Personality Psychology- an Integrative Essay Example

In particular the humanist perspective, influenced greatly by the work of prominent humanists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, emphasizes the role of motivation on thought and behaviour. Concepts such as self-actualization are an essential part of this perspective, conceptualised by a hierarchy of needs each level both independent and interdependent of the next. If traits sketch an outline of human individuality, characteristic adaptations fill in some of the details.

McAdams final level is that of integrative life narratives. Narrative approaches to personality suggest that human beings construe their own lives as ongoing stories and that these life stories help to shape behavior, establish identity, and integrate individuals into modern social life Narrative identity is indeed that story the person tries to “keep going”—an internalized and evolving narrative of the self that incorporates the reconstructed past and the imagined future into a more or less coherent whole in order to provide the person’s life with some degree of unity, purpose, and meaning.The psychosocial construction of narrative identity moves personality from broad trends (dispositional traits) and the specific responses to daily life demands (characteristic adaptations) to the challenge of making meaning out of one’s life in a complex world.

Dispositional traits play the fundamental role of sketching the outline while characteristic adaptations fill the details of human individuality, then narrative identities give individual their unique and culturally anchored meanings.While McAdams describes personality in terms of these three levels: dispositional trait, characteristic adaptations and narrative; there is an underlying notion that influences them all, culture.. At the level of dispositional traits, culture

provides display rules and demand characteristics for behavioural expression, but culture has little impact on the magnitude or strength of traits.

At the level of characteristic adaptations, culture sets agendas for the timing and content of goals, strivings, relational patterns, and the like. Culture has its strongest impact at the level of life narrative, providing a menu or anthology of arrative forms from which individuals draw in making meaning out of their lives. In conclusion, Personality is an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations (notions from humanistic, psychodynamic, social-cognitive approaches), and integrative life stories complexly and differentially situated in culture. The principles articulated in this essay mark a newfound effort to assume a central and integrative position within the discipline of personality psychology.