Personality Psychology — subject primer
This page is a Chinese-language primer on personality psychology. The outline below summarises it in English.
Overview
Personality psychology studies enduring patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that make people distinct — and how stable those patterns really are.
Core themes
Traits versus situations, temperament and biology, the self and identity, personality development across adulthood, and personality disorder as a boundary case.
Key theories and figures
Allport and Cattell on traits, Eysenck's biological dimensions, the Big Five (Costa & McCrae), Freudian and neo-analytic views, Rogers and Maslow on the self, Kelly and Mischel on cognitive-affective accounts.
Research methods
Self-report and informant questionnaires, projective and performance measures, experience sampling, behaviour genetics and cross-cultural comparison.
Applications
Personnel selection and career counselling, clinical case formulation, health and well-being research, and the responsible use of personality tests.
In China
Chinese researchers have worked on indigenised personality constructs (such as the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory) alongside large-scale validation of imported inventories.
Appendices
A quick-reference table of constructs and instruments, plus further reading (textbooks, journals, organisations and standards).