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Chapter 13Personality
Where does personality come from?
Personality: a person’s characteristic thoughts, emotional responses and behavior.
Each characteristic is a personality trait: a pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior that is relatively
consistent over time and across situations. However, people are more than just the sum of their
traits.
Gordon Allport (1961) gave a classic scientific definition of personality: “the dynamic organization
within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine (the individual’s) characteristic
behavior and though”.
The notion of organization indicated that personality is a coherent while. The organized whole is
dynamic in that it is goal seeking, sensitive to particular context, adaptive to the person’s
environment, and fluid over time. By emphasizing psychophysical systems, Allport brought together
two ideas: he highlighted the mental nature of personality and he recognized that personality arises
from both biological processes and external environments.
,13.1 Genetic factors influence the expression of personality
Over the pars few decades, evidence has emerged that biological factors play an important role in
determining personality. Of course these factors are all affective by experience.
Gene expression underlies all psychological activity.
Nearly all personality traits have a genetic component.
The genetic basis of traits had been shown to be the same across cultures
- Adoption studies
Further evidence for the genetic basis of personality comes from adoption studies.
The personalities of adopted children bear no significant relationship to those of their adoptive
parents. Findings such as these indicate that parenting has less of an impact on personality.
Recall that many features of humans are determined largely by interactions between biological
factors and environments – nature and nurture – even if neither one in its own carries much weight.
This appears to be the case with personality.
Genes can explain why genetic siblings are slightly more like each other than adopted siblings are,
but genes stull have an overall small effect on personality relative to other factors.
What are these other factors that cause siblings to have different personalities? One factor is that
the lives of siblings diverge as they establish friendships outside the home. Also, even when siblings
are raised in the same household, the environment in a home can change substantially as families
have more children, increase or decrease in socioeconomic status. Finally, biological factors that are
shared by identical siblings but not by other kinds of siblings, such as exposure to stress hormones
during pregnancy, can also explain differences in personality between siblings.
- Are there specific genes for personality?
Genes code for proteins, not behaviors. Features of human behavior such as personality are so
complex that no single gene can account for them. Instead many gens acting together can make us
more of less likely to react in a specific way to certain types of stimuli. These behavioral, mental, or
emotional response tendencies are referred to as dispositions.
Some genes can have a strong influence on how available certain neurotransmitters are to neurons.
However, even these genes exert only a small effect on traits that are presumably related to the
neurotransmitter.
Each person experiences different circumstances that may cause epigenetic changes and the
selective expression of certain genes.
, 13.2 Temperaments are evident in infancy
Genes create differences in personality by affecting biological processes. These differences are called
temperaments: biologically based tendencies to feel or act in a certain way. Temperaments
represent the innate biological structures of personality and are more stable.
Arnold Buss and Robert Plomin (1984) have argues that three basic characteristics can be considered
temperaments. Activity level is the overall amount of energy and action a person exhibits.
Emotionality describes the intensity of emotional reactions. Sociability refers to the general tendence
to affiliate with others.
The relation between temperament and life decisions illustrates the gene-environment correlation
phenomenon in the nature/nurture debate. Genes and environment affect not only behavior but
also each other. Even if genes and environments are unrelated to start with, they become
complementary over time because of decisions people make.
- long-term implications of temperaments
Early-childhood temperaments influence behavior and personality structure throughout a person’s
development.
Temperament at age 3 predicted personality structure and various behaviors in adulthood.
Research has shown that children as young as 6 weeks of age can be identified as likely to be shy.
Approximately 15-20 precent of newborns react to new situations or strange object by becoming
startled and distressed, crying, and vigorously moving their arms and leg. The developmental
psychologist Jerome Kagan refers these children as inhibited, and he views this characteristic as
biological determined.
Question
How do biologically based temperaments shape our environment?
Temperament shapes our choices and patterns of behavior, which influence the physical
environment and the behaviors of others around us.
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