Developmental and Personality Concepts.
Why does a person do what they do? Where does personality come from and how does it grow? These are some frequently asked questions when discussing the topic of personality. Personality does originate from a specific point, and from then on it continues to grow and become exponentially more complex. There are some commonly assumptions made when developing a personality theory. .
The fact that people differ from each other is obvious. How and why they differ is less clear and is an important part of the study of personality. Personality psychology addresses the questions of shared human nature, dimensions of individual differences and unique patterns of individuals. Research in personality ranges from analyses of genetic codes and studies of biological systems to the study of sexual, social, ethnic, and cultural bases of thought, feelings, and behavior. Personality research includes studies of cognitive abilities, interpersonal styles, and emotional reactivity. Methods range from laboratory experiments to longitudinal field studies and include data reduction techniques such as factor analysis and principal components analysis, as well as structural modeling and multi-level modeling procedures. Measurement issues of most importance are those of reliability and stability of individual differences. Research in individual differences addresses three broad questions:.
1) developing an adequate descriptive taxonomy of how people differ; .
2) applying differences in one situation to predict differences in other situations;.
3) testing theoretical explanations of the structure and dynamics of individual differences. .
Bandura who went to the University of Iowa, received his Ph.D. in 1952. It was there that he came under the influence of the behaviorist tradition and learning theory. He has since developed his social learning or cognitive theory and his ideas of observational learning and modeling, for which he made a place for himself in the history of Psychology.