What is personality?

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  • Created by: Ella4
  • Created on: 09-02-17 21:00

Personality is made up by the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that make a person unique. This will stay reasonably constant but will develop over the years as a result of experience. 

Temperament describes the way an individual responds to the environment. This stays constant throughout life. 

A study of temperament was Thomas, Chess and Birch, who studied 133 children from infancy to early adulthood. They found that the children fell into 3 types 'easy' where the children were happy and flexible, 'difficult' where the children were demanding and cried a lot, or 'slow to warm up' where the children were unhappy with change but soon warmed up. They concluded that temperament will stay with us constantly. 

However, there are evaluations from this study:

  • All children were from middle-class families so we cannot generalise this to other social classes.
  • The parents may have given biased answers to show their children in the best possible way.
  • Participants could have dropped out from the longitudinal study.

Another study into temperament was Buss and Plomin, who believed that temperament was also constant throughout life. They studied 228 pairs of monozygotic twins and 172 pairs of dizygotic twins and watched the…

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