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Some debates have pervaded the field of psychology since its genesis. Perhaps one of the most salient ones deals with the nature of personality. Personality psychology studies one's distinctive style of cognition, behavior, and affect. However, this concept elicits discord among psychologists as some have insisted that it does not exist, while others struggle with issues of measurement. It has long been believed that life experiences tend to shape personality development by intensifying the propensities that led individuals to those experiences in the first place, which is known as the corresponsive principle. ==Personality exists== Personality, one's characteristic way of feeling, behaving and thinking, is often conceptualized as a person's standing on each Big Five personality trait (extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness). A person's personality profile is thus gauged from his standing on five broad concepts which predict, among other life outcomes, behavior and the quality of interpersonal relationships. Initially, it was believed that one's Big Five profile was static and dichotomous in that one was either at one extreme of each trait or another 〔Funder, D. C. (2010). The Personality Puzzle (5th Ed.). NY: Norton〕 For example, people are typically categorized as introverted or extraverted. Personality was therefore assessed in terms of generalities or averages. In noticing the strong inconsistencies in how people behaved across situations, some psychologists dismissed personality as nonexistent. This school of thought attributes human behavior to environmental factors, relegating individual differences to situational artifacts and contesting the existence of individual predispositions. It was led by situationists like Walter Mischel (1968). Their contention held that personality was a fictitious concept. For them, the discrepancies observed across one's behaviors were evidence that interindividual differences did not exist 〔Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. Hoboken, NJ US: John Wiley & Sons Inc.〕 Some aspects of the situationist perspective even suggest that all human beings are the same and that the differences we observe are simply illusory biproducts of the environment. However, personologists soon integrated these inconsistencies into their conceptualization of personality. They modified the old, more monolithic construct by measuring how people differ across situations. Their new methods of personality assessment describe fluctuations in personality characteristics as consistent and predictable for each person based on the environment he is in and his predispositions. Some work suggests that people can espouse different levels of a personality dimension as the social situations and time of day change Therefore, someone is not conscientious all the time, but can be conscientious at work and a lot less so when she is home. This work also suggests that intrapersonal variations on a trait can be even larger than interpersonal variations. Extraversion varies more within a person than across individuals, for example. This work was based on individual self-ratings during the day across a long period of time. This allowed for researchers to assess moment-to-moment and day to day variations on personality attributes.〔 Personologists now tend to agree that people's personalities are variegated and are not be conceptualized through bipolar characterizations (e.g. extraversion vs introversion). Rather people oscillate between the two extremes of a trait. The pattern of this oscillation then constitutes personality. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「personality changes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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