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In psychology, personality is a collection of emotion, thought, and behavior patterns unique to a person. There are several theoretical perspectives on personality in psychology, which involve different ideas about the relationship between personality and other psychological constructs, as well as different theories about the way personality develops.

1 Personality theories

There is a wide range of psychological theories about the way personality works. Most specific theories can be grouped into one of the following classes of theories.

1.1 Trait theories

According to the DSM-IV, the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, personality traits are "prominent aspects of personality that are exhibited in a wide range of important social and personal contexts. ...". In other words: persons have certain characteristics which partly determine their behaviour. For example, a friendly person is likely to generally listen well and show interest in others.

Gordon Allport delineates three kinds of traits with varying degrees of intensity: cardinal trait s, central trait s, and secondary trait s. Raymond Cattell's research propagated a two-tiered personality structure with fifteen "primary factors" and five "secondary factors".

Building on the work of Cattell and others, Lewis Goldberg proposed a five dimension personality model, nicknamed the "Big Five":

  1. Extroversion
  2. Agreeableness
  3. Conscientiousness
  4. Emotional Stability
  5. Intellect
Holland proposed a "RIASEC" model of personality widely used in vocational counseling. The RIASEC is a circumplex model where the six types, which are represented as a hexagon where physically closer types are more related than distal types:
  1. Realistic - Physical, hands-on, tool-oriented, masculine
  2. Investigative - Scientific, technical, methodological
  3. Artistic - writing, painting, singing, etc.
  4. Social - nurturing, supporting, helping, healing
  5. Enterprising - organizing, activating, motivating
  6. Conventional - clerical, detail-oriented
Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Meyers alleged that the writings of Carl Jung delineated personality types by constructing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Their personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people's behaviour in terms of fixed characteristics.

1.2 Psychodynamic theories

Psychodynamic (also called psychoanalytic) theories explain human behaviour in terms of interaction between various components of personality. Sigmund Freud was the founder of this school. He broke the human personality down to three significant components: the id, the ego and the superego. According to Freud, personality is shaped by the interactions of these three components.



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