PERSONALITY AND DEVELOPMENT Introduction This

This research paper presents an understanding and characterization of personality and development. Factors that continue to shape it over the course of a lifetime are also discussed.

The term personality for some refers to one's social value.

Popular beliefs are that an individual has personality if they behave in likeable ways. If a person is charming, generous, and popular, gets along with others, and behaves in a socially desirable manner, he has personality (Feist, 1985, p. 8). Psychology defines the personality as a unique style of behavior or thought, a kind of self or inner agent. Psychologists differ in their views of the personality, they use different terms to refer to the concept, such as types, traits, and social learning. Each of the terms is associated with a different theory of personality; each theory offers its own definition of personality and human behavior. Although theorists differ in terminology and details, most agree that personality is an internal, mental, and emotional pattern of responses to the environment (Gatchel & Mears, 1982, p. 4; & Kolb & Brodie, 1982, p. 2).

Personality is a characteristically recurring pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior which affects each aspect of a person's life. It is the quality that makes one person stand out from another; it makes a person unique. Main personality theories agree that personality is a reflectio

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ceived ideas. Psychological problems stem from faulty learning, incorrect inferences based on inadequate or incorrect information, and a lack of adequate distinction between imagination and reality (Freeman, Simon, Beutler, & Arkowitz, 1989, pp. 1-25). The phenomenological and self-theory approach to personality development includes Carl Roger's view that individual perceptions of events guide actions more than objective reality. The self is viewed as an important organizing unit. George Kelley noted his personal construct theory that states when psychologists refer to subjects, behavior is governed by laws and dependent on motives, contingencies, and reinforcement conditions. However, when referring to the self, psychologists focus on cognitive processes, with rational hypotheses testing to validate constructions and ideas (Koch & Leary, pp. 522-523). Social learning approaches include Albert Bandura's theory of personality development. For Bandura, the personality is learned largely within a social context with a reciprocal interaction between the environment, the behavior, and the person (reciprocal determinism). In this case, the person, includes internal causes such as cognition. Cognitive capacities of memory and

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