What are the theories of personality?
Personality theories
What are the theories of personality?
Personality theories are a set of academic constructs raised in psychology to explain the variations in behavior between some individuals and others.
In Psychology, personality is understood as the set of subjective characteristics that make an individual unique and that determine their behavior in the face of their vital circumstances.
The pioneer of the theories of personality was Gordon Allport, an American psychologist who in 1936 published the first book on this subject, and in which he suggested two ways of studying personality:
- Nomothetic psychology: study universal behaviors.
- Ideographic psychology: studies the psychological traits that differentiate people.
Since then, the study of personality has been raised from different areas: genetic, social, environmental, etc.
In this sense, there are personality theories that, in turn, can have multiple variants, according to the changes or updates suggested by new authors or studies.
Freud's psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory was created by the Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century and essentially posits the interaction of three parts of the personality:
- It : it is the part of the personality that seeks immediate satisfaction.
- Self : it is the part that tries to satisfy the demands of the self in a realistic way.
- Super-ego : includes moral and social aspects, influenced in turn by parental patterns.
In the same way, Freud claimed that the early childhood stage was essential for the development of the adult personality, and that the latter included 5 phases of psychosexual development:
- Oral stage : it is expressed in the first 18 months of life and the baby tries to explore the world through the mouth.
- Anal stage : lasts up to 3 years and is the phase in which the child controls his sphincters.
- Phallic stage : lasts up to 6 years and sexual differences begin to be explored.
- Latency stage : lasts until adolescence and is characterized by the development of a sense of modesty.
- Genital stage : refers to the physical and psychological changes of adolescence that end with adulthood.
The German psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm also added his own assessments to create the theory of humanistic psychoanalysis. In this sense, Fromm distanced himself from the Freudian postulates about libido and devoted himself to delving into the transcendental motivations of the human being, such as freedom and love.
For Fromm, the psychoanalyst's objective should be to help the individual to know himself and to guide him to find his personal freedom.
Jungian psychoanalytic theory
One of the most prominent disciples of Freud and his psychoanalytic theory was Carl Jung. However, Jung made his own contribution to psychoanalysis by raising the concept of the collective unconscious. According to the researcher, all individuals share a series of common mental structures and these structures are stored in our dreams.
Furthermore, Jung raised the personality profiles based on the combination of two main categories (introversion and extraversion) and four functions (sensations, thought, intuition, feeling). The result is eight personality types.
Thinking-extrovert
They create their own constructs from their experiences with the outside world and the explanations they get from their interactions with others.
Intuition-extrovert
They have natural leadership skills as they have deep confidence in themselves and what they can contribute to the world.
Sentimental-extrovert
They are people with high skills for socialization. His approach to reality is more emotional than rational.
Feeling-extrovert
They are adventurous people, their connection with the world is through new experiences. They are explorers of places and ideas by nature.
Introvert-thinking
They are characterized by the development of a deep awareness of themselves. They tend to be self-reflective and as a consequence have a facility to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Intuition-introvert
They are people who tend to self-absorption and are dreamy and fantasy by nature. Because of that, they find it difficult to fit into the real world.
Sentimental-introvert
Although they are emotional people, their introversion prevents them from expressing what they feel, which can generate certain difficulties in expressing affection.
Introvert-feeling
They are people who experience the world from the stimuli they perceive from it. However, their insights and discoveries are part of their inner world, as they do not often share their findings with others.
Behaviorist theories of Pavlov and Skinner
Behaviorism is a theory of personality created by Ivan Pavlov and Frederick Skinner, based on the idea that external stimuli influence the formation and reinforcement of the personality.
Pavlov and Skinner used the scientific method to explain how the interaction of an organism with its environment generated a "reward" for its behavior. This positive reinforcement facilitated the repetition of the response to the stimulus.
This process had three essential elements:
- Stimulus : the signal from the environment that generates a response (the baby cries because they have left him alone).
- Answer : it is the action provoked by the stimulus (the mother returns and carries it in her arms).
