When psychologists talk about personality, they are concerned primarily with individuals differences-the characteristics that distinguish one individual from another.
Psychologists do not agree on an exact definition of personality. But for our purpose we will define personality as the characteristic patterns of behaviour and modes of thinking that determine a person’s adjustment to the environment.
An infant is born with certain potentialities. The development of these potentialities depends upon maturation and upon experiences encountered in growing up.
Although newborn infants in a hospital nursery look pretty much alike, the physical characteristics that will later make them readily distinguishable from each other are already determined by heredity.
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Intelligence and certain special abilities, such as musical talent, also have a large hereditary component, and some differences in emotional reactivity may be innate. One study found that reliable individual differences could be observed shortly after birth in such characteristics as activity level, attention span, adaptability to changes in the environment, and general mood.
One infant might be characteristically active, easily distracted, and willing to accept new objects and people; another might be predominantly quiet, persistent in concentrating on an activity and leery of anything new.
These original characteristics of temperament tended to persist in many of the 100 or more children whose development was followed over a 14-years period (Thomas, Chess and Birch, 1970).
Parents respond differently to babies with differing characteristics.
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In this way a reciprocal process starts that may exaggerate some of the personality characteristics present at birth.
What happens to the potentialities with which the infant is born depends on his experiences while growing up. Although all experiences are individual, we may distinguish between two classes: the common experience, shared by most individuals growing up in a given culture or culture subgroup, and the unique experience, not predictable from the roles that the culture assigns us.
Instead of trying to sort people into types, trait theories assume that a personality can be described by its position on a number of continuous dimensions or scales, each of which represents a trait.
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Thus, we could rate an individual on a scale of intelligence, emotional stability, aggressiveness, creativeness, or any of a number of other dimensions.
A trait, then, refers to any characteristic in which one individual differs from another in a relatively permanent and consistent way. When we informally describe ourselves and others by such adjectives as friendly, cautious, excitable, intelligent, or anxious, we are using trait terms.
Various traits studies by factor analytic methods are shown in relation to the two basic dimensions of introversion-extraversion and stability-instability. (After Eysenck and Eysenck, 1963).