Personality and Personality Change

Characteristics of A Healthy Personality
Good physique

Pleasing manners

Appearance

Intelligence

Smartness

Trustworthiness

Reliability

Responsibility

Personal integrity

Professional front

Good control over body and mind

Management

Healthy Body

Healthy Mind

Nutrition

Personal Hygiene

Exercises - Yoga, Pranayam Gym, Aerobics Walking Jogging

Try to be Stress Free

Be Calm and cool

Do meditation

Positive attitude

Don’t worry about small things

Be focussed and clear

Personality Development

Communication skills

Interpersonal relationships

Professional front and attitude towards life and restoring our ethics.

Public Speaking

Body Language

Behavior

Anger Management

Physical Fitness

Food Habit

Friends making skills

Learning skills

Relationship skills

Communication skills

Dealing with problems

Read a lot about it

Watch successful persons

Attend Personality development classes

Work on skills

 Learn By Watch

How to Make A Great First Impression

Be it at work, at job or on a date, we all want to make a great first impression because it is very rightfully said that “First impression is the last impression”. Here are some ways to make it happen.

You should always make an eye contact with the person standing opposite to you because when you do not make an eye contact, it signals lack of respect or deception.

You should always wear a smile on your face in your first meeting. If your face looks nervous or frozen, you will make a bad impression.

Your posture must be good and straight. Correct posture shows worth and confidence.

Do not take away all the credit and do not show any trace of ego in your attitude towards the person.

You should not embellish your accomplishments or appear too self-serving. This gives a bad impression.

You should not have the air of being perfect. Acting more vulnerable, honest and raw can be a good thing.

You should talk less, ask more questions and listen intently.
You should look youthful. Looking youthful signals vitality to lead and to deal with adversity.

Personality is totality of an individuals behaviour, attitude, ego, interests, emotional responses and social roles.

Personality development is the improvement of behavioral traits such as communication skills, interpersonal relationships, professional front and attitude towards life and restoring our ethics.

Personality is a term that has many general meanings. Sometimes the word refers to the ability to get along well socially. For example, we speak of experiences or relationships which are said to give a person "more personality." The term also may refer to the most striking impression that an individual makes on other people. We may say, "She has a shy personality."…

Personality change. Research on cognitive and social learning processes is leading to new forms of psychotherapy to help people who have psychological problems. Some of these problems are the result of learning deficits…

Personnel management is a field of management that involves using workers' skills effectively and making their jobs rewarding. Many large businesses and other organizations have a department responsible for per­sonnel management. The field is also called employee relations or human resources management….

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. 

Selected Videos

The Healthy Personality

The Big 5 Personality Traits

Communication Fundamentals

How Healthy Are You?

Are You Emotionally Intelligent?

What is a Good Leadership?

Personality is a term that has many general meanings. Sometimes the word refers to the ability to get along well socially. For example, we speak of experiences or relationships which are said to give a person "more personality." The term also may refer to the most striking impression that an individual makes on other people.

We may say, "She has a shy personality."

To a psychologist, personality is an area of study that deals with complex human behaviour, including emotions, actions, and cognitive (thought) processes. Psychologists study the patterns of behaviour that make individuals different from one another.

The nature of personality

Personality types. For hundreds of years, people have tried to group the vast differences among human beings into simple units. Some of the resulting group­ings divide people into personality types based on certain characteristics.

The ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates divided indi­viduals into such types as sanguine (cheerful) and melancholic (depressed). He attributed their behavioural differences to a predominance of one of the body fluids. For example, Hippocrates believed that a person was cheerful if blood (sanguis) was the dominant influence on his or her behaviour.

Some of the more recent theories about personality types have tried to associate body build and tempera­ment. Classifications based on body measurements were developed by two psychiatrists, Ernst Kretschmer of Germany and William Sheldon of the United States.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who studied psy­chological characteristics, classified people as introverts or extroverts (see Extrovert; Introvert).

The simplicity of personality-type theories is appeal­ing, but it also limits their value. An individual's behav­iour is so complex, diverse, and variable that the person cannot be sorted usefully into a simple category.

Personality traits. Related to personality-type theo­ries is the search for broad traits or dispositions to de­scribe enduring differences among people. One of the early workers in this field was the British psychologist William McDougall. Personality traits are regarded as dimensions that range from high to low. For example, anxiety is a trait that varies from the greatest anxiety to the least anxiety. Most people have some degree of anx­iety along the scale between the two extremes. Psychol­ogists have studied such personal attributes as aggres­siveness, dependency, and extroversion-introversion.

