The topic I have chosen for my research paper is personality. I am going to explore the field of personality psychology from different perspectives of personality theories. We all think differently, feel differently and therefore behave differently. This broad pattern or tendency is what we generally call personality. In terms of psychology, however, the fact is that there is no one single definition of personality that is agreed by personality theorists. What makes a person who he or she is? What can influence the personality? Ethnicity? Age? Education? Religion or belief? Childhood experience? Culture? Social environment? Medical effect?Does a personality change? When or how it change? Role of unconsciousness?There are so many things that could determine personality and I am going to analyze variety of personality theories in my research paper.
Here is how I would organize and develop my paper. I would explore six major personality theories; Trait Theories, Type Theories, Psychoanalytic Theory, Humanistic Theory, Behaviorist Theory and Social-Cognitive Theories. (I would exclude Biopsychological theory here for a reason). There would be three major paragraphs and I would group up the first two as systematic theories, the third and fourth as abstract theories and the last two as external effect theories. I categorized them in this way since this would make it possible to view them deeper, compare and contrast those theories within each paragraph in regard to similarities, differences or common foundations. So, for example, the first paragraph would include Five factor model by Lewis Goldberg, Three factor theory by Hans Eysenck and 16 personality factors, also known as Lexical Hypothesis, by Raymond Cattell from one big tree of Trait Theories. Then it would include Carl Jung, Briggs Myers and type A type B personality theory as Type Theories.
I am going to use the Internet resources as pre-research to gather general information and to plan basic constructure of the paragraphs in the most effective way. For further and main resources, I am going to use psychology textbooks as well as books and e-books as following. “Attitude, Personality and Behavior”, “Personality and development in childhood”, “Personality development: a psychoanalytic perspective”, “Dimension of personality”, “Personality in adulthood: a five-factor theory perspective” and some more as I find. I will also use several articles from New York Times.
Psychology has a long past but its history is short, compared to other subjects of science. There are much more to be found about human complexity, which I am interested in. In my research paper, I would like to approach personality, one of the complexities of human beings, from many different perspectives. I hope this paper would be highly informative, intellectual, academic and still something interesting to read.
Keiko Matsuura
