Chapter 15 Introduction
Personality and Disorders
PART
VIII
We all approach life in different ways. We vary in our emotions, motives, and styles of thinking and behaving, and these differences give each of us a unique personality. Most of these differences are healthy and add spice to life, but some create problems and are classed as mental disorders. This final unit has three chapters. Chapter 15 is about ways of describing and explaining normal personality differences. Chapter 16 is about identifying disorders and understanding their origins, and Chapter 17 is about methods to help people overcome or cope with problems and disorders.
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Personality
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Personality as Behavioral Dispositions, or Traits
- Trait Theories: Efficient Systems for Describing Personalities
- The Relationship of Personality Measures to People’s Actual Behavior
- Continuity and Change in Personality Over Time
- Genetic Foundations of Personality Traits
Personality as Adaptation to Life Conditions
- Advantages of Being Different from One Another
- Adapting to the Family Environment
- Adapting to One’s Gender
Personality as Mental Processes I: Psychodynamic and Humanistic Views
- Elements of the Psychodynamic Perspective
- Defensive Styles as Dimensions of Personality
- The Humanistic Perspective: The Self and Life’s Meanings
Personality as Mental Processes II: Social-Cognitive Views
- Beliefs Viewed as Personality Traits
- The Idea of Situation-Specific Personality Traits
- Cross-Cultural Differences in Personality
Reflections and Connections
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Personality refers to a person’s general style of interacting with the world, especially with other people—whether one is withdrawn or outgoing, excitable or placid, conscientious or careless, kind or stern. Judith Harris (2005) defined personality as: “the development during childhood of chronic patterns of behavior (along with their cognitive and emotional concomitants) that differ from one individual to another. Some individuals are chronically more outgoing, or more aggressive, or more rule-abiding than others” (p. 246). Most chapters of this book emphasize the ways in which we are similar to one another, but in this chapter we turn explicitly to differences among us. A basic assumption of the personality concept is that people do differ from one another in their styles of behavior in ways that are fairly consistent across time and place.
Most people are fascinated by human differences. Such fascination is natural and useful. In everyday life we take for granted those aspects of a person that are common to all people, and we focus, instead, on aspects that distinguish one person from another. Attention to differences helps us decide whom we want for partners and friends and how to deal with the different people that we know. Personality psychologists make a scientific study of such differences. Using questionnaires and other assessment tools, they conduct research to measure personality differences and explain their origins. They try to relate personality to the varying roles and habitats that people occupy in the social world, and they try to understand the mental processes that underlie the differences.
This chapter is divided into four main sections. The first is concerned with the basic concept of personality traits and with questions about their validity, stability, and biological bases. The second is concerned with the adaptive functions of personality: How might individual differences prepare people for life within different niches of the social environment? The third and fourth sections are about the unconscious and conscious mental processes that may underlie and help explain behavioral differences among individuals, and the way these are viewed by the psychodynamic, humanistic, and social-cognitive theories of personality.
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