Personality Development Notes

Learning Objectives

• Define personality.

• Describe early theories about personality development.

Defining Personality

• Personality: Long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave in specific ways.

• Personality is what makes us unique individuals.

• Each person has an idiosyncratic pattern of enduring, long-term characteristics and a manner in which they interact with other individuals and the world around them.

• Personalities are thought to be long term, stable, and not easily changed.

• The word personality comes from the Latin word "persona".

• In the ancient world, a persona was a mask worn by an actor to represent or project a specific personality trait of a character.

Historical Perspectives

• The concept of personality has been studied for at least 2,000 years, beginning with Hippocrates in 370 BCE.

• Hippocrates theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids (“humors”) of the body:

  • Choleric temperament: Yellow bile from the liver.

  • Melancholic temperament: Black bile from the kidneys.

  • Sanguine temperament: Red blood from the heart.

  • Phlegmatic temperament: White phlegm from the lungs.

• Galen built on Hippocrates’s theory, suggesting that both diseases and personality differences could be explained by imbalances in the humors and that each person exhibits one of the four temperaments.

  • Choleric person: Passionate, ambitious, and bold.

  • Melancholic person: Reserved, anxious, and unhappy.

  • Sanguine person: Joyful, eager, and optimistic.

  • Phlegmatic person: Calm, reliable, and thoughtful.

• Galen’s theory was prevalent for over 1,000 years and continued to be popular through the Middle Ages.

• In 1780, Franz Gall proposed that the distances between bumps on the skull reveal a person’s personality traits, character, and mental abilities.

• Measuring these distances revealed the sizes of the brain areas underneath, providing information that could be used to determine whether a person was friendly, prideful, murderous, kind, good with languages, and so on.

• Phrenology was initially very popular; however, it was soon discredited for lack of empirical support and has long been relegated to the status of pseudoscience.

• Immanuel Kant agreed with Galen that everyone could be sorted into one of the four temperaments and that there was no overlap between the four categories.

• Kant developed a list of traits that could be used to describe the personality of a person from each of the four temperaments.

• Wilhelm Wundt suggested that a better description of personality could be achieved using two major axes: emotional/nonemotional and changeable/unchangeable.

  • The first axis separated strong from weak emotions (the melancholic and choleric temperaments from the phlegmatic and sanguine).

  • The second axis divided the changeable temperaments (choleric and sanguine) from the unchangeable ones (melancholic and phlegmatic).

• Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic perspective of personality was the first comprehensive theory of personality, explaining a wide variety of both normal and abnormal behaviors.

• According to Freud, unconscious drives influenced by sex and aggression, along with childhood sexuality, are the forces that influence our personality.

• Neo-Freudians generally agreed with Freud that childhood experiences matter, but they reduced the emphasis on sex and focused more on the social environment and effects of culture on personality.

• The perspective of personality proposed by Freud and his followers was the dominant theory of personality for the first half of the 20th century.

• Other major theories then emerged, including the learning, humanistic, biological, evolutionary, trait, and cultural perspectives.