PERSONALITY

the characteristic way in which a particular individual thinks, feels, and behaves. Personality embraces a person's moods, attitudes, and opinions and is most clearly expressed in interactions with other people. Personality is those behavioral characteristics, both inherent and acquired, that distinguish each individual and are observable in the individual's relations to the environment and to the social group. a characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Personality embraces moods, attitudes, and opinions and is most clearly expressed in interactions with other people. It includes behavioral characteristics, both inherent and acquired, that distinguish one person from another and that can be observed in people's relations to the environment and to the social group. The term personality has been defined in many ways, but as a psychological concept two main meanings have evolved. The first pertains to the consistent differences that exist between people: in this sense, the study of personality focuses on classifying and explaining relatively stable human psychological characteristics. The second meaning emphasizes those qualities that make all people alike and that distinguish psychological man from other species; it directs the personality theorist to search for those regularities among all people that define the nature of man as well as the factors that influence the course of lives. This duality may help explain the two directions that personality studies have taken: on the one hand, the study of ever more specific qualities in people, and, on the other, the search for the organized totality of psychological functions that emphasizes the interplay between organic and psychological events within people and those social and biological events that surround them. The dual definition of personality is interwoven in most of the topics discussed below. It should be emphasized, however, that no definition of personality has found universal acceptance within the field. The study of personality can be said to have its origins in the fundamental idea that people are distinguished by their characteristic individual patterns of behaviour-the distinctive ways in which they walk, talk, furnish their living quarters, or express their urges. Whatever the behaviour, personologists-as those who systematically study personality are called-examine how people differ in the ways they express themselves and attempt to determine the causes of these differences. Although other fields of psychology examine many of the same functions and processes, such as attention, thinking, or motivation, the personologist places emphasis on how these different processes fit together and become integrated so as to give each person a distinctive identity, or personality. The systematic psychological study of personality has emerged from a number of different sources, including psychiatric case studies that focused on lives in distress, from philosophy, which explores the nature of man, and from physiology, anthropology, and social psychology. The systematic study of personality as a recognizable and separate discipline within psychology may be said to have begun in the 1930s with the publication in the United States of two textbooks, Psychology of Personality (1937) by Ross Stagner and Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937) by Gordon W. Allport, followed by Henry A. Murray's Explorations in Personality (1938), which contained a set of experimental and clinical studies, and by Gardner Murphy's integrative and comprehensive text, Personality: A Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure (1947). Yet personology can trace its ancestry to the ancient Greeks, who proposed a kind of biochemical theory of personality. Additional reading Definitions of personality as a psychological concept, with treatment of related issues, are found in the following reference works: Rom Harr and Roger Lamb (eds.), The Dictionary of Personality and Social Psychology (1986); Richard L. Gregory (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987); Raymond J. Corsini et al. (eds.), Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology (1987); and Jonathan L. Freedman, Introductory Psychology, 2nd ed. (1982).Major theories of personality are surveyed in Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Theories of Personality, 3rd ed. (1978); and in Nathan Brody, Personality: In Search of Individuality (1988). Roger Brown, Social Psychology, the Second Edition (1986); and Irwin G. Sarason, Personality: An Objective Approach, 2nd ed. (1972), review and evaluate contemporary personality studies and research methods. The best presentation of psychoanalytic ideas remains Freud's own, available in many translated selections. The following two, edited and translated by James Strachey, can be recommended: Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1977; originally published in German, 1916-17), and New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1974; originally published in German, 1933). Gardner Murphy, Personality: A Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure (1947, reissued 1966), integrates views and data that reach across historical epochs and many intellectual disciplines. The theory of cognitive controls and styles is carefully analyzed in George S. Klein, Perception, Motives, and Personality (1970).Discussions of the variety of currently held views on personality, demonstrating a broad interdisciplinary approach, include James F. Masterson, The Search for the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age (1988); and Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillett (eds.), Persons and Personality: Contemporary Inquiry (1987). Adaptation of personality in social interaction is explored in Joel Aronoff and John P. Wilson, Personality in the Social Process (1985); Alan S. Waterman, The Psychology of Individualism (1984); Robert A. Levine, Culture, Behavior, and Personality: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Psychosocial Adaptation, 2nd ed. (1982); Nancy Cantor and John F. Kihlstrom, Personality, Cognition, and Social Interaction (1981); and Nancy Cantor and John F. Kihlstrom (eds.), Personality and Social Intelligence (1987). Issues of personality development from childhood through adulthood are interpreted in Robert L. Leahy (ed.), The Development of the Self (1985); Laurence R. Simon, Cognition and Affect: A Developmental Psychology of the Individual (1986); Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Personality Development in Adulthood (1988); and Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, new anniversary ed. (1985). Philip S. Holzman