What does it mean when people say you have a nice or bad personality? Personality is a mirror of what you do and speak. Essentially, your personality defines who you are. Your behaviour reflects your personality and informs how different you are from others. A common saying in field of personality psychology is; “Some things change; some things stay the same.” According to Allport (1961), “Personality is a dynamic organisation, inside the person, of psychophysical systems that create the person’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors.” The continuities, consistencies and stabilities of personality traits and dispositions over time define personality development (Larsen & Buss, 2008).
Personality
Personality, a characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Personality embraces moods, attitudes, and opinions and is most clearly expressed in interactions with other people. It includes behavioral characteristics, both inherent and acquired, that distinguish one person from another and that can be observed in people’s relations to the environment and to the social group.
The term personality has been defined in many ways, but as a psychological concept two main meanings have evolved. The first pertains to the consistent differences that exist between people: in this sense, the study of personality focuses on classifying and explaining relatively stable human psychological characteristics. The second meaning emphasizes those qualities that make all people alike and that distinguish psychological man from other species; it directs the personality theorist to search for those regularities among all people that define the nature of man as well as the factors that influence the course of lives. This duality may help explain the two directions that personality studies have taken: on the one hand, the study of ever more specific qualities in people, and, on the other, the search for the organized totality of psychological functions that emphasizes the interplay between organic and psychological events within people and those social and biological events that surround them.