We often hear people comment about others: “he has a lot of personality,” or “he lacks personality.” But do we know what personality really is? First of all, we must differentiate between having a lot of character and what personality really is.
Personality is a hypothetical construct that we infer from people’s behavior. It includes a series of characteristic features of the individual, in addition to including their way of thinking, being or feeling. Personality psychology is concerned with studying it.
Personality encompasses a series of common characteristics included in its different definitions. It is a hypothetical construct inferred from the observation of behavior. That is, we think that “X” person behaves in “X” way because that is her personality, or because that is who she is.
This construct does not imply value connotations, but rather includes a series of relatively stable and consistent elements over time, called traits. Besides, includes other elements such as cognitions, motivations and affective states
Personality encompasses both the manifest behavior and the private experience of the person (their thoughts, desires, needs, memories…). It is something distinctive and specific to each person, because, although there are some “personality types”, the truth is that each person is unique, as is their personality.
On the other hand, it reflects the influence of psychological and biological elements of experiences on behavior. The purpose of personality is the successful adaptation of the individual to the environment
There are many definitions of personality, and one of the most complete is that of Bermúdez (1996), who defines it as a “relatively stable organization of structural and functional characteristics, innate and acquired under the special conditions of its development, which make up the peculiar and defining team of behavior with which each individual faces different situations.”
We should not confuse this definition of personality with the clichés that we use every day, such as “So-and-so has a lot of personality” or “So-and-so has no personality.” Although both ideas can be related, they are not exactly the same.
When we use these phrases we are referring to (or imagining) people with a strong character or very clear ideas ; That is, we use personality as a synonym for character. Even if we were to clarify even more, we would see that character is a more biological or innate construct; It would be like the way a person usually reacts to a situation.
On the other hand, when we talk about someone “without personality”, we think of people with unclear ideas, a lack of initiative, who are influenced or even dependent. That is, we attribute not having a personality to the lack of certain characteristics that a person does not always have to have for us to continue considering that they have one personality or another.
All of this is part of common language or verbal expressions ; We cannot consider it wrong per se, but it is true that it does not coincide with the concept of personality that we are describing here.
Thus, we see how personality is actually much more than “having character or not,” and that it also encompasses many characteristics of the person: it includes their way of thinking, feeling, communicating, living, emotional, etc.
Personality psychology
This discipline is responsible for studying The effect of individual differences in personality on behavior It is made up of three types of theoretical models:
1. Internalist models
They establish that behavior is basically determined by personal variables, which constitute a valid predictor of said behavior
2. Situationist models
They consider that the causes of behavior are external to the individual (mechanistic paradigm). They emphasize behavior which is important in itself and is a product of learning.
3. Interactionist models
They determine that behavior is the result of interaction between situational and personal variables These models overcome the reductionism of the previous ones, it is a “mixture” of the two.
Traits
Personality allows us to build our own identity and adapt to the world and environment. It characterizes people and makes them unique. Includes both positive and negative traits (or rather, socially considered as such), such as empathy, solidarity, anger, optimism, pessimism, joy, bad mood, sincerity, honesty, resentment, etc.
We can also talk about personality “traits”; The set of common traits constitute the different personality types. Thus, we can talk about people with depressive tendencies, dependent people, and even countless others.
That is, personality is made up of the traits that define the person. This It is quite stable over time, as well as cross-situationally (in different situations), although it is true that with nuances, since there are situations that are more extreme than others, and that can lead the person to behave in ways never thought of or never experienced before.
When the person’s traits are extreme, dysfunctional, normatively deviant or maladaptive the person is considered to have a personality disorder (the diagnostic criteria in reference manuals should always be consulted).
These traits must be stable over time, as well as predominant; In addition, they usually cause discomfort in the person.
In the DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) a total of 10 Personality Disorders are described and characterized.
