idea of a large number of daimons, unique to each individual, may be the best approach.

Balance Another common theme in personality theories is the idea of balance. Freud, for example, felt that all of life's "crises" were best resolved at some midpoint between two extremes -Potty training was to be accomplished not too early, not too late, not too harshly, not too leniently. The result of a balanced upbringing would be a balanced personality -- not too retentive, not too expulsive, for example. Even when talking about positive experiences, such as learning to act on our imaginations, we need to recognize that those positive experiences need to be tempered with at least a small amount of negative experiences. For example, without a little shame and self-doubt, Erikson tells us, acting on our imaginations becomes ruthlessness. Carl Jung's entire theory revolves around balance, especially between anima and animus and between the ego and the shadow. The former in particular has received a great deal of attention and empirical support: Androgenous people (those who combine qualities of both the "feminine" and the "masculine") appear to be mentally healthier. The latter also has

support: People who are able to think in "shades of gray" are much more mature than those who see everything as black and white, good vs. evil, us vs. them. Ego vs shadow might also be understood as a need to balance rationality with emotion.

The balancing act that has gotten the most attention from personality psychologists is the balancing of our desires for individuality and community. This idea originated with Otto Rank's contrast between a desire for both "life" (our drive towards individuality) and "death" (our drive towards union with others), as well as the corresponding fears (isolation vs. engulfment). Rollo May uses the words will and love, others use words such as autonomy and homonymy, agency and communion, egoism and altruism, and so on. Founded in our instincts for assertiveness and nurturance, in their highest forms they are self-enhancement and self-transcendence, respectively. Whatever the words, the balance to be achieved is between the impulse to serve oneself (becoming all one can be as an individual) and the impulse to serve others (become one with the universe of others). But serve only yourself, and you end up alone; serve only others, and you lose your identity. Instead, one must serve oneself in order to serve others well, and serve others in order to best serve oneself. At some point the two aren't so much balanced as working synergistically. Here's a nice quote from good old Einstein that sums it up nicely: Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. (Einstein, "Why Socialism?" in Monthly Review, NY, May 1949)

Neurosis Life is filled with stress. Many people's difficulties begin with childhood experiences of abuse, neglect, poverty, sickness, parent's sicknesses or death, parental psychological

problems, divorce, immigration, accidents, deformities, etc. Sometimes, we are strong enough, or have enough support, to weather these storms. More often, we find that these experiences leave us with an on-going apprehension about life. We end up suffering from anxiety, guilt, sadness, anger... not just as a direct result of the specific experience, but because we no longer trust life. A child with loving parents and compassionate relations, peers, and teachers may well be able to cope with these problems. On the other hand, a lack of support, a lack of what Rogers calls positive regard, can leave even a child blessed with a comfortable environment troubled with self-doubt and insecurity. Many of our theories were developed in order to help those who cannot cope, and looking at Adler, Horney, Rogers, Bandura, and others, we find a great deal of agreement as to the details. As I said a moment ago, in order to cope with life's difficulties, we need positive regard -- a little love, approval, respect, attention.... But others often make that love and approval conditional upon meeting certain standards, not all of which we can meet. Over time, we learn to judge ourselves by those standards. It is this incongruence (Rogers term) between what we need and what we allow ourselves that leaves us with low self-esteem, or what others call a poor self-concept or an inferiority complex. There is a real advantage to the idea of inferiority over self-esteem: It is rare to have an overall sense of low self-esteem. Instead, most people have a sense of inferiority in some domains and not in others. Acknowledging the specificity of inferiority allows us to focus in on possible remedies, while just saying someone suffers from low selfesteem leaves us with little sense of where to start! Confronted with the difficulties of life, lacking in the support of others, and not even enjoying confidence in ourselves, we find we must defend ourselves however we can. We can list a large number of defense mechanisms, as Anna Freud did, or we might be able to simplify a little, like Carl Rogers: We defend our sensitive egos by denial and rationalization. Denial (perhaps including repression) is the attempt to block the offending experiences directly, at the cost of emotional exhaustion. Rationalization (including, perhaps, perceptual distortion) is a more sophisticated and less exhausting way of dealing with the offending information by working around it. Either way, they are lies we tell ourselves and others in order to minimize the impact of that incongruence between our need for love and security and what is afforded to us. We use these lies because they help, actually. But they only help in the short run: Over time, they lead us into a possibly serious misunderstanding of how the world (especially other people) works, and of who, in fact, we are. For those people who are, perhaps, a bit stronger than those who succumb to neuroses, we still find suffering in the form of alienation: There develops a split between the deeper, "truer" core self within, and the persona (to borrow Jung's term) that we present to the outside world to attempt to meet with those conditions of worth that Rogers talks about. We feel inauthentic, false, phony, dishonest on the one hand, and misunderstood or unappreciated on the other. Over the long haul, this is likely to lead to depression and

withdrawal from social life. But sometimes, alienation can lead to new perspectives on life and some remarkably creative insights. Perhaps we owe a good portion of our art, music, and literature to these same people.

