History of modern personality theory and research

History Of Modern Psychology of Personality

The Diversity of Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

One of the most fundamental distinctions in understanding the history of modern psychology of personality is between research into the psychology of the individual and research into psychology through statistical research on groups of study participants. Other fundamental distinctions include the influence of situations and the influence of inherent personal tendencies of individuals irrespective of situational variables. Modern psychology also recognizes the validity of extensive physiological and neurological variation among individuals that contributes to outward behavior, and it considers distinctions based on the chronological age at the time of specific behaviors. Finally, the wide range of modern psychological specialties and subspecialties give rise to another specialty: integrative models of psychology that draw from various different perspectives and methodologies to extract the optimal combined beneficial approaches of the entire field of psychology of personality.

The Culture of Personality, Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Sociology

The common perception of personality in general originated in the early decades of the 20th century, before which the phrase "personality" was not widely associated with the formal study of psychology; nor was it part of the American lexicon. The impetus for the focus on personality (in general) was largely attributable to public fears about depersonalization as a consequence of rapid industrialization and urbanization of American society. The contemporaneous influence of the first-generation psychodynamic (i.e. Freudian) theorists also contributed greatly to the emerging focus on personality in psychology. Subsequently, the field of sociology had an influence on psychology by virtue of the growing use of social work methodologies (such as using case studies and certain statistical methods developed for sociological data) and the gradual appreciation for the psychological significance of variables in the sociological realm.

Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Two Different Tasks of Personality Psychology

The growing field of multi-disciplined approaches focused principally either on the study of individual differences among people (and the range of those differences) or on the study of individuals as integrated wholes with psychologically significant variables in numerous specific disciplines. Generally, the modern conflict between the psychometric-analysis approach to understanding the psychology of human personality and the psychiatric-and-historical (or "interpretative") approach to understanding of psychology relates to how human personality traits develop and how much they determine state of mind and outward behavior of the individual.