INTRODUCTION TO PERSONALITY PAPER

Introduction to Personality Paper

Introduction to Personality Paper

a. Define personality

"Personality refers to a relatively stable structure of behavior and consistent internal state, which explains the tendency of human behavior" (McShane and Glinow, 2001). Personality is stable enough, but if it changes at all, only after a long period of time or as a result of the traumatic event. "The person has both internal and external elements" (Wilson 2004). External features of the behavior, it is obvious that we rely on detection of personality someone while the inner qualities represent the thoughts, values, and genetic characteristics that we collect with the observed behavior. personality of the individual as inherited forms of the environment. "Our personality is partly genetically inherited from our parents" (Holbeche 2005). However, these genetic features of personality change a few of life experience. Recent studies have shown that "certain personality traits predict some work-related behaviors, stress reactions and emotions quite well under certain conditions" (Middleton 2002).

b. Examine the theoretical approaches in the study of personality.

Freud put forward a psychodynamic explanation of personality development through his theory of psychosexual development. His theory was largely split into three strands: the structure of the personality, stages of development, and defence mechanisms. He believed that the psyche (the mind) was split into three parts: the id, the ego and the superego. The id operates on the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification for its needs, the ego operates on the reality principle and attempts to satisfy the id's desires in a socially acceptable manner, and the superego acts as the conscience and portrays an image of what the person should strive to be (the ego ideal) (Middleton 2002).

They develop through a series of stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital); for example the id develops in the oral stage (0-18 months), the ego develops in the anal stage (18-36 months) and the superego develops in the phallic stage (3-6 years). The stages describe what the greatest source of pleasure is for a person in that stage; for example a child in the oral stage will derive greatest pleasure from sucking. Defence mechanisms, according to Freud, are strategies which reduce anxiety, for example denial is the refusal to accept that something exists or is happening, and repression is the forgetting of an event which is pushed into the unconscious. Together, these three strands of Freud's psychoanalytic theory describe ...