Personality is an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. In the 1950's, sociologist Talcott Parsons concluded that in the middle-class suburban family the masculine personality tends to be goal-oriented interests, needs and functions, presumably in whatever social system both sexes are involved, while the feminine personality tends more to the primacy of expressive interests, needs and functions. African American women have been characterized as strong, dominant, and nurturing; Latina women as emotional, nurturing, and passionate; Jewish women as aggressive, dominant, and intellectual; and so forth. The one area of gender differences in behavior in which hormonal differences have been strongly implicated is males' greater physical aggression than females'. .
According to psychodynamic theories, females and males develop different personality structures as a result of early-childhood experiences with their caretakers and identification with the same-sex parent. Freud's theory of personality development is called "psychosexual development." The theory discusses the oral, anal, and phallic stage. Girls get penis envy and boys get a castration complex. Helene Deutsch proposed that the triad of passivity, masochism, and narcissism is a natural concomitant of female biology. She suggests that because girls do not possess an "active" sexual organ, their "active" impulses must be inhibited and transformed into passive aims. Women are naturally suited to be "acted upon" rather than to take action, and the reward for passivity is love. Karen Horney concluded that Masochism represents an attempt to achieve personal safety and satisfaction by appearing inconspicuous and dependent. Thus, Horney's explanation of "feminine psychology" suggests that social change might be able to remedy traits deemed undesirable. Rather than attributing the adolescent female's renunciation of the "active" role in life to the resolution of penis envy, Thompson attributed it to external social pressures.