Studies of personality traits help reveal the relation­ships between an individual's different personal attrib­utes. For example, a group of children may be tested for intelligence and may also be given questionnaires about their attitudes. In addition, they may be asked to rate their own characteristics, and may be rated by their teachers. The results are then correlated statistically to discover the relationships among all this information.

Ratings and self-reports. Research on personality traits tends to rely heavily on broad ratings of personal­ity. In self-ratings, a person indicates the degree to which he or she thinks he or she possesses certain personality characteristics. Ratings may also be obtained from teachers, or others who know the person or who have watched the person in special situations.

These judgments may be affected by many types of bias. A person may give the responses that he or she thinks are expected and socially desirable, even if they are not true. Moreover, the answers may reflect precon­ceptions and stereotypes (fixed ways of thinking), rather than an accurate description of behaviour. Tests that ask a person to rate such attributes as friendliness or adjust­ment provide broad self-characterizations rather than detailed descriptions of behaviour. Consequently, the findings of such tests may partly reveal the concepts and stereotypes that people apply to themselves and to oth­ers. These findings may not necessarily reflect the peo­ple's actual behaviour outside the test.

Some techniques are designed to reduce the role of personal meanings and concepts. Other approaches de­liberately seek to clarify the individual's concepts about himself or herself. These personal concepts are espe­cially important in theories that stress the role of the self and one's image of oneself. For example, in his theory of self-realization, the American psychologist Carl R. Rog­ers focuses on phenomenology—a person's private ex­periences and perceptions.

Projective tests. Some investigators have tried to avoid the problems of relying on a person's ratings or reports about himself or herself by creating indirect clinical techniques in the form of projective tests. These methods require the person to respond to a situation in which there are no clear guidelines and no right or wrong answers. The person may be asked how inkblots appear to him or her on the Rorschach Test. Or the per­son may be instructed to create a story about the char­acters in a series of pictures in the Thematic Appercep­tion Test. Projective techniques rely on a trained clinician to interpret the person's attributes indirectly from test behaviour. The value of this approach for re­vealing aspects of personality is controversial and is still being studied.

Freud's psychoanalytic theory. According to the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud, the personality has three parts: (1) the id, which represents instinctive im­pulses of sex and aggression; (2) the ego, which repre­sents the demands of the real world; and (3) the super­ego, or conscience, which represents standards of be­haviour incorporated into the personality during child­hood.

According to Freud, mental life is characterized by in­ternal conflicts that are largely unconscious. Impulses from the id seek immediate gratification, but they con­flict with the ego and the superego. When unacceptable impulses threaten to emerge, a person experiences anx­iety. To reduce this anxiety, the person may use various personality defences. The person may, for example, dis­place (transfer) his or her emotions to less threatening objects. A child who is afraid to express aggression to­ward his or her father may become angry at his or her pet dog instead.

Freud's ideas have had great influence on the study of personality, but they are highly controversial. Many of his ideas had to be modified severely by psychologists to take greater account of social and environmental vari­ables. See Developmental psychology.

Personality and environment

Trait theories and psychoanalytic theories both as­sume that broad internal personality dispositions deter­mine behaviour in many situations. However, research on the consistency of various personality traits indicates that what people do, think, and feel may depend greatly on the specific conditions in which their behaviour oc­curs.

People may be honest in one situation and dishonest in another. They may be passive in some situations but aggressive in other situations or with different people. Many contemporary approaches to the study of person­ality therefore emphasize the role of specific social ex­periences and environmental events in the development and modification of behaviour. Psychologists are gradu­ally moving away from broad theorizing about the na­ture of personality. Instead, they are studying the condi­tions that determine complex behaviour.

Personality development. Some psychologists have examined the effects of early experiences on later per­sonality development. Other investigators have studied the stability of particular patterns of personality over long periods of time. Their findings suggest that such tendencies as striving to achieve may persist to some degree from childhood into adulthood. However, re­search has also shown that personality continues to change as a result of new experiences and modifications in the environment.

Throughout their development, people learn about themselves and their world by observing other people and events. They also learn by trying new kinds behaviour directly. The rewards and punishments receive after trying various patterns of behaviour effect their future behaviour in similar situations. People also learn by observing the results of the behaviour of such social models as their parents. Suppose children repeatedly see adults succeed in antisocial or criminal acts. If they see such behaviour rewarded, they are more like to copy it than if it is punished. Children more readily imitate models who are powerful or who reward or take care of them.

