Personality Psychology

Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its areas of focus include:

• ·         Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes
• ·         Investigating individual differences—how people are unique
• ·         Investigating human nature—how people are alike

"Personality" can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, emotions,interpersonal orientationsmotivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word "personality" originates from the Latinpersona, which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre  of the ancient Latin-speaking world, themask  was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but rather was a convention employed to represent or typify that character. Personality may also refer to the patterns of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors consistently exhibited by an individual over time that strongly influence our expectations, self-perceptions, values and attitudes, and predicts our reactions to people, problems and stress. In a phrase, personality is not just who we are, Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization, or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual.