We explain what personality is and the theories that propose its classification. Also, what are its general traits and characteristics.
What is personality?
Personality is an internal order of an emotional-behavioral typewhich all people have and which remains more or less unchanged throughout their lives, allowing a certain margin of predictability over time.
Personality is responsible for the fact that when faced with similar stimuli, two people react differentlysince they have different attitudinal patterns, and different feelings and thoughts.
Personality is a dynamic psychic fact, that is, it It changes over time and is susceptible to awarenesswhich has been represented in culture as a system of masks that the individual uses to deal with the different types of situations that are presented to him.
Origin of personality
The word personality It comes from the Latin personthe name given to the masks used by actors during their performances in ancient times.
Also appears as personalized in scholastic philosophersmeaning the set of features that turned any individual into a person, that is, into a legal subject and citizen.
In later times, the word person came to designate any individual and personality to its unique psychic characteristics.
Definition of personality
There are numerous defining approaches to personality, but broadly speaking it can be said that it is a pattern of feelings, emotions, and thoughts that preferably manifest themselves in the behavior of a given individual, persisting more or less over time and forming an essential part of their unrepeatable identity.
Personality traits
There have been numerous attempts to order the supposed components of personality, thus generating different typologies according to the predominance of each of them. These components have been called traits and They are classified as stable and eventualaccording to the predominance of its appearance.
So, Stable traits are those that are most commonly manifestedwhile eventual traits appear occasionally or sporadically, depending on the environmental conditions and the psychic construction of the individual.
The theory of the four humors
Hippocrates, in ancient times, postulated the theory that the four constituent elements of personality They had to do with the predominance of four substances or humorsin turn linked to each of the four elements of nature and each of the four seasons.
This theory It was in force for centuries, practically until the birth of modern medicine. According to her there would be four temperamental typologies:
- Sanguine. With a predominance of blood, linked to air and spring, he was supposed to be loving, brave, optimistic, passionate.
- Choleric. With a predominance of yellow bile, linked to fire and summer, he had a bad temperament, easily irritable.
- Melancholic. With a predominance of black bile, linked to earth and autumn, he was believed to be sleepy, depressed, depressive and contemplative.
- Phlegmatic. With a predominance of phlegm, linked to water and winter, he was considered cold, cerebral and indifferent.
Eysenck’s three dimensions
Seeking to reduce personality traits to their most essential expression, Hans Eysenck proposed three independent dimensions or “superfactors” in every personalitywhich could be used as scales to characterize personality. These dimensions are:
- Neuroticism. It involves the traits of shyness, sadness, depression, guilt, tension, fear, shame, emotionality and worry, whose common axis seems to be a strong consciousness of self.
- Extraversion/Introversion. Sociability, activity, assertiveness, dominance, carefreeness, boldness, speed, spontaneity, or the opposite. Its axis seems to be in the relationship with others.
- Psychoticism. Aggressiveness, impulsiveness, hostility, cruelty, egocentrism, traits that seem impulsive and even visceral.
5 factor model
Later developments inherited Eysenck’s dimensions and proposed a model based on 5 major personality traits, namely:
- Extraversion (or introversion). High socialization, boldness in social situations, tendency to avoid solitude. Tends to experience positive emotions: satisfaction, joy, excitement. Has an intense relationship with the environment. Its opposite, introversion, is identical but of the opposite sign in every way.
- Openness to change (or closure). Intellectual curiosity, aesthetic exploration, a taste for inner experiences, independence of judgment. Tends to originality, awareness of one’s own emotions and to be highly imaginative. In the opposite case, it is the opposite: a disposition less sensitive to art, more in tune with familiarity and less
- Responsibility (or irresponsibility). Self-control, planning, organization, everything that makes up the will to achieve. It tends towards more conscientious, willful and determined personalities, and in the opposite case, it tends towards more lax moral assessments.
- Kindness (or incivility). Docility, ability to establish friendly interpersonal relationships, reliability, solidarity. Its positive pole tends to greater conformity and the negative pole tends to critical thinking.
- Neuroticism. Anxious, unstable personalities with high emotional volatility, high levels of anxiety and worries. Tends to have low tolerance to stress, poor social skills, and little adaptability.
Psychoanalysis
The doctrine created by Sigmund Freud’s studies, psychoanalysis, involved the construction of the human personality from conscious and unconscious elements, which he structured based on three fundamental psychic instances:
- It. This is the formless psychic matter: the set of drives governed by the pleasure principle, of very primitive formation, and manifest only in the sense of unconscious actions, of an emotional content that escapes the known psychic world.
- Superego. It constitutes an ideal psychic being, an entity that regulates behavior that always aims at a sense of order, of it must bepsychic image of ourselves.
- I. The self is supposed to be what is within our control, and is a part of the It that has been modified by contact with reality and the social order. Therefore, it satisfies the impulses coming from the id when the occasion or the control of the superego allows it.
The Jungian approach
Psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, in his theory of personality, distinguished only two basic typologies, namely:
- Extroverts
- introverts
Yes ok no individual belongs exclusively to these categoriesaccording to Jung, one of the two will be found predominantly present in its social composition.
Other approaches to personality
Other considerations regarding personality understand it according to the singular integration of two distinct factors: temperament, understood as a genetic predisposition to certain types of behaviors; and character, the result of the evolution of said temperament in a specific social environment.
That way, A similar temperament would produce different character traits.according to the individual’s particular history and emotions.
Environmental influences on personality
As we have said, personality does not only manifest itself in the realm of intimacy, but often operates as a way of connecting with the environmentsince we are above all gregarious beings.
In that sense, the environment will largely determine the mechanisms of personality, since Emotionally significant experiences leave their marklike footprints on the sand, in the way the individual reacts, whether traumatically or, on the contrary, positively.