"Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals."
It focuses on understanding individual differences in behavior, personality traits, and cognition.
Personality Traits: The study of enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that differentiate individuals from one another.
Trait Theories: Theories that attempt to identify and describe the basic traits that are the building blocks of personality.
Biological Approaches to Personality: Investigation of how genetics, physiology, and brain structure are associated with personality characteristics.
Psychoanalytic Theory: Theories that focus on the interaction between the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality and how they influence behavior.
Behavioral Approaches to Personality: Study of how behavior interacts with personality, including reinforcement and punishment, and observational/social learning.
Humanistic Approaches to Personality: Theories that focus on the unique and positive aspects of human nature and emphasizes the importance of personal growth, free will, and self-determination.
Cognitive Approaches to Personality: Exploration of how mental processes and perceptions affect personality, including beliefs, expectations, and attributions.
Personality Assessment: Development and use of various methods of evaluating personality, such as questionnaires, observation, and interviews.
Cross-Cultural Psychology of Personality: Examining how cultural differences influence the development and expression of personality traits, as well as how different cultures conceptualize and represent personality.
Personality Disorders: The study of extreme and long-term patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that deviate from the norm and impair social functioning.
"Its areas of focus include the construction of a coherent picture of the individual and their major psychological processes, investigation of individual psychological differences, and investigation of human nature and psychological similarities between individuals."
"'Personality' is a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by an individual that uniquely influences their environment, cognition, emotions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations."
"The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means 'mask'."
"Personality pertains to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviors persistently exhibited over time that strongly influences one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes."
"Personality also predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and stress."
"Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic."
"Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual."
"The study of personality has a broad and varied history in psychology, with an abundance of theoretical traditions."
"The major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist, evolutionary, and social learning perspective."
"Many researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain perspective and instead take an eclectic approach."
"Research in this area is empirically driven – such as dimensional models, based on multivariate statistics such as factor analysis – or emphasizes theory development, such as that of the psychodynamic theory."
"There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing."
"In psychological education and training, the study of the nature of personality and its psychological development is usually reviewed as a prerequisite to courses in abnormal psychology or clinical psychology." Note: Due to the limitation of generating specific quotes, some questions may not have directly corresponding quotes from the provided paragraph.