Personality disorders - Essay Example

Temperaments and Personality Development Temperaments are an integral part of our personality, it is believed that they are inborn and very much a part of us as soon as we are born into this world. Our temperament is a measure of how we interact with or react to the people, things and places in our life. Because it is innate, we don’t have much control over how it affects us. The temperament that best describes me is ‘slow to warm up’. I am cautious, sometimes shy, and need routine and exposure to things in order to accept them into my life.

With time, however, the negative feelings I may have had to something or someone can turn to positive ones, given the right climate and readiness on my part to make that happen. Temperaments are part of a person’s personality, and the part that we really can’t shape, since they are with us from birth. Biologically, a temperament is with you regardless of whether you’re born a boy or a girl, and babies of both genders are born the same way, with this preset code. It has been said that baby boys are harder to raise than their female counterparts, but all babies start out needing the same things, and already have their temperament ‘installed’ so that is a misconception, if not an old wives’ tale.

Socially, temperaments don’t change, either. When you are first born, you have not had the opportunity to learn anything yet, so how you act around other people is in your temperament, not a learned behavior. They say that your temperament remains virtually unchanged throughout your life, so if you start out a social butterfly you are more likely to remain so when you do have the opportunity to learn behaviors. I believe that your temperament affects the development of your personality since it is a building block of who you are.

You already have a set of rules that you follow in social situations, though you are not always aware of it, especially when you are young. These ‘rules’ then shape your personality as you grow older, but you can never escape fully your innate tendencies, your temperament. Hans Eysenck’s personality theory is based on the biological, and it very much influenced by the classical conditioning work of Ivan Pavlov. Eysenck believed that genetics was the basis of our personalities, and that we do not have much control over how we act in a specific situation, that our behaviors were just in us, we didn’t learn them.

This is different from the other trait theorists that we studied because they believe that our personality is shaped by our behavior, our genes do not have much to say in the determination of who we are. Eysenck’s PEN theory is different from many other trait theorists. He used a scale and ‘factor analysis’ to determine our level of extraversion and neuroticism and these combined form the four temperaments, to which we can belong. You can score high or low, and a combination of these will determine your temperament type, choleric, melancholic, sanguine or phlegmatic.

He believed that everyone is somewhere on each scale, but it was where on the scale that mattered (and made a person neurotic, or just have the capacity to be neurotic) and from this comes the basis of his theory. He looked at physiological changes within the body to account for the differences that he found on the scales, and no one can falsify those findings. I believe that the PEN theory would provide an accurate measure of a personality. You cannot lie about what your body is telling you through physiological responses to stimuli, but you can try to ‘make it look good’ so to speak if given a list of words and asked to choose which best describes you.

I believe that the genetic approach to personality development is a good one because it takes us back to who we really are. Eysenck’s theory, because he has proven so many comparisons to the work of Pavlov also gives it more weight in my opinion. Working with dogs was a departure because they can not tell you about themselves; Pavlov had to study them and their differences in order to base his findings. Eysenck took it one step further and developed a way around a person’s choice in the matter of their personality and made it more about who we really are inside rather than who we think we should be outwardly.