Self and Personality
Personal identity refers to those attributes of a person that make her/him different from others.Social identity refers to those aspects of a person that link her/him to a social or cultural group or are derived from it.
Personal self leads to an orientation in which one feels primarily concerned with oneself.Social self emerges in relation with others and emphasizes such aspects of life as cooperation, unity, affiliation, sacrifice, support or sharing. This self values family and social relationships, and is thus also referred to as familial or relational self.Self-concept is the way we perceive ourselves and the ideas we hold about our competencies and attributes.
Self-esteem is the value judgment of a person about himself/herself. Our capacity to view ourselves in terms of stable dispositions permits us to combine separate selfevaluations into a general psychological image of ourselves, and this is known as an overall sense of self-esteem. Self-esteem shows a strong relation with our everyday behavior.
People differ in the extent to which they believe they themselves control their life outcomes or the outcomes are controlled by luck or fate or other situational factors. A person who believes that s/he has the ability or behaviors required by a particular situation demonstrates high self-efficacy.
Self-regulation refers to our ability to organize and monitor our own behavior. People who are able to change their behavior according to the demands of the external environment are high on self-monitoring.
Self-control refers to learning to delay or defer the gratification of needs.A number of psychological techniques of self-control have been suggested.
• Observation of our own behavior – It provides us with necessary information that may be used to change, modify or strengthen certain aspects of self.
• Self-instruction – We often instruct ourselves to do something and behave the way we want to, and such instructions are quite effective in self regulation.
• Self-reinforcement – It involves rewarding behaviors that have pleasant outcomes.
nd human personality by examining certain broad patterns in the observed behavioural characteristics of individuals. Each behavioural pattern refers to one type in which individuals are placed in terms of the similarity of their behavioural characteristics with that pattern.
• The Greek physician Hippocrates had proposed a typology personality based on fluid or humour. He classified people into four types (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric) each characterized by specific behavioural features.
• In India, Charak Samhita classified people into categories of vata, pita and kapha on the basis of three humoural elements called the tridosha. Each refers to a type of temperament called prakriti (the nature) of a person.
• There is also a typology of personality based on the trigunas.
1. Sattva guna includes attributes like cleanliness, truthfulness, dutifulness,detachment, discipline, etc.
2. Rajas guna includes intensive activity, desire for gratification, dissatisfaction, envy of others and a materialistic mentality.
3. Tamas guna characterizes anger, arrogance, depression, laziness, helplessness, etc.
All the three are present in each and every person in different degrees. The dominance of one guna over another may lead to a specific type of behavior.
• Sheldon classified personality using body build and temperament into
Endomorphic, Mesomorphic and Ectomorphic typology.
1. Endomorphs are fat, soft and round and are relaxed and sociable.
2. Mesomorphs have strong musculature, are rectangular with a strong body build and are energetic and courageous.
3. Ectomorphs are thin, long and fragile and are brainy, artistic and introverted.
• Carl Jung has proposed a typology by grouping people into introverts and extraverts.
• Friedman and Rosenman, whilst trying to identify psychosocial risk factors,classified individuals into categories.
1. Type A personality – Possesses high motivation, lack patience, feel short of time, and are always stressed out. People with this personality are more susceptible to problems like hypertension and coronary heart disease.
2. Type B personality – It is understood as the absence of Type-A traits.
3. Type C personality – Suggested by Morris, this type of personality is prone to cancer. Individuals are cooperative, unassertive and patient, suppress their negative emotions and show compliance to authority.
4. Type D personality – Characterised by proneness to depression.
Trait approaches to personality focus on the specific psychological attributes along which individuals differ in consistent and stable ways. They are mainly concerned with the description or characterization of basic components of personality. A trait is considered as a relatively enduring attribute or quality on which one individual differs from another. Traits are generally consistent across situations, they are relatively stable over time and their strengths and combinations vary across individuals leading to individual differences in personality.
• Gordon Allport’s Trait Theory proposed that individuals possess a number of traits that are dynamic in nature.
1. Cardinal traits are highly generalized dispositions and indicate the goal around which a person’s entire life seems to revolve.
2. Central traits are those traits that are less pervasive in effect, for example warm, sincere, etc.
3. Secondary traits are the least generalised characteristics of persons such as likes or dislikes.
While Allport acknowledged the influence of situations on behavior, he held that the way a person reacts to a given situation depends on his/her traits, although people sharing the same traits might express them in different ways. Allport considered traits more like intervening variables that occur between the stimulus situation and response of the person. This means that any variation in traits would elicit a different response from the same situation.
• Catell : Personality Factors – Raymond Catell believed that there is a common structure on which people differ from each other, and this structure could be determined empirically. He tried to identify the primary traits from a huge array of descriptive adjectives and applied a statistical technique called factor analysis to discover the common structures.
1. He found 16 primary or source traits that are stable and considered as the building blocks of personality.
2. Surface traits are the results of the interaction of source traits. He developed a test called the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire for the assessment of personality.
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