6533b82afe1ef96bd128b697

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Personality: Definitions, Approaches and Theories

Ewa Piechurska-kuciel

subject

Trait theoryPsychosexual developmentmedia_common.quotation_subjectTraitPersonalityCognitionPsychoanalytic theoryPsychologyPersonality psychologySocial cognitive theorymedia_commonCognitive psychology

description

The main objective of this chapter is to describe the concept of personality and approaches to researching it. For this reason, first a view on outlining the field of personality psychology in its present form, then the key term—personality—is discussed. The next section contains a synopsis of the main approaches to the study of personality, including psychoanalytic, learning and humanistic perspectives. The objective of the second part is to present the main theoretical directions in personality studies, which are divided into two basic trends. The first one is represented by type theories that focus on qualitative differences and discrete categories. The other direction is composed of trait theories that aim to formulate the latent structure of personality on the basis of statistical procedures, this has led to the development of the trait model adopted as the groundwork of this volume—the Big Five. The last section of this chapter is devoted to a general description of the most important theories exploring the development of personality across a lifespan (psychosexual, psychosocial, cognitive, and social cognitive).

yearjournalcountryeditionlanguage
2020-01-01
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59324-7_1