1. The first person to propose a comprehensive theory of
the human personality was Sigmund Freud, a 19th-
century clinical neurologist who formulated his ideas
while treating patients in Vienna, Austria. His work,
called psychoanalysis, was based largely on sessions
with wealthy White European women who came to him
complaining of emotional distress and disturbing
thoughts and behaviors.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
2. Unique
characteristics
Quality of a person
Sum of all physical,
mental, social
characteristics
Distinctive
behaviour personality
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
3. Basically It’s everything about you that makes you what
you are—a unique individual who is different, in large
and small ways, from everybody else.
The word goes back to about the year 1500, and
derives from the Latin word persona, which refers to a
mask used by actors in a play. It’s easy to see how
persona came to refer to our outward appearance, the
public face we display to the people around us.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
4. Watson. “personality is the sum of activities that can be
discovered by actual observations over a long enough
period of time to give reliable information”
R. S. Woodworth. “Personality is the quality of the
individual’s total behavior.”
Allport. “Personality is a dynamic organization within the
individual of those psychophysical systems that determine
his unique adjustment to his environment.”
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
5. R. B. Cattel. “Personality is that which permits a prediction
of what a person will do in a given situation.”
Eysenk. “Personality is the more or less stable and
enduing organization of a person’s character,
temperament, intellect and physique, which determine
his unique adjustment to the environment.”
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
6. Stable and Predictable Characteristics: the word
personality refer to enduring characteristics and relatively
stable and predictable. Although it can be recognize i.e. a
friend may be calm much of the time, we know that he or
she can become excitable, nervous, or panicky at other
times. Thus, sometimes our personality can vary with the
situation. Yet although it is not rigid, it is generally
resistant to sudden changes.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
7. Unique Characteristics: personality is an enduring
and unique cluster of characteristics that may
change in response to different situations.
Self consciousness: the man is described as ‘I’ or a
person, or to have a personality when the idea of
self enters into his consciousness.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
8. Psychophysical system: It is an organization of some
psychophysical systems or some behavior
characteristics and functions as a unified whole. It
includes all the behavior patterns, i.e., conative,
cognitive and affective
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
9. Dynamic organization:Personality is not static, it is
dynamic and ever in process of change and
modification. One has to struggle with the
environmental as well as the inner forces throughout
the span of his life
End Product of heredity and environment: development
of personality is depends upon the both factors
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
10. The major approaches to personality assessment
are:
• Self-report or objective Inventories
• Projective Techniques
• Interviews
• Experimental Methods
• Case Study
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
11. A personality assessment technique in which subjects
answer questions about their behaviors and feelings.
These tests include items dealing with symptoms,
attitudes, interests, fears, and values. Test-takers
indicate how closely each statement describes
themselves, or how much they agree with each item.
Example : MMPI
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
12. A personality assessment device in which subjects are
presumed to project personal needs, fears, and values
onto their interpretation or description of an
ambiguous stimulus. Clinical psychologists developed
projective tests of personality for their work with the
emotionally disturbed. the interpretation of the results
of projective tests is so subjective, these tests are not
high in reliability or validity.
EXAMPLE: TAT, RORCHACH INBLOT TEST
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
13. A detailed history of an individual that contains
data from a variety of sources. The primary clinical
method is the case study or case history, in which
psychologists probe their patients’ past and present
lives for clues to the source of their emotional
problems.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
14. The word interview refers to one to one communication
with one person acting in the role of interviewer and
another is interviewee.
There are two types of interview structured and
unstructure interview.
In structured interview, questions are closed ended and
in unstructured interview questions are open end.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
15. An experiment is a technique for determining the effect of one
or more variables or events on behavior. There are two kinds
of variables in an experiment. One is the independent or
stimulus variable, which is the one manipulated by the
experimenter. The other is the dependent variable, which is
the subjects’ behavior in response to that manipulation and
The control group is not exposed to the independent variable.
Measures of the behavior being studied are taken from both
groups before and after the experiment.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
16. In the Correlational method, researchers investigate the
relationships that exist among variables. Rather than
manipulating an independent variable, the
experimenters deal with the variable’s existing
attributes.
It is a statistical technique that measures the degree of
the relationship between two variables, expressed by
the correlation coefficient.
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Dr. Urvashi Sharma, Assistant Professor,
Psychology
