Personality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Personality (disambiguation).

Personality is the particular combination of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral response patterns of an individual. Different personality theorists present their own definitions of the word based on their theoretical positions.^[1]

Psychology

Some ideas in the psychological and scientific study of personality include:

• Personality changes
• Personality development, the concept that personality is affected by various sources
• Personality disorder
• Personality genetics, a scientific field that examines the relation between personality and genetics
• Personality pathology, characterized by adaptive inflexibility, vicious cycles of maladaptive behavior, and emotional instability under stress
• Personality psychology, the theory and study of individual differences, traits, and types
• Personality quiz a series of questions (usually multiple-choice, rating scale, or True/False) intended to describe aspects of an individual's character, thoughts, and feelings
• Personality style
• Personality systematics, among subsystems of personality as they are embedded in the entire ecological system
• Personality test
• Personality type, refers to patterns of relatively enduring characteristics of behavior that occur with sufficient frequency
• Personality trait, refers to enduring personal characteristics that are revealed in a particular pattern of behaviour in a variety of situations

[edit]Beginning of personality study

The study of personality started with Hippocrates' four humours and gave rise to four temperaments.^[2] The explanation was further refined by his successor Galen during the second century CE. The Four Humours theory held that a person's personality was based on the balance of bodily humours; yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood.^[3] Choleric people were characterized as having an excess of yellow bile, making them irascible. High levels of black bile was indicative of melancholy and pessimism. Phlegmatic people were thought to have an excess of phlegm, leading to their sluggish, calm temperament. Finally, people thought to have high levels of blood were said to be sanguine and were characterized by their cheerful, passionate dispositions. ^[4]

[edit]Origins of the modern individual personality

The modern sense of individual personality is a result of the shifts in culture originating in the Renaissance, an essential element in modernity. In contrast the Medieval European's sense of selfwas linked to a network of social roles: "the household, the kinship network, the guild, the corporation- these were the building blocks of personhood", Stephen Greenblatt observes, in recounting the recovery (1417) and career of Lucretius' poem De rerum natura: "at the core of the poem lay key principles of a modern understanding of the world."^[5] ""Dependant on the family, the individual alone was nothing," Jacques Gélis observes.^[6]