At the other end of the spectrum are those people whose psychological suffering is founded on physiological problems. Schizophrenia, although it certainly has some sizable social and psychological causes, seems to have a considerable physiological component. Other disorders, such as bipolar, major depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, improve with the use of medications that enhance the effects of our own neurotransmitters. The borderline between psychology and physiology is becoming increasingly blurry!

Coping strategies People troubled by neuroses will be also find themselves attracted to certain patterns of living that to one degree or another keep the psychological pain at bay: They may become alcoholics, or work-aholics, or sex addicts, or they may become obsessed with cleanliness or physical health, etc. These patterns can involve unusual behaviors, emotional attachments, obsessive thoughts, etc. Binswanger calls these patterns themes and they are similar to Horney's neurotic needs, Ellis's irrational beliefs, and the behaviorists' maladaptive habits. Many theorists see a certain order among these themes, and classify them into four or five categories, which Horney calls coping strategies. Fromm calls them orientations, Freud uses character types.... They are, perhaps, the result of an interaction between a person's temperament and the specific stressors they must deal with. There are two coping strategies we can readily agree on: The dependent style is characterized by a sense of inferiority and weakness, but also involves a strong -- perhaps desperate -- use of manipulation of others. It is also referred to as oral passive, getting, leaning, compliant, or receptive. The aggressive style is characterized by aggressive posturing that serves to temporarily diminish a sense of inferiority -- i.e. the superiority complex! When you feel bad about yourself, beat or humiliate someone else. This is also known as oral aggressive, ruling, dominant, or exploitative. From there, things get more uncertain. A third candidate is the perfectionist style. This type of person attempts to actually reach the excessively difficult standards they have accepted for themselves -- or at least pretend to

reach them. They tend to be emotionally detached from others, and to dislike depending on them. It is also known as the anal retentive or hoarding type. A fourth candidate is the schizoid style, AKA, the avoiding or withdrawing type. This kind of person attempts to remove him- or herself from most if not all social interaction. They tend to be somber, psychologically detached, sometimes angry at the whole world, and potentially violent. And a last, fifth candidate is the infantile style, AKA, the phallic or marketing style. These people avoid responsibility by essentially extending their childhoods into adulthood. They are obsessed with youth, fun, adventure, and even high risk activities. They tend to be shallow and hedonistic. One could argue that the most common coping strategy of all -- most common because it works so well -- is conventionality, "busy-ness," getting lost in the day-to-day. It will be up to future personality researchers to determine which of these are true styles, if the idea of a few styles holds up, or if we should stick to a more individualistic way of describing people's coping.

Therapy It is somewhat surprising that, for all the variation in theories, there is considerable agreement regarding therapy. First, there is an emphasis on self-awareness or, as Freud put it, making the unconscious conscious. We encourage our clients to understand their biological, social, and personal unconscious and related motivations, to examine the conflicts between their needs and the standards society and they themselves impose, and to look behind their defensive posturings. We are also taught to encourage our clients to discover more conscious, higher motivations -- meaning the development of competence, creativity, and compassion, becoming valuable to oneself and to others.... And the means of therapy? We are taught to use genuinely caring dialog, and to provide support (not management or control) with a goal of eventual autonomy for the client. Now, each theory has its own set of preferred techniques. Some, such as the radical behaviorist approach, insist that techniques are all you need. Others, such as Rogers approach, suggest that you dont need techniques at all, just an empathic, respectful, and honest personal presence. Probably the majority of therapists, however, follow the middle path and use a few techniques that they have found useful and that fit their clients and their own personalities. In addition, we now have a fairly reliable set of drugs that appear to help. Our understanding of the physiological bases for psychological problems has been growing rapidly, and, while that understanding is far from complete, it has allowed us to help people more effectively. Most therapists are still hesitant to rely entirely on medications, perhaps rightly so. But these

medications certainly seem to help in emergency situations and for those whose suffering just doesn't respond to our talk therapies.

