Personality Theories

The Big Five As people we all exhibit different behaviors. These behaviors more or less make up who we are, they are the building blocks of our personality. Psychology is captivating because it boldly attempts to measure personality. One of the ways it does this is through The Big Five, it is all the ways in which people talk about personality put together in 5 categories: Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeable Neurotic Each one of us is made up of a combination of these traits. I like this method because there is no normal, just different. "All living humans have many mental disorders, mostly minor but some major, and we are all more or less crazy in many ways."  I couldn't agree more. Today we are going to diagnose my dear friend, just for fun and hopefully to help us all understand this method a bit better. Lets call her Susan. Before we diagnose Susan, we need some more information about what these traits mean and about Susan's life. 

I'm not attacking women. Don't think that. Read on. I find myself reading the tabloids and the magazine covers as i'm waiting in line at the grocery store, the one sentence attention grabbers--   BRANGELINA SPLIT UP or TAYLOR SWIFT MOVING ON TO THE NEXT MAN . I usually roll my eyes and think "what is wrong with these people?". David Buss, evolutionary psychologist and researcher of  human mating strategies, conflict between the sexes,  etc. would tell you nothing. He says that leaving a mate and switching to another is a common practice in many cultures, he calls this serial mating  (2017). There are many reasons for these mate changes:  Someone in the relationship brings "baggage" that the other person wasn't anticipating and doesn't want to deal with Changes in mate value. Basically both partners were 7's , one loses weight, gets fit, and becomes a 9 or 10. The sudden interest in a new man who is catching your attention and drawin

What does it mean to be human? Someone once told me it's bad to start a paper by asking a question, but since this isn't really a paper it's a blog post.. and since I don't really care.. it's fine. I start by asking a question because I want to make my readers think, reading and writing is a journey and I hope to get you started. I ask this question because there is no answer. At least there is not a definite right answer. SO, what do we think? I want you to dig deep. It's not that we all have skin and two eyes and two legs and a heart. No. What does it really mean to be human! To feel, to breathe, to think! I don't have all the answers for you. But we can start that journey together, with the help of Carl Rogers and his theory, the Humanistic approach. To start, I will introduce some terms that we may not be familiar with.  Unconditional Positive Regard - Having an attitude of total acceptance towards another person  Potential Growth : there are 3 i

        It's the first day of preschool a father drops his daughter off, she cries hysterically. A child is asked to wait ten minutes to eat a cookie, and if they can wait, they can have two cookies. The child started to draw a square around the cookie. A teenage girl is being offered a drink at her first party, she declines the offer.   What do these situations have in common? They are the beginning of a lifetime of learning how to self-regulate. Psychologist, Walter Mischel studied self-regulation,and he teaches us that we are able to control who we are as people and how we react. In addition, Mischel does not believe in labels--he believes that a person's behavior is bast predicted from the understanding of who that person is, the current situation and the interactions between them. Mischel teaches Self-Regulation strategies so that people can understand how to delay gratification and to be the kind of person one would like to be. In this post, we will learn about som

We all have things about ourselves we don't like, stories we choose to keep a secret, and feelings we don't share. Why? It is too painful to face, and we don't want to have labels, or be a burden to anyone.  It is painful to face certain things that we are going through or emotions we are feeling. We think we're the only ones hiding flaws and faults and suppressing feelings, because we are damaged and weird and even if in the slight chance we wanted to share, no one else would understand. W e believe this, and tell ourselves that everyone else is normal. Guess what? You're not the only one who feels this way. Let me introduce the theory by Carl Jung that is known as your shadow. Jung identified the Shadow as one of the four principle archetypes of what he called the collective-unconscious.  Basically, we are not totally conscious and aware of, as Jung would put it, the dark stuff about ourselves. Everyone's shadow is different and our shadows, according to Jun

We all know someone who is completely self-absorbed. They think of no one but themselves. Their number one interest is self-promotion, or doing things for their gain. It is likely we are also acquainted with people who care a great deal about about other peoples opinions. They feel the need to be perfect and liked by those around them. There are also "normal" people, but i don't believe in normal, who's to say something or someone is normal. So there are those who just have a little bit of both, sometimes think about themselves when making a decision and sometimes think about how they will look like, or come across to others. Now i'll get to the point of this post, Freud. Who has been known as the father of psychology. Freud can explain these attributes manifested in people by his structure of personality theory, the Id, the Ego and the Superego. The Id: driven by pleasure, as primarily unconscious . The id is the first aspect of personality, we are born with it.