Q.How do you define personality? What are the main approaches to the study of personality?

In psychological terms, personality refers to our characteristic ways of responding to individuals and situations — the unique and relatively stable qualities that characterise a person's behaviour across different situations over time. It has physical and psychological components, is fairly unique to the individual, does not change easily, yet is dynamic.

The main approaches to studying personality are:

• Type approaches — group people into broad types (e.g., Hippocrates, Sheldon, Jung's introvert–extravert).
• Trait approaches — identify basic building-block traits along which people differ (Allport, Cattell, Eysenck).
• Psychodynamic approach — Freud's id/ego/superego and the unconscious.
• Behavioural approach, Cultural approach, and the Humanistic approach (Rogers, Maslow).

Defining personality

The word 'personality' comes from the Latin persona, the mask worn by actors in Roman theatre. For a layperson personality often means physical appearance, but this is superficial. In psychological terms, personality refers to our characteristic ways of responding to individuals and situations. It denotes the unique and relatively stable qualities that characterise an individual's behaviour across different situations over a period of time. Consistency in behaviour, thought and emotion across situations and across time is what marks a person's personality — an honest person, for instance, tends to remain honest irrespective of time or situation, though some situational variation does occur as people adapt.

Personality is characterised by the following features:

1. It has both physical and psychological components.
2. Its expression in terms of behaviour is fairly unique to a given individual.
3. Its main features do not easily change with time.
4. It is dynamic, in the sense that some of its features may change due to internal or external situational demands — so personality is adaptive to situations.

Once we characterise someone's personality we can predict how that person will probably behave in a variety of circumstances, which helps us deal with people in realistic ways.

Main approaches to the study of personality

Psychologists have developed several approaches, each throwing light on some but not all aspects of personality:

• Type approaches — attempt to comprehend personality by examining broad patterns and placing individuals into a limited number of types based on similarity of characteristics. Examples include Hippocrates' four humours (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, choleric), the Indian tridosha (vata, pitta, kapha) and trigunas (sattva, rajas, tamas), Sheldon's endomorph/mesomorph/ectomorph typology, Jung's introverts and extraverts, and Friedman and Rosenman's Type-A and Type-B (later Type-C and Type-D) personalities.
• Trait approaches — focus on the specific psychological attributes (traits) along which individuals differ in consistent and stable ways. Traits are the relatively enduring 'building blocks' of personality. Key theorists are Allport (cardinal, central, secondary traits), Cattell (16 source traits, the 16 PF), and Eysenck (biologically based dimensions). The interactional approach adds that situational characteristics also play an important role in determining behaviour.
• Psychodynamic approach — owes largely to Sigmund Freud; explains personality in terms of the unconscious, the structure of id, ego and superego, defence mechanisms and psychosexual stages, later extended by post-Freudians (Jung, Horney, Adler, Fromm, Erikson).
• Behavioural approach — ignores internal dynamics and views personality as learned stimulus–response connections and their reinforcement (Pavlov, Skinner, Bandura).
• Cultural approach — understands personality as an adaptation of individuals or groups to the ecological and cultural features (economic maintenance system, climate, terrain, food) of their group's life.
• Humanistic approach — developed in response to Freud; emphasises growth, fulfilment and self-actualisation and the positive aspects of life (Rogers, Maslow).