Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Historical precursors of personality theory
- 2 From illness to wellness models of human nature
- 3 Developmental perspectives on personality: from youth-based to life-span models
- 4 The biology of personality
- 5 Trait theories and the psychology of individual differences
- 6 The puzzle of the self
- 7 Culture and personality
- 8 Gendered personality
- 9 Emotions and reasoning: a definition of the Human
- 10 Taking the measure of the Human: benefits and inherent limitations of personality measures
- 11 Can personality change? The possibilities of psychotherapeutics
- 12 The disordered personality: evolution of nosological systems
- 13 Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
13 - Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Historical precursors of personality theory
- 2 From illness to wellness models of human nature
- 3 Developmental perspectives on personality: from youth-based to life-span models
- 4 The biology of personality
- 5 Trait theories and the psychology of individual differences
- 6 The puzzle of the self
- 7 Culture and personality
- 8 Gendered personality
- 9 Emotions and reasoning: a definition of the Human
- 10 Taking the measure of the Human: benefits and inherent limitations of personality measures
- 11 Can personality change? The possibilities of psychotherapeutics
- 12 The disordered personality: evolution of nosological systems
- 13 Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
The topics in psychology that most interest laypeople – love, hate, work, play, food, sex, status, dominance, jealousy, friendship, religion, art – are almost completely absent from psychology textbooks.
(Pinker, 2002b, p. 21)Gathering eight appendices into a single chapter requires some indulgence from the reader. Each appendix has important personological features but is not otherwise closely related to the others. As these topics did not fit seamlessly into the preceding chapters I decided to aggregate them in a final chapter. Some personality traits are widely recognized as important in our daily lives, and though well treated by scholars in handbooks, reference works, and stand-alone volumes, they are often given insufficient attention in books on personality psychology, or indeed in psychologists' research agendas, as Cacioppo et al. (2005) have observed. Sternberg and Lubart (cf. 1991, p. 678) lament that although significant research is being done on specific traits, the scientific community of personality psychologists, and particularly those who write textbooks, do not give them sufficient prominence in their own work.
In the segments that follow I will cursorily examine some of the personality traits that have been traditionally subsumed under more generic topics, such as the Big Five Model or Cattell's 16PF (see Chapter 5, above). Relatively little information is available on a number of them. For example, the preparation and enjoyment of food takes up a large proportion of our waking lives.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Personality PsychologyTheory, Science, and Research from Hellenism to the Twenty-First Century, pp. 451 - 498Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010