Personality theory: major approaches and frameworks

Personality Theory and Why It Matters
Introduction
What shapes the human personality? What factors impact the development of the individual’s cognition, behaviors, and outlook? These questions have longed been considered by psychologists and researchers. Early on, some believed nature played a more dominant role; later, psychologists began to examine the role of a nurturing environment in the formation of the personality. Over the decades, it has become more and more evident that the human personality is complexly impacted both by nature and nurture. To assess personality, therefore, one needs a holistic understanding of the human subject. This paper will discuss major concepts in behavioral, interpersonal and self-psychology models of personality theory. It will describe the roles of hereditary and environmental factors in personality development. It will also describe the assessment method that is most useful in assessing personality, as well as provide personal and career applications.
Major Concepts
Behavioral
Behaviorism focuses on how people develop learned behaviors and responses to stimuli. Seligman added to the field of behaviorism by developing the concept of learned helplessness. He asked the question, “Why do people become hopeless, feeling that there is nothing they can do to make matters better for themselves or to change something in their lives?” He theorized that people develop a sense of “learned helplessness,” which is why they feel defeated no matter what the situation is (Lecci, 2015). This is an important concept because it explains why people enter into modes of acting that seem completely self-destructive: they have learned that this is the only way for them to act. What they need is an example of how to overcome their situations.
Interpersonal
Sullivan was responsible for developing the idea of self-esteem, which he saw as something that deeply impacted how one’s personality is formed. Self-esteem is what helped a person to reduce anxiety and feel more personally secure. The more self-esteem a person had the more self-actualizing he could become. It stemmed from Maslow’s (1943) theory of human motivation, in which it was posited that self-actualization was the final accomplishment of individuals after their esteem needs were met. What makes Sullivan’s concept so important is that he argued that individuals need to learn how to function in high-anxiety situations. The more successful they are in these types of situations, the better able they will be to handle anything that comes their way. They will be full of confidence and self-esteem. Self-esteem thus became known as an important quality of people who achieve success: they believe in themselves. It was an answer in some ways to Seligman’s problem of learned helplessness.
Self-Psychology Models
The important concept hat Kohut emphasized in his approach to self-psychology was that people need to empathize with others, and that parents who fail to empathize with their children is what most commonly leads to psychopathology. Empathy as a concept was not new, but in terms of application Kohult described how a therapist could use empathy as a form of vicarious introspection that would enable the therapist to develop more insight more quickly into the needs of the client (Lecci, 2015). This concept is the most important in this model because it is what facilitates the learning process and helps to lay the foundation for improvement in the human personality when psychopathology has developed.
The Roles of Heredity and Environment
Heredity and environment impact the development of the personality in big ways. Essentially, it is a combination of nature and nurture that determines the pathway of the personality. Nature is set up through biology, i.e., through hereditary transmission of DNA. But DNA itself is not necessarily going to be the last word on the development of the personality. Indeed, researchers have shown that DNA can be unlocked in a way by nurturing parents. Erikson’s concept of psychosocial development gives a view of the epigenetic principle and explains that it is essentially the notion that nature and nurture work together to develop the human personality (Lecci, 2015).
The epigenetic principle is important in understanding how nature and nurture work together to explain the development of the personality. Weaver et al. (2004) and Hurley (2013) both have researched this principle. The example that Weaver et al. (2004) give of how nature and nurture work together is the rat mother who licks her pups; the DNA of those pups is read differently by the body during its development because the licking has triggered a response in the body. Those pups go on to lick their own pups. Hurley (2013) built on those findings by looking at how rats born to attentive mothers have lower levels of glucocorticoid receptors in their hippocampus and rats born to inattentive mothers have high levels of glucocorticoid receptors. Both researchers essentially showed that neither nature nor nurture work in a vacuum but that both impact one another.
Erikson’s stages of development explained this interaction of nature and nurture to some degree, by focusing on an internal conflict with the person and framing it in a psychosocial manner, showing that the internal conflict is resolved or not resolved based on how the person interacts with the environment. At each stage of development, the individual is facing some internal conflict such as identity vs. role confusion and that conflict is impacted by the external environment and the degree to which the individual is appropriately nurtured along the way. The nurturing of a mother to a child at the very first stage of development will help the baby’s brain and personality to develop in a very specific way, much as the affections of a rat mother shown to her pups triggers a response in the rat pup for it to develop in a specific way. Without that triggering nurturing act, the behavior is not passed on by way of nature (DNA). The nurturing act has to be made in order for the DNA characteristic to be activated and read by the body.
Psychosocial development is a most applicable concept because Erikson gives an important sense personality development as a kind of dramatic process. Nature by itself is insufficient to provide everything needed for a proper development. Nurturing is necessary—but it must be balanced—neither too much nor too little, so that the individual develops sufficient amounts of autonomy and self-esteem, the ability to be independent without developing an attachment disorder.
Based on the behavioral, interpersonal and self-psychology models, clearly one can see a pattern of how individual personality is impacted by one’s interaction with one’s environment, by stimuli, and by internal processing of events. One’s own self-esteem plays a big part in how personality is shaped, and that esteem is solidified by conflict and engagement with anxiety. If a person flees anxiety and never faces it, he will not have much esteem for himself and will be unlikely to have a fully developed personality.