- Consequence : it is the association between the stimulus and the response (the baby learns that if the mother leaves him alone, he must cry to make him return).
Later, behaviorism would develop two aspects: classical conditioning (defended by Pavlov) that states, among other things, that the response to a stimulus is always involuntary.
For his part, Skinner would be the creator of the theory of operant conditioning, which suggests that the response to the stimulus is voluntary, at least most of the time.
Bandura's cognitive theory
Albert Bandura developed a theory of personality based on the beliefs or expectations that an individual has about the world around him. These beliefs are called cognitions, which is why his theory was called cognitive theory.
In addition, Bandura argues that cognitive processes play a fundamental role in personality. Therefore, thoughts, memory, emotions, and value judgments also influence people's behavior.
Carl Rogers Humanist Theory
Carl Rogers proposes the development of the personality as a product of the individual's choices, based on his free will and his subjective vision of the world. This construct is known as the humanist theory of personality.
Unlike psychoanalytic theory, which is based on the pathologies of the individual, humanist theory focuses on the study of a supposed human need to achieve meaningful goals.
In this sense, for humanistic psychologists there are four dimensions of personality, which are expressed to a greater or lesser degree in each individual:
- Unanimous sense of humor : it is a dimension of people who are very friendly, transparent and political.
- Reality and problem centered : it is a dimension that is expressed in people focused on the conflicts in their environment.
- Consciousness : it is the dimension that is manifested in people who live life events in an intense and transcendental way.
- Acceptance : it is the dimension expressed in people who flow naturally with life events.
Allport ideographic theory
The American psychologist Gordon Allport raised the existence of psychological structures called traits. These traits can be central or secondary and their function is to decant the stimuli in such a way that they can be assimilated in a similar way in different situations.
This response system makes individuals better able to adapt to the environment and has an essential influence on the processes of self-perception and self-esteem of people.
On the other hand, for Allport all individuals are oriented to the fulfillment of vital objectives, therefore, they are active beings with full participation in their personal development process. All his approaches were framed in his ideographic theory of personality.
Kelly's theory of personal constructs
It is also known as the theory of personal constructs, and although it has cognitive influences, it is considered rather a contribution more aligned with the postulates of constructivist theory.
This theory of personality developed by the psychologist George Kelly, starts from the assumption that people understand the world from dichotomous concepts, such as love-hate, joy-sadness, peace-war, etc.
In this sense, the personality of an individual can be defined from a series of qualifiers. However, what is interesting is the meaning that the person assigns to these qualifiers, since this is determined by their beliefs and experiences, that is, by their personal constructs.
Eysenck PEN Model
The American psychologist Hans Eysenck proposed the PEN model, which is based on the existence of three essential factors that define an individual's personality: psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism.
The Eysenck PEN model emerged after evaluating more than 700 soldiers who had participated in World War II. From this study, he obtained a series of data that revealed the existence of three common factors that were related to biological aspects, as described below.
Psychoticism
It is a characteristic factor in antisocial people, with little sense of empathy and prone to criminal behavior or suffering from mental disorders. For Eysenck, psychoticism was related to neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine.
Extraversion
Extraversion is linked to vitality, sociability and optimism, which is why people with opposite traits (passivity, little sociability and pessimism) would be considered introverts. For Eysenck, this duality is associated with cortical excitation levels.
Neuroticism
This factor is associated with anxiety, exaggerated emotional reactions, and a propensity for irritability. This is related, according to the Eysenck PEN model, with the levels of excitation of the limbic system. The lower the activation threshold of this system, the greater the propensity for neuroticism.
On the contrary, people with a higher threshold of activation of the limbic system have greater emotional control and their response to different situations is much more balanced.
Theory of personality based on Darwinism
This theory explains the development of personality based on Darwin's studies on the origin of species and their subsequent evolution.
According to this approach, personality is the result of processes of natural selection. This entails the expression of traits that will help a subject to survive in a given environment, such as solidarity, sociability, and leadership.
Update date: February 28, 2021.
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