Approaches to personality

The essentials

Personality refers to a person's characteristic patterns of behaviour and ways of thinking and feeling that are relatively stable across situations and time. Psychologists explain personality through several approaches.

Key points

• Type approaches: Hippocrates' four types (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic); Charaka Samhita's tridosha (vata, pitta, kapha); trigunas (sattva, rajas, tamas); Sheldon's body types (endomorphic, mesomorphic, ectomorphic); Jung's introverts and extraverts; Friedman and Rosenman's Type A (impatient, competitive, hostile, prone to heart disease) and Type B (relaxed, easy-going). Type C is linked with cancer proneness and Type D with depression proneness.
• Trait approaches: Allport's cardinal, central and secondary traits; Cattell's 16 source traits (16PF); Eysenck's dimensions of neuroticism versus emotional stability and extraversion versus introversion, later psychoticism versus sociability; the Big Five (McCrae and Costa): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
• Psychodynamic (Freud): levels of consciousness (conscious, preconscious, unconscious); id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), superego (moral conscience). Defence mechanisms such as repression, projection, denial, reaction formation and rationalisation. Psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital.
• Post-Freudians: Jung (collective unconscious, archetypes), Karen Horney (basic anxiety), Alfred Adler (inferiority complex, individual psychology), Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson (identity crisis).
• Behavioural: personality as learned responses to stimuli.
• Cultural: personality traits as adaptations to the ecology and culture of a group.
• Humanistic: Carl Rogers (real and ideal self, fully functioning person, unconditional positive regard); Abraham Maslow (self-actualisation).

Exam tips

• Learn one example of each defence mechanism; these are frequently tested.

Common mistakes

• Reaction formation is acting opposite to a hidden feeling; projection is attributing one's own feeling to others.
• Cardinal traits dominate a whole life and are rare; central traits are the few typical ones most people have.