Introduction to Personality Development

Objectives

• Define personality.
• Describe the five traits used to define personality.
• Identify two factors that determine how your personality develops.
• Describe what happens to our personality over a lifetime.

What is Personality?

Personality

• It is something that makes each people unique
• It is made up of behaviors, attitudes, feelings, and ways of thinking that make you an individual
• A psychologist studies how people think and behave.

Central Traits of Personality

• There are 5 main traits of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability.
  • Extroversion
    • describes how you like being with other people
  • Agreeableness
    • can describe how empathetic and cooperative you are.
  • Conscientiousness
    • describes how responsible or self-disciplined you are.
  • Openness to Experiences
    • can refer to how imaginative or predictable you are.
  • Emotional Stability
    • refers to how you react in the most extreme situations

How Personality Forms

• Personality can be influenced by our environment and our genetics/heredity.

• Heredity

  • Infants are born with certain tendencies to act in certain ways.
  • Traits such as cheerfulness/shyness, or abilities such as musical abilities/artistic abilities can be inherited from their parents.

• Environment

  • These describes the conditions where you grew up.
  • Examples are family, your friends, and your culture.
    • Family
      • Experiences from childhood help shape your personality
      • Children learn from their families about their feelings, attitudes, and appropriate ways to behave.
      • Children often has the tendency to imitate the behavior of what they see.
    • Friends
      • Your friends may influence your choices or decisions, and even the living conditions that you have.
    • Culture
      • It can affect personality in a way that some personality traits may be more valued in one culture than the other.

Connections to Other Notes

See also: Personality Traits in Psychology

• Personality Psychology

  • the study that focuses on patterns of thoughts and behaviors that make each individual unique.
  • research on the field have taken a quantitative approach as it is now focused on identifying and measuring personality traits, and how these traits determine a person’s behavior in a particular context.

• Personality Traits

  • relatively consistent patterns of thought and behavior
  • proposed to have five dimensions, known as the Big Five or Five Factor model.

Dimension	Factors	Low Score Traits	High Score Traits
Openness	imagination, feelings, actions, ideas	practical, conventional, prefers routine	curious, wide range of interests, independent
Conscientiousness	competence, self-discipline, throughtfulness, goal-driven	impulsive, careless, disorganized	hardworking, dependable, organized
Extroversion	sociability, assertiveness, emotional expression	quiet, reserved, withdrawn	outgoing, warm, seeks adventure
Agreeableness	cooperative, trustworthy, good-natured	critical, uncooperative, suspicious	helpful, trusting, empathetic
Neuroticism	tendency toward unstable emotions	calm, even-tempered, secure	anxious, unhappy, prone to negative emotions