Conclusions Even among our list of consistencies, we can find some "metaconsistencies." Being a visual sort, I like to put things into graphic form. So here goes:

What you see here is "poor me" (or "poor you"), at the center of enormous forces. At top, we have history, society, and culture, which influence us primarily through our learning as mediated by our families, peers, the media, and so on. At the bottom, we have evolution, genetics, and biology, which influence us by means of our physiology (including neurotransmitters, hormones, etc.) Some of the specifics most relevant to psychology are instincts, temperaments, and health. As the nice, thick arrows indicate, these two mighty forces influence us strongly and continuously, from conception to death, and sometimes threaten to tear us apart. There is, of course, nothing simple about these influences. If you will notice the thin arrows (a) and (b). These illustrate some of the more roundabout ways in which biology influences our learning, or society influences our physiology. The arrow labeled (a) might represent an aggressive temperament leading to a violent response to certain media messages that leads to a misunderstanding of those messages. Or (b) might represent being raised with a certain set of nutritional habits that lead to a physiological deficiency in later life. There are endless complexities. I also put in a number of little arrows, marked (c). These represent accidental influences, physiological or experiential. Not everything that happens in our environment is part of some great historical or evolutionary movement! Sometimes, stuff just happens. You can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time: Hear some great speaker

that changes the direction of your life away from the traditional path, or have a cell hit by stray radiation in just the wrong way. Last, but not least, there's (d), which represents our own choices. Even if free will ultimately does not stand up to philosophical or psychological analysis, we can at least talk about the idea of self-determination, i.e. the idea that, beyond society and biology and accident, sometimes my behavior and experience is caused by... me! Perhaps there is more agreement than I originally thought! This bodes well for our field. Perhaps we can get through the next so many years intact, and arrive, somewhere in the twenty-first century, at full scientific status. I do hope so, although I also hope that Personality continues to be a bit of an art as well. I choose to believe that people will always be a bit harder to predict and control than your average green goo in a test tube!
Overview

Personality and Individual Differences

That people differ from each other is obvious. How and why they differ is less clear and is an important part of the study of personality. Personality psychology addresses the questions of shared human nature, dimensions of individual differences and unique patterns of individuals. Research in personality ranges from analyses of genetic codes and studies of biological systems to the study of sexual, social, ethnic, and cultural bases of thought, feelings, and behavior. Personality research includes studies of cognitive abilities, interpersonal styles, and emotional reactivity. Methods range from laboratory experiments to longitudinal field studies and include data reduction techniques such as factor analysis and principal components analysis, as well as structural modeling and multi-level modeling procedures. Measurement issues of most importance are those of reliability and stability of individual differences. Research in individual differences addresses three broad questions: 1) developing an adequate descriptive taxonomy of how people differ; 2) applying differences in one situation to predict differences in other situations; and 3) testing theoretical explanations of the structure and dynamics of individual differences. These pages are meant to guide those interested in personality theory and research to the current personality research literature. Although some of the readings are available on-line, all should be available from most university libraries. Abstracts of many recent articles are available by using search engines such as Medline. Information about scholarly societies and graduate training programs in personality is provided for those interested in pursuing further study in personality theory. Course syllabi from personality theory and research courses are being added gradually. Suggestions for links to active researchers and personality laboratories are welcome. Issues of personality appeal to everyone and there are many interesting web sites that can be visited both inside and outside of academia. Selected links to non-academic pages devoted to personality theory are included with an emphasis upon non-commercial sites. Some of these sites have examples of personality and ability tests that are similar to more standard testing instruments.

The personality project is meant to be a cooperative endeavor for and by all of us interested in the study of personality. This means that suggestions for links to other pages and corrections to the current pages are always welcome. They will be added as time permits.

Chapter 3- Personality and Attitude

Determinants of Personality Personality is the outcome of a continuous personal quality development process. The role of personality becomes clear in a particular situation. Personality is recognised in a situation. It is the result of personal quality interaction in a particular condition. The major determinants of personality of an individual are given below:
Biological Factors

Heredity: Heredity refers to those factors that were determined at conception. Physical stature, facial attractiveness, sex, temperament, muscle composition and reflexes, energy level, and biological rhythms are characteristics that are generally considered to be either completely or substantially influenced by who your parents were; that is, by their biological, physiological, and inherent psychological makeup. The contribution of heredity to personality development is vividly clear for developing external appearance, behaviour, social stimuli, self inner awareness, organising traits, etc. Brain: Brain has a great impact on personality. The psychologists are unable to prove empirically the contribution of human brain in influencing personality. Father and children generally adopt the same type of brain stimulation. The differences are caused by environment. Electrical stimulation of brain (ESB) and split brain psychology (SBP)are the outcome of genetic transmision. The are helpful in moulding employee's behaviour. ESB is used for motivating employees towards better performances. Managers are trained to use SBP for mobilising employees for proper behaviour. Physical Features: Perhaps the most outstanding factor that contributes to personality is the physical stature of an individual. An individual's external appearance is proved to be having a tremendous effect on personality. For example, the fact that a person is short or tall, fat or thin, handsome or ugly, black or whitish will undoubtedly influence the person's effect on others and in turn will affect the self-concept. A person's physical characteristics may be related to his approach to the social environment, to the expectancies of others, and to their reactions, to him. These in turn may have impact on personality development.
Environment

