Title: Personality psychology - Wikipedia
Headings: Personality psychology
Personality psychology
Contents
Philosophical assumptions
Personality theories
Type theories
Psychoanalytical theories
Behaviorist theories
Social cognitive theories
Humanistic theories
Biopsychological theories
Genetic basis of personality
Evolutionary theory
Drive theories
Personality tests
Personality theory assessment criteria
Methods measuring inner experience
See also
References
Further reading
External links

Content: Personality also predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and stress. Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual. The study of personality has a broad and varied history in psychology with an abundance of theoretical traditions. The major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist, evolutionary, and social learning perspective. However, many researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain perspective and instead take an eclectic approach. Research in this area is empirically driven — such as dimensional models, based on multivariate statistics such as factor analysis — or emphasizes theory development, such as that of the psychodynamic theory. There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing.