1. Each person’s own construction based on sociocultural, biological, physical and genetic factors, which identify their uniqueness within society, manifesting itself in their forms of behavior.
2. In Law, legal personality allows the creation and operation of a recognized entity through one or more binding persons, in accordance with local regulations.
Etymology: By the modes of Latin personalities, personalĭtātis.
Grammatical category: noun fem.
in syllables: personality.
Personality
Augustine Repetto
Degree in psychology
What makes people different from each other or that in the same situation each one acts in a particular way? Why do we sometimes explain or even justify a person’s behavior based on their way of being? Why do we make conjectures and anticipate the reactions that others might have? It is common to attribute internal motives to the behavior, thoughts and emotions of people. For example, when we say that “Matías yells at Germán because he is aggressive” and “Camila worries too much because she is nervous“We are explaining their behavior based on an internal trait: the first, based on aggressiveness, and the second, based on nervousness.
When we choose to tell a person something because they are more understanding than another, we are also guiding our behavior based on personal characteristics. In the same way, when we refer to ourselves based on characteristics that we consider to define us, we are referring to internal aspects. All of these issues have to do with personality. Thus, personality can be understood as a dynamic organization of the psyche that is expressed in relatively stable individual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. The analysis of these individual differences is precisely the analysis of personality.
Although personality research has been one of the fields of specialization where one of the largest productions of knowledge within psychology has been made, specialists have not agreed on a unanimous definition. This should not surprise us because it is what commonly happens with most psychological constructs.
Personality Dimensions
nuvolanevicata
In the search to understand what makes us unique and why we act in a certain way, researchers have developed different instruments that allow us to analyze individual differences. Today, the explanatory theory that has acquired great relevance within the community of specialists is the Big Five Model. Created by the referents McCrae and Costa, the theory maintains that personality is made up of five large dimensions or basic factors, in which people are located at some point within the spectrum that each factor represents. Therefore, there are as many possible combinations as there are people in the world. The authors maintain that the particular composition of personality, that is, the way in which the dimensions are combined, remains stable throughout life.
– neuroticism: People with high levels of neuroticism are more emotionally unstable and more sensitive to adverse stimuli than those with low levels. The latter are more optimistic
– openness to experience: Refers to the tendency to try new things, to do them in a creative and original way, to actively modify the context according to one’s own needs. A person with a lot of openness to experience is one who takes challenges and faces unknown situations. While a person with little openness to experience will prefer to stay with what they already know and do things in a more routine way.
– Responsibility: People who strive to achieve their goals, who reflect and are more organized, tend to be more responsible than those who are not so responsible and prefer spontaneity.
– extraversion: Those who tend to seek social stimulation, that is, those who like to interact with people, get involved in social activities or play group sports, are more extroverted than those who prefer to be alone or do individual activities.
– Kindness: Those people who tend to be more condescending, to want others to like them, are kinder than those who criticize or question other people.
While the dimensions outlined above provide a useful basis from which to understand personality, they fall short of fully describing each person’s idiosyncrasy, as it fails to explain the more subtle differences that make us unique. For the authors, the five great factors are universal, that is, they are found in all people, regardless of the culture in which they develop.
In this sense, we could think that it is based on the interaction between innate tendencies and the context in which we find ourselves, that we are modulating our position in the spectrum of the different dimensions.
Is personality inherited?
There is research that has studied the development of children and suggests that from birth we bring tendencies that mark our personality. With socialization and different experiences, some tendencies develop and become more marked, forming part of the individual’s personality and others, because they have not been reinforced by the context, lose force. Therefore, personality conformation implies the result of a complex interaction between inherited dispositional factors and the social and cultural context of which we are a part.
Following
References
Sánchez, R., & Ledesma, R. (2007). The big five factors: how to understand personality and how to evaluate it. Knowledge for transformation, 131-160.