Personality

Personality describes the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that make up a person's unique time-dependent adjustment to life. Personality is relatively stable, but can change over time due to experiences and developmental processes. Although there is no consensus on the definition of personality, most theories in personality focus on traits, motivation, skills, and identity. Research in personality psychology generally attempts to explain the characteristics of a person that underlie differences in behavior. Personality characteristics are related to many life outcomes, such as work and relationship success, mental health, well-being, and longevity. For example, an individual can develop anger during their life, or they could fall into a state of depression. Over time, psychologists have taken many different approaches to study personality, which can be organized across dispositional, biological, intrapsychic (psychodynamic), cognitive-experiential, social and cultural, and adjustment domains. The various approaches used to study personality today reflect the influence of the first theorists in the field, a group that includes Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers.