Theories of personality development and psychological frameworks

Psychology

The Conceptual and Theoretical Domains of Personality Psychology: Individual, Social, and Developmental Phases

One of the primary goals of psychology as a social science is to explain and understand, through empirical methods and findings, the nature of the individual, as s/he relates to himself/herself and the society. Psychology has its different fields of study, and each field pertains to a specific aspect of human psyche and development that is essential to the study of the individual. One of these fields is the psychology of personality, where psychologists try to find how personalities is conceived and later develops within an individual. Studying personality is essential because it determines an individual's thinking, behavior, and feeling. Establishing constructs about personality and its variants among people thus provides information for social scientists to make specific descriptions about an individual's behavior as s/he develops.

The importance of personality in the study of psychology led to the formulation of theories that would provide social scientists with frameworks to work with when trying to understand and resolve a specific social or psychological problem. At this point, it is important to note that prior to the formulation of personality theories, constructs or ideas about the area of personality psychology must be first identified, defined, and operationalized. Theories of personality are first evaluated according to their conceptual frameworks -- that is, social scientists must first address the factors that influence and affect the development of personality within an individual. There are three domains by which social scientists can properly identify and define important concepts and ideas relevant to the study of personality: the individual, social aspects or the society, and individual development (Cloninger, p. 10).

These three domains contain factors that affect human personalities and their development. Conceptualizing these significant issues can provide social scientists with concrete information about the nature and for the formulation of the main thrust of each personality theory. Issues essential when discussing the individual per se is to consider the traits of the individual, which is actually a holistic view of a person, which involves looking into his/her physical, emotional, and mental characteristics. At the societal level, an individual's personality is determined, influenced, and affected based on his/her ability to adapt to the environment; behavior, thinking, and actions towards self and others; and perceived and achieved expectations of the individual vis-a-vis the society. Lastly, developmental stages of humans such as transition from childhood to adulthood are also analyzed, mainly to gauge whether, indeed, personality is significant and does affect an individual's development.

These concepts become the basis for social scientists to construct theories about the psychology of personality. Supplied with sufficient information about the nature of individual, society, and the relationship of both, and their influence in altering human personality, theories are then formulated to provide social scientists with a general overview of personality as it relates to the field of psychology. Since theoretical constructs are broader and more general in their perspective, personality theories are categorized under different approaches or perspectives, identified as follows: dispositional, biological, psychoanalytic, neoanalytic, learning, phenomenological, and cognitive self-regulation (Carver, 1996:10-3).

The dispositional perspective posits that personality, or human nature, is a set of relatively permanent qualities built into the person. This means that people have specific behavior and actions for a particular type of situation. It portrays human personality as a diverse, yet constant set of behaviors and actions that can be easily predicted. This is contradicted by the learning perspective, which claims that human nature is dynamic, and over time and as an individual develops, his/her behavior also changes and become more inconsistent as the individual gains more experience in his/her constructed social reality. The biological perspective provides a more technical viewpoint of human personality: it states that personality is genetically-based, thus, personality is biologically-driven and inherited.