Personality Explained: A Brief Look at a Complex Construct

Source: Shutterstock

The field of personality psychology is concerned with the assessment of the construct of personality. Constructs are simply psychological (as opposed to physically observable matter, e.g., a chair) concepts like emotion and sadness.

Physical variables may be connected to a psychological construct, but they do not define it. For example, sadness often involves a physical expression, e.g., tears but the definition of sadness is not tearing.

Defining a "self"

Personality is a longstanding pattern of acting, feeling, and behaving that we think of as belonging to the self (for example, “my personality is”) and makes us prone to act, feel, and think in certain predictable ways in different situations. For instance, sometimes an individual’s personality is described with the adjective, “outgoing.” What we mean when say that someone is outgoing is that in general, in social situations the person will likely engage in a set of behaviors (talking, making eye contact, expressing affect), experience a set of feelings (excitement, energy, pleasure), and display a pattern of thoughts (e.g., “I want to talk,” “I want to be liked,” or “being the center of attention is a good thing.”).

Personality is sometimes defined in terms of adjectival traits like “outgoingness” or “introversion” or categorical types e.g., “extrovert” or “paranoid”). The distinction between traits and types is central in personality psychology and has been a controversial as well as debated topic from the beginning of the field. Another question key to personality psychology is what sort of variables should be considered as comprising the construct of personality aside from thinking, feeling, behaving (traits or types). Some theorists conceptualize motivation and attachment as distinctive personality variables. Others view values as a personality characteristic. In my opinion, all the above fall under the category of personality and more: traits, types, values, motivation, attachment, as well as, ways of coping, defense mechanisms, problem-solving style, and other cognitive capacities or skills.

Assessment

In addition to conceptualizing personality, the field of personality is also concerned with its measurement/assessment. Personality can be measured with surveys, behavioral observation, or performance and projective tasks. Sometimes individuals are aware that a specific component of their personality is being measured (explicit assessment) and sometimes it is not obvious, or the person cannot exercise conscious control over their responses to the assessment instrument or test (implicit assessment).

Source: Shutterstock

Personality exists at different levels of description and can be measured in different ways. Measurement and description of personality, as well as its explanation or conceptualization, is often guided by different psychological schools of thought or paradigms for understanding the mind, from behavioral to cognitive and humanistic to psychodynamic.

Future Aims

I hope to elaborate and clarify some of these concepts in future posts with a focus on factor-analytic versus theoretically-based (aka rationally-based) personality assessment as well as psychodynamic, developmental, social-cognitive, and linguistic-descriptive models of the self/personality.

Stay tuned.