Cultural Factors: The accepted norms of social behaviour are known as culture. Culture was traditionally considered as the major determinant of an individual's personality. The way in which people behave with others and the driving force of such functions are considered significant components of culture. The ideology of the culture is imitated by the following generations. The personality attributes of independence, aggression,

competition and cooperation are the outcomes of cultural interaction. Religion: Religion plays a significant role in shaping one's personality. Hindus have different personalities from those of Sikhs and Muslims.Children in Hindu societies learn from the very beginning about hard work and god-fearing attitudes. Christians are open, independent, and cooperative. Family: Children learn from their parents, sisters and brothers. family is the first factor affecting personality development, after hereditary characteristics are endowed. Rich people have different personalities from those of poor. Children nurtured under a warm, loving environment are positive and active as compared to children neglected by their parents. Parental Influences: The positive and negative personalities of children are dependent on their parents characteristics and mutual behaviour. Children develop negative personalities if their parents don't have good relationship. Proper parental guidance to children makes them active and efficient.
Situation

Situation further influences the effects of heredity and environment on personality. A individual's personality, while generally stable and consistent, does change in different situations. Different demands in different situations call forth different aspects of one's personality. It has been observed that many arrogant and indisciplined employees become humble and disciplined in a particular situation. Those having a criminal background may become powerful and strong administrators, dominant politicians, etc.

Determinants of Personality
Personality is a result of the combination of four factors- physical environment, heredity, culture and particular experiences. Geographical environment sometimes determines cultural variability. Man comes to form ideas and attitudes according to the physical environment he lives in. To the extent that the environment determines cultural development and to the extent that culture in turn determines personality a relationship between personality and environment becomes clear.Montesque in 18th century claimed that the bravery of those blessed by a cold climate enables them to maintain their liberties. Great heat enervates courage while cold causes certain vigor of body and mind. The people of mountain as well as deserts are usually bold, hard and powerful. However physical conditions are more permissive and limiting factors than causative factors. They set the limits within which personality can develop. Hereditary is another factor determining human personality. Some of the similarities in mans personality are said to be due to his common heredity. Every human group inherits the same general set of biological needs and capacities. These common needs and capacities explain some of our similarities in personality. Man tends to resemble his parents in physical appearance and intelligence. However heredity does not mould human personality alone and unaided. We can assume that there are genes for

normal personality traits just as there are genes for other aspects of human life and functioning. Heredity only furnishes the materials out of which experience will mould the personality. Experience determines the way these materials will be used. An individual may be energetic because of his heredity but whether he is active on his own belief or on behalf of others is a matter of his training. There can be little doubt that culture largely determines the types of personality that will predominate in the particular group. According to some sociologists personality is the subjective aspect of culture. They regard personality and culture as two sides of same coin. Spiro had observed the development of personality and the acquisition of culture are not different processes but one and the same learning process. Personality is an individual aspect of culture while culture is a collective aspect of personality. Each culture produces its special type or types of personality. A given cultural environment sets its participant members off from other human beings operating under different cultural environments. According to Frank culture is a coercive influence dominating the individual and molding his personality by virtue of the ideas, conceptions and beliefs which had brought to bear on him through communal life. The culture provides the raw material of which the individual makes his life. The traditions, customs, mores, religion, institutions, moral and social standards of a group affect the personality of the group members. From the moment of birth the child is treated in ways which shape his personality. Every culture exerts a series of general influences upon the individuals who grow up under it. It can be summed up that culture greatly moulds personality. The individual ideas and behavior are largely the results of cultural conditioning. However it should not be concluded that culture is a massive die that shapes all that come under it with an identical pattern. All the people of a given culture are not of same cast. Personality traits differ within any culture. Personality is not totally determined by culture even though no personality escapes its influence. It is only one determinant among others. Personality is also determined by another factor the particular and unique experiences. There are two types of experiences one those that stem from continuous association with ones group, second those that arise suddenly and are not likely to recur. The type of people who meet the child daily has a major influence on his personality. The personality of parents does more to affect a childs personality. The social rituals ranging from table manners to getting along with others are consciously inculcated in the child by his parents. The child picks up the language of his parents. Group influences are relatively greater in early childhood. This is the period when the relationships of the child with the mother, father and siblings affect profoundly the organization of his drives and emotions, the deeper and subconscious aspects of his personality. Group interaction moulds the childs personality. It may also be inferred that personality is a matter of social situations. It has been shown by social researchers that a person may show honesty in one situation and not in another. The same is true for other personality traits also. Personality traits tend to be specific responses to particular situations rather than general behavior patterns. It is a dynamic unity with a creative potential. Heredity, physical environment, culture and particular experiences are thus the four factors that explain personality its formation, development and maintenance. Beyond the joint influence of these factors however the relative contribution of each factor to personality varies with the characteristic or personality process involved and perhaps with the individual concerned.