Assessment in Personality Theory
There are many methods of assessing personality. Psychometric tools for measuring personality in a clinical setting and psychometric tools used for measuring personality in a non-clinical setting are most common for adults. For children, behavioral assessments are most common because it is easier to directly observe a child’s behavior objectively, as analyzing a child’s psychology is much more complex and subjective (Lecci, 2015). For adults, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory®-2 (MMPI-2) is a clinical setting psychometric tool that might be used to help a doctor diagnose a personality disorder in a patient. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is another example of a common tool: it is a psychometric tool that might be used in a non-clinical setting to help a recruiter evaluate a candidate for a job position. Typically, one will use 1) structured interviews, 2) self-report inventories and objective tests, 3) projective tests, and 4) rating scales and checklists.
Structured interviews are used with predetermined questions that are asked the person and the answers are used with a diagnostic tool that compares the answers to DSM criteria for diagnosing personality disorder. Self-Report Inventories and Objective Tests include the MMPI-2 and the PAI, which can be used to assess various disorders and even if the individual is at risk for self-harm. Projective Tests are tools like the Rorschach test or the inkblot test as it is called. The Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R) is used to measure erratic behavior and a lack of empathy. Checklists and rating scales usually use the Likert scale or something comparable to give a numeric rating or ranking to various responses of the individual. These can be used to determine personality types, characteristics, and disorders. This is the most useful method because it provides one with a path for clinical diagnosis, which can help a person to get the help that is needed for addressing personality disorder issues (Osberg, Haseley & Kamas, 2008).
The MMPI is the best because it is clinical and can be used to diagnose an actual personality disorder. It has utility in a health situation. For people who are simply trying to better understand their personalities so that they can adjust things on an individual basis so as to better their careers or personal relationships, the MBTI can be used as it gives a person a good idea of what kind of personality he has based on responses to scenarios, and that can tell him what kind of job he might like to consider or what type of role he should take in a relationship. The MBTI can be used for coaching and for personal development and is often used in organizations wherein people are trying to develop their own personalities (McCarthy & Garavan, 1999).
Personal Applications
The model that best explains this writer’s personal journey of personality development is Erikson’s psychosocial model of personality development. Overall, personality formation is always going to remain a mystery to some extent because there is an element of mystery to everything in life; people simply cannot know all the facts about an individual, or what factors are responsible for this or that development unless one spends one’s lifetime in analysis. However, for this writer, it can be seen that Erikson’s model is applicable in this writer’s personal journey because it paints each stage of development as being understood from the standpoint of a specific conflict, such as Identity vs. Role Confusion in the adolescent years. By seeing personality development as an outcome of an interaction between the self (including the person’s biology) and the environment, it can best be understood how one’s overall personality has been shaped and affected over time.
The element of this writer’s personality that is best explained by this model is the element of self-identity. I know who I am and what my role is in the world because I have engaged in that conflict of self vs. role confusion, just as Erikson describes it. It is not, however, that this model is applicable alone, but rather that it can be combined with other models, which is why it makes so much sense. For instance, the interpersonal model with the concept of self-esteem is also applicable here, because it is through conflict and dealing with anxiety that one gets a better sense of one’s value and what one is worth. I have not shied away from dealing with difficult situations and I feel that I am confident about what I can do as a result.
Career Applications
Understanding personality theory can help me to be successful in a career in the field of Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Psychiatric Nursing because it can help me to be more empathetic towards others, as Kohut says is need in the self-psychology model. It also helps to remind me that not everyone who presents for a disorder is going to be the same. Some are going to be impacted more by nature (by hereditary factors, fon example) and some are going to be more impacted by their environment (by the degree to which they were nurtured growing up). For everyone it will be a mix, and it must be determined what the individual is dealing with today in order for a proper approach to be developed.
It is also helpful because rather than expecting everyone to be homogenous and the same in every way, personality theory reminds me that everybody is different because of different innate characteristics and different experiences that have affected the person. The better one understands personality, the better able one will be to use social and emotional intelligence skills to foster communication and build relationships. All of this can be very helpful from a psychological point of view in a clinical setting because the better that one understands what is going on with the client the better situated the therapist will be to assist that client. Better relationships allow for trust to be established, and with trust as a foundation the ability to provide real help and support for a client is strengthened.
Conclusion
Personality theory contains a great many different views and models. The various behavioral, interpersonal and self-psychology models and concepts are all important in helping one to understand how people can develop. The concept of learned hopelessness is important, for instance, because it explains why people come to a kind of place of self-defeat. The concept of self-esteem is important because it explains how people come to a place of self-actualization. The concept of empathy is important because it is what helps therapists assist patients quickly in identifying their issues and addressing them in a positive manner. Various assessments are useful, depending on the situation—whether it is a clinical setting or a non-clinical setting. Overall, personality is informed both by nature and nurture and one should see how his own biology and environment have influenced him. For professionals in the field, it means using the tools of personality theory to help others understand themselves and address any issues that need to be addressed.
References
Hurley, D. (2013). Trait vs. fate. Discover 34(4), 48-55. Retrieved from http://discovermagazine.com
Lecci, L. B. (2015). Personality. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370.
McCarthy, A. M., & Garavan, T. N. (1999). Developing self?awareness in the managerial career development process: the value of 360?degree feedback and the MBTI. Journal of European Industrial Training, 3, 2.
Osberg, T. M., Haseley, E. N., & Kamas, M. M. (2008). The MMPI–2 Clinical scales and Restructured Clinical (RC) scales: Comparative psychometric properties and relative diagnostic efficiency in young adults. Journal of Personality Assessment, 90(1), 81-92.
Weaver, I. C. G., Cervoni, N., Champagne, F. A., D’Alessio, A. C, Sharma, S., Seckl, J.R., … Meaney, M. J. (2004). Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 7(8), 847-854. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn1276