Psychological Theories of Personal Characteristics

Personality influences everything in your life from the way you live your day-to-day rituals and experiences to the relationships you find yourself in throughout your entire life. It is the sole foundation to who you truly are and what sets you aside from the next person/everyone else in the world. Personality delves much deeper than traits acquired on the surface level, it explains through a developmental scope, how you treat people, how you treat yourself, and how you live your daily life within your skin.

Personality reveals many things that contribute to your “true self” which are from your genetics, your upbringing, and your life experiences. There are many types of theories on personality in the psychology field as there are still many viable explanations to support how one’s development affects them later on in life.

For starters, Psychologist Gordon Allport was one of the first in his field to tie personality to an individual’s personal traits. A trait is a personal characteristic we have which stays generally the same overtime and is resistant to changing.

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He believed that certain consistencies in a person’s behavior may reflect some sort of inner psychological quality. He organized traits into a hierarchy of three levels: cardinal traits, central traits, and secondary traits. Cardinal traits are traits that are so resistant to change and so dominant that a person becomes predominantly known for those types of characteristics. Central traits make up one’s personality. Lastly, secondary traits are those of which you pick up from your environment, or culture, that are shared by many people.

While Allport believed that there was an endless stream of personality traits, which people believed was problematic because it would be difficult to infer meaning and set concrete characteristics based on similar/almost-alike traits, psychologist Raymond Cattell suggested there were only 16 of these traits. These 16 consisted of abstractedness, apprehension, dominance, emotional stability, liveliness, openness to change, perfectionism, privateness, reasoning, rule-consciousness, self-reliance, sensitivity, social boldness, tension, vigilance, and warmth. He believed that every person ranged in every trait to a varying degree but only had one dominant one.

Psychologst Hans Eysenck narrowed this list of traits even further and suggested there were only three. These of which, are extroversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.

Furthermore, the “Big Five” theory, possibly the most popular and widely-accepted trait theory in the branch of personality psychology, proposes that personality is made up to the extent of only 5 qualities: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness, whom similar to Cattell, believed individuals lied on a spectrum with each.

Abraham Maslow was a well renowned and very influential psychologist of the 20th century who was most known for creating “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” a theory in psychology that is comprised of hierarchical levels from the bottom-up with the final stage being self-actualization, or your self-fulfillment needs. This “refers to the person’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially” (Maslow). He believed that human beings are motivated by a hierarchy of needs which are your: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. With one completion of each you move on to the next of your needs, nearing toward your full and true self.

Carl Jung was the founder of analytical psychology and had many shared interests with Freud about the unconscious. He is best known for his theories on the Collective Unconscious, including the concept of archetypes, and the use of synchronicity in psychotherapy. He also developed the concepts of the extroverted and introverted personality. The Collective Unconscious, in theory, refers to the idea that humans are endowed with an innate archetype since birth. This archetype is created to respond and and experience basic human behavior and specific situation a type of way. For example, a mother-child relationship is governed by the mother archetype.

Some theories look at how personality develops and changes through life. One of the best-known personality theories, Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, focuses on the stages of personality development in children that prepare them for their adult years to come. Similar to Maslow’s ideology, he believed that each person goes through stages in their youth and a completion of that stage moves them on to their next phase of development. We are motioned through each stage with libidinal energy, or the force that drives all human behaviors. Failure at any particular stage can lead to problems that arise in their adult personality.

Another psychologist, Erik Erikson adopted the idea of eight psychosocial stages people go through in life that consists of stages where an individual faces a development crisis that serves as a turning point in development. He believed these stages played a key role in the development of personality and psychosocial skills. Erikson was primarily focused on the development of ego identity and how social interactions influenced the development of personality.

While there are different types of personalities, there lies the possibility of different types of personality disorders as well. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that approximately 9.1 percent of the adult U.S. population experiences symptoms of at least one personality disorder each year. These disorders are characterized as chronic and pervasive mental disorders that impact thoughts and behaviors. A personality disorder can be diagnosed if there are significant impairments in self and interpersonal functioning together with one or more pathological personality traits.

The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition) currently lists 10 different personality disorders, which include antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, and dependent personality disorder. The DSM-5 allocates each to one of three groups: Group A (odd, bizarre, eccentric): PPD, SPD, STPD; Group B (dramatic, erratic): ASPD, BPD, HPD; and Group C (anxious, fearful): AVPD, DPD, OCD.