PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT #1 Bismah Tayyab

Q. How are there exactly eight perspectives or aspects of personality? Can the perspectives

be merged?

The eight perspectives of personality psychology are psychoanalytic, neo-psychoanalytic,

life-span, behaviorist, cognitive, trait, humanistic, and social learning. Each perspective identifies

important elemental contributions, which when combined allow deeper understanding of the

complex construct personality. These perspectives represent an evolution of scientific thought

and analysis from simplistic categorization of personality as either nature versus nurture, or some

variant thereof.

Each perspective has its strengths and weaknesses, and brings something different to our

understanding of human behavior. For this reason, it is important that psychology does have

different perspectives to the understanding and study of human personality.

When considering if these can indeed be merged or not, it would be useful to see them as

if presenting a continuum of nature and environmental influences, which may be visualized as a

pendulum swinging from side to side. For instance, the psychoanalytic perspective emphasizes

unconscious contributions, which may be the result of biology, genetics, or nature, but also may

result from social or situational interactions learned or evolved over time.

The biological, humanistic, and trait perspectives also appreciate the influence of

unconscious influences such that the biological perspective focuses on genetic or heredity

influences, the humanistic perspective incorporates human spirituality, and the trait perspective

identifies stable traits, skills, or temperament of the individual.

Seemingly, in contrast, the behaviorist, cognitive, social learning, and neopsychoanalytic

perspectives represent environmental influences on personality. For instance, the behaviorist

PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT #1 Bismah Tayyab

perspective emphasizes learned behavioral responses to outside stimuli, while the cognitive

perspective emphasizes the minds function in understanding ones environment. The social

learning perspective emphasizes iterative functioning of the individual within its social and

environmental relationships, and the potential variability dependent upon contexts.

Lastly, the neo-psychoanalytic perspective focuses on the interaction between internal

drives and/or emotions with outside (environmental) or social demands. Although these

perspectives reflect environmental influences, they do not necessarily obviate unconscious

processes at work, i.e., natures influences. In fact, the neo-psychoanalytic perspective

specifically relates to unconscious (emotional/drive) processes in relationship to external

influences or contexts, thusly incorporating both nature and nurture aspects.

PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT #1 Bismah Tayyab

References

Hall, C. S. & Lindzey, G. (1998). Theories of Personality. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons

Inc.