psychology-health

1930-1950

Learning from animal responses.

The first issue of the journal Character and Personality was published in 1932.

In 1937, Gordon Allport published the first major textbook onpersonality: Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. Allport’s was the first to articulate a grand vision for the field of personality and to place it within the context of historical and contemporary scholarship in the arts and sciences.

Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler  had all developed comprehensive theories of personality derived from clinical observations and rooted in the European psychoanalytic tradition.

Personality textbooks organized the field according to these grand systems, variously dividing the systems into psychoanalytic and psychosocial theories.

Psychoanalytic theories became incorporated within personality psychology proper and began to have a significant influence on how personality psychologists thought about and empirically studied human individuality.

1950 - 1970

Specialized psychology departments.

After WWII, more attention was given to psychology, and personality psychology in particular.

Specializations were developed, such as clinical, counseling, and industrial/organizational psychology.

Increased federal funding supported personality research in laboratories and field settings.

Personality psychologists focused their research efforts on the examination and elaboration of particular personality constructs, such as extraversion, anxiety, and the need for achievement.

Personality psychology turned away from the grand theories of the 1930s and 1940s and came to focus instead on problems and controversies concerning personality measurement. Most influential, however, was Mischel’s (1968, 1973) critique, in which he argued against explanations of human behavior based on internal personality traits and in favor of explanations that focused on the situational and cognitive/social-learning determinants of behavior.

1970 - Present

The Big Five model: The phase began with critique and pervasive doubt concerning the legitimacy and worth of personality studies, but it evolved by the mid-1980s into a broad sense of renewal and revitalization.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologists delivered a series of devastating critiques of personality psychology that threw the field into a crisis. For example; Carlson (1971) chastised personality psychologists for ignoring the grand theories of the early years and straying away from their implicit mandate to study real lives and whole persons in depth. Personality psychologists have refined new research methodologies for the scientific study of persons.

Contemporary research in personality has become more sensitive to the complex interactions of internal personality variables and external situational factors in the prediction of behavior (Kenrick & Funder, 1988).

Renewed interest in integrative personality theory and a renewed commitment to studying whole persons in their full biographical complexity.

Reference

McAdams, D. (2006). The person: A new introduction to personality psychology. (4th ed.).Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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