As children develop, they copy some of the behaviour of many models, including their friends as well as their parents. They combine aspects of their behavior into new patterns. Through direct and observational learning and cognitive growth, they also acquire standards and values that help them regulate and evaluate their own behaviour. Gradually, people develop an enormous set of potential behaviours. The particular behaviour patterns they show in specific situations depend on motivational factors. See Motivation.

People's cognitive and social learning experiences vary as a result of the particular social and cultural conditions to which they are exposed in the home, at school, and in other environments. Personality traits may  predict many important aspects of behaviour. But setting in which behaviour occurs often provides the best predictions about what people will do. Thus, although extensive differences among people are found in most human actions, considerable uniformity and regularity can occur when environmental conditions are very powerful. Strong success experiences in a new situation, for example, may override the effects of past failure experiences and of personality traits in determining future reactions to that new situation. Similarly, prolonged or intense environmental changes, such as lengthy hospitalization or imprisonment, may lead to major personality changes. A person who has severe difficulties in personal relationships is said to be suffering from a personality disorder. See Mental illness.

Emotional reactions. During the course of development, we acquire intense emotional reactions to many stimuli. Events that once were neutral may become either pleasurable or painful as the result of condition (see Learning [How we learn]).

Some reactions may involve strong anxiety and can have crippling effects. For example, children who have frightening experiences with dogs may become afraid of all dogs. This fear may generalize (spread) even more widely to other animals and to such objects as fur coats or hair. Such fears are especially hard to unlearn because these people tend to avoid all contact with  situations that provoke fear. Consequently, these people prevent themselves from having experiences that might eliminate their fear—petting harmless dogs, for example. Emotional upsets of this kind may also be acquired by observing the fear reactions of other people.

As a result of social learning, we generalize from experiences to new but similar or related situation. But we do not generalize indiscriminately. A young boy may learn to express physical aggression in many settings including school, play, and home. But he also learned not to be aggressive in other situations, such as when visiting his grandparents.

Personality change. Research on cognitive and social learning processes is leading to new forms of psychotherapy to help people who have psychological problems. Some of these problems are the result of learning deficits. For example, some people lack fundamental academic and vocational skills, such as reading proficiency. Individuals who have inadequate relations with others need to learn essential interpersonal skills. Some people have these basic skills, but they suffer be­cause of emotional fears and inhibitions.

Psychotherapy aimed at changing personality tends to stress insight into the history through which the prob­lems developed. Learning methods try to change the disturbing behaviour itself by carefully planned relearning nd conditioning techniques. Still other forms of personality change may be achieved by creating special environments for learning more adaptive personality patterns.

Related articles:

Abnormal psychology 

Psychology

Alienation 

Behaviour 

Freud, Sigmund 

Social psychology

Social role

Testing

Personnel management is a field of management that involves using workers' skills effectively and making their jobs rewarding. Many large businesses and other organizations have a department responsible for per­sonnel management. The field is also called employee relations or human resources management. In organiza­tions that have many employees who belong to a union, personnel management is often known as industrial relations or labour relations. Its chief function in such a company is to represent the firm in contract talks and other dealings with the union.

Specialists in personnel management have a wide range of responsibilities. They interview, test, and rec­ommend applicants to fill job openings. They organize recruiting campaigns and travel to secondary schools and colleges to search for promising applicants. These managers develop pay scales, systems for evaluating employee performance, and training programmes to teach workers and managers new skills. They administer employee benefits, such as health insurance, life insur­ance, and pensions. They offer counselling to help em­ployees solve personal or work-related problems. In many countries, personnel managers also supervise affirmative-action plans, including special recruiting and training programmes for women and minority groups (see Affirmative action).

Development of personnel management, in the 1800's and early 1900's, personnel management was a simple activity that involved little more than hiring em­ployees. Recruiting was generally easy because many workers were competing for jobs.
Personnel management grew in complexity and im­portance during the mid-1900's. People began to recog­nize that worker morale affects productivity and that most workers need more than reasonable wages to be happy in their job. For example, employees also require recognition, a feeling of achievement, and an opportu­nity to participate in decisions that affect their work. Per­sonnel managers helped meet these needs by such means as company newsletters, recreation pro­grammes, and suggestion systems.