Personality Theories
The study of personality is based on the essential insight that all people are similar in some ways, yet different in others. For example, all people learn, yet people learn different things, in different ways, and to different extents. There have been many different definitions of personality proposed. Most contemporary psychologists though would agree on the following definition:
Personality is that pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguishes one person from another and that persists over time and situations.
Read more about this topic: Personality Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words personality and/or theories:
“The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)