SW_PERSONALITY

• Personality is the pattern of psychological and physical processes which controls an individual’s behavior and thought.
• The characteristics and qualities that form a person’s distinctive character are part of their personality.
• The total of all the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of a person is their personality.
• Personality development is the evolving process of progressive maturation by which an individual is transformed from a dependent biological being (infant) to a biosocial person (adult) who becomes a participative or productive member of the world they live in.
• Theory provides a framework for simplifying and describing data in a meaningful way.
• A general principle or set of principles proposed to explain how several separate facts are related is a theory.
• Case Study is a detailed history of an individual that contains data from a variety of sources.
• Scientific method consists of the orderly, systematic procedures that researchers follow as they identify a research problem, design a study to investigate the problem, collect and analyze data, draw conclusions, and communicate their findings.
• Psychology is the study of mental and behavioral processes.
• Structuralism is the first formal school of thought in psychology, aimed at analyzing the basic elements, or structure, of conscious mental experience.
• Functionalism is an early school of psychology that was concerned with how humans and animals use mental processes in adapting to their environment.
• Behaviorism is the school of psychology that views observable, measurable behavior as the appropriate subject matter for psychology and emphasizes the key role of environment as a determinant of behavior.
• Psychoanalysis emphasizes the influence of the unconscious mind on behavior.
• Psychology became a science and an academic discipline in the 19th century when people who wanted to learn more about behavior and mental processes began to use the scientific method.
• Structuralism was criticized for its primary method, introspection, which is not objective, even though it involves observation, measurement, and experimentation.
• Functionalism, a new school of psychology, was taking shape in the early 20th century, concerned not with the structure of consciousness but with how mental processes function.
• Personality theories must be able to clarify and explain the data of personality by organizing that data into a coherent framework.
• Theories should also help us understand and predict behavior.
• Personality theories must be testable, capable of stimulating research on their various propositions.
• Everybody has one — a personality, that will help determine the boundaries of your success and life fulfillment.
• Theories are sets of principles used to explain a particular class of phenomena, in our case, the behaviors and experiences relating to personality.
• Techniques for assessing or measuring personality must be reliable (consistency of responses on a test) and valid (degree to which the test measures what it is intended to measure).
• Your personality can limit or expand your options and choices in life, prevent you from sharing certain experiences, or enable you to take full advantage of them.
• Personality refers to our external and visible characteristics, those aspects of us that other people can see.
• The first school of thought, structuralism, was advocated by the founder of the first psychology lab, Wilhelm Wundt.
• Social work is a profession which, by the very nature of its professional mandate, is committed to the promotion of the integral well-being of people to the highest degree in any given context.
• Humanistic Psychology developed as a response to psychoanalysis and behaviorism, focusing on individual free will, personal growth, and self-actualization.
• Research in cross-cultural psychology shows how personality can vary from one culture or country to the next.
• An essential part of the professional equipment of social workers must be an adequate and effective working knowledge of personality and human behavior along with human growth and development.
• Those who work in the field of psychology try to give meaning to the question, “How do you see the world?”
• Personality is how we make an impression on others or the visible aspect of one’s character.
• The work of Charles Darwin, especially his ideas about evolution and the continuity of species, was largely responsible for an increasing use of animals in psychological experiments.
• Personality encompasses a host of subjective social and emotional qualities as well, ones that we may not be able to see directly, that a person may try to hide from us, or that we may try to hide from others.
• Human Behavior and Social Environment is the area that focuses on the knowledge of the person and the environment, including the person as a biopsychosocial being and the interaction between him/her and the social, cultural, political, and economic environment which influence his/her behavior.
• Cognitive Psychology is the school of psychology that emphasizes that individuals perceive objects and patterns as whole units and that the perceived whole is more than the sum of its parts.
• Gestalt Psychology is a school of psychology that emphasizes the whole over the parts and the process over the product.
• Gestalt psychology is based upon the idea that we experience things as unified wholes.
• Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior to their smallest element, the gestalt psychologists believed that you must look at the whole of experience.
• According to the gestalt thinkers, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Behaviorism holds that all behavior can be explained by environmental causes, rather than by internal forces.