Personality Type and Trait approaches

Individuality and personality- type and trait approaches

The term personality refers to enduring qualities of an individual that are shown in his ways of behaving in a wide variety of circumstances. The term personality comes from the Latin word persona meaning "mask".

Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychosocial systems that determine the individual's unique adjustment to the environment. The term "dynamic" points up the change of nature of personality, it emphasizes that changes can occur in the quality of a person's behavior. Organization implies that personality is made up of a number of different traits, which are interrelated.

Personality types

A first step in understanding personality is to identify basic types. Clinicians generally derive these types from their collective experience, which suggests several generally recognizable categories such as a social and outgoing type and a solitary and self-conscious type.

Psychologists have attempted to produce a more scientific set of categories by using personality tests to measure certain aspects of personality ('traits') and then employing statistical methods to discover which traits cluster together as factors. Examples of personality traits include: anxiety, energy, flexibility, hostility, impulsiveness, moodiness, orderliness and self-reliance.

Personality can be described by 5 factors. These have been variously named but can be referred to usefully as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. (The initial letters of these factors form the mnemonic OCEAN)

The interrelationship changes with some traits becoming more dominant and other less so, with changes in the child and in the environment.

The psychosocial system are the habits, attitudes, values, beliefs, emotional states, sentiments and in the child's neural, glandular and general bodily states. These system are not the product of hereditary foundation they have been developed through learning as a result of the child's experiences.

The importance of personality

Variations in personality are important because they may predispose to psychiatric disorders, they may account for unusual features in a psychiatric disorders and they may affect the way that patients approach psychiatric treatment.

See also Personality Patterns

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