Personality refers to characteristics that make individuals unique, including their prototypical thoughts, emotions, interests, habits, and behaviors. Psychological in nature, personality is relatively stable over time. Personality plays a significant role in determining how a person behaves in various situations. Many dimensions of personality have been linked to career development. Almost every element of a
The term personality typically refers to one’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving. In addition to the stable, trait-like features often evoked by this construct (e.g., sociability, dominance, modesty), many theories also emphasize the roles of culture, family, and other environmental factors involved in personality expression and development. This predominant individual differences variable has
People differ in many respects, some important, some trivial. Personality traits are among the individual-difference characteristics that are important and powerful in explaining human behavior in the world of work. Myriad psychological characteristics can be used to describe people and distinguish them from one another. For example, in the English language, in excess of 12,000
The Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI) is a widely used self-report measure designed to detect the principal personality traits of psychopathy. Revised in 2005 as the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R), it consists of 154 items arrayed in a 4-point Likert-type format. The PPI-R, like the original PPI, yields a Total score reflecting global psychopathy as well
Personality disorders, formerly known as character disorders, make up a class of heterogeneous mental disorders characterized by chronic, maladaptive, and rigid patterns of cognition, affect, and behavior. They are coded on Axis II of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) and reflect patterns of thought, affect, and
The Sixteen Personality Questionnaire (16PF) is one of the oldest commercially available measures of normal adult personality. It is used in a variety of settings, including personnel selection, counseling, career development, and outplacement consulting. The inventory has also been utilized extensively in academic settings to advance the understanding of personality structure, its roots, and predictive
Modal personality was the term used by anthropologist Cora DuBois in her 1944 monograph The Peoples of Alor: A Social-Psychological Study of an East Indian Island, based on research carried out in the Alor islands of Indonesia during the late 1930s. The Alor study focused on issues and methods involving both anthropology and psychology. It
Personality is typically defined as a person’s distinctive and enduring (i.e., cross-situational) thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the person’s reactions to life situations. Personality traits are also defined as specific properties that predispose a person to react in certain ways in given classes of situations—sport, for example. Some personality traits are genetically determined and
Personality differences among individuals can be explained in relation to their individual differences in need patterns. Individuals possess various needs—very basic ones, such as the consumption of food and avoidance of pain; and secondary ones, such as achievement, affiliation, and dominance. These primary and secondary needs have the potential to influence an individual’s pattern of
Personality has been defined as the relatively stable organization of an individual’s character, temperament, intellect, and physique, which shapes the individual’s behavior and his or her actions in a given situation. For each individual, there are core personality components that are quite stable and unchanging. However, when one observes patterns of behavior in an individual