Personality

About: Personality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 75641 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2653846 citations.

Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development

Abstract: Preface. Introduction. 1. What Promotes Adaptive Motivation? Four Beliefs and Four Truths about Ability, Success, Praise, and Confidence. 2. When Failure Undermines and When Failure Motivates: Helpless and Mastery-Oriented Responses. 3. Achievement Goals: Looking Smart vs. Learning. 4. Is Intelligence Fixed or Changeable? Students' Theories About Their Intelligence Foster Their Achievement Goals. 5. Theories of Intelligence Predict (and Create) Differences in Achievement. 6. Theories of Intelligence Create High and Low Effort. 7. Theories and Goals Predict Self-Esteem Loss and Depressive Reactions. 8. Why Confidence and Success Are Not Enough. 9. What Is IQ and Does It Matter? 10. Believing in Fixed Social Traits: Impact on Social Coping. 11. Judging and Labeling Others: Another Effect of Implicit Theories. 12. Belief in the Potential to Change. 13. Holding and Forming Stereotypes. 14. How Does It All Begin? Young Children's Theories about Goodness and Badness. 15. Kinds of Praise and Criticism: The Origins of Vulnerability. 16. Praising Intelligence: More Praise that Backfires. 17. Misconceptions about Self-Esteem and about How to Foster It. 18. Personality, Motivation, Development, and the Self: Theoretical Reflections. 19. Final Thoughts on Controversial Issues.

Personality and Assessment

Abstract: After many "out-of-print" years, this volume has been reissued in response to an increasing demand for copies. This reflects that the fundamental questions that motivated this book thirty years ago are still being asked. But more important, the answers -- or at least their outlines -- now seem to be in sight. In 1968, this book stood as an expression of a paradigm crisis in its critique of the state of personality psychology. The last three decades have been filled with controversy and debate about the dilemmas raised here, and then with renewal and fresh discoveries. It therefore seems especially timely to revisit the pages which posed the challenges. Mischel outlined the need to encompass the situation in the study of personality, but with a focus on the acquired meaning of stimuli and on the situation as perceived, viewing the individual as a cognitive-affective being who construes, interprets, and transforms the stimulus in a dynamic reciprocal interaction with the social world. He focused on the idiographic analysis of personality that had originally motivated the field, and the complexity, discriminative facility, and uniqueness of the individual, and sought to connect the expressions of personality to the individual's behavior -- that is, to what people do and not just what they say. Even the intrinsically contextualized "if...then..." expressions of the personality system -- its essential behavioral signatures -- were foreshadowed in this book that fired the opening salvo in a search for "a truly dynamic personality psychology."

The determinants of parenting: A process model.

Abstract: This essay is based on the assumption that a long-neglected topic of socialization, the determinants of individual differences in parental functioning, is illuminated by research on the etiology of child maltreatment. Three domains of determinants are identified (personal psychological resources of parents, characteristics of the child, and contextual sources of stress and support), and a process model of competent parental functioning is offered on the basis of the analysis. The model presumes that parental functioning is multiply determined, that sources of contextual stress and support can directly affect parenting or indirectly affect parenting by first influencing individual psychological well-being, that personality influences contextual support/stress, which feeds back to shape parenting, and that, in order of importance, the personal psychological resources of the parent are more effective in buffering the parent-child relation from stress than are contextual sources of support, which are themselves more effective than characteristics of the child.

Stressful life events, personality, and health: an inquiry into hardiness.

Abstract: Personality was studied as a conditioner of the effects of stressful life events on illness onset. Two groups of middle and upper level executives had comparably high degrees of stressful life events in the previous 3 years, as measured by the Holmes and Rahe Schedule of Recent Life Events. One group (n = 86) suffered high stress without falling ill, whereas the other (n = 75) reported becoming sick after their encounter with stressful life events. Illness was measured by the Wyler, Masuda, and Holmes Seriousness of Illness Survey. Discriminant function analysis, run on half of the subjects in each group and cross-validated on the remaining cases, supported the prediction that high stress/low illness executives show, by comparison with high stress/high illness executives, more hardiness, that is, have a stronger commitment to self, an attitude of vigorousness toward the environment, a sense of meaningfulness, and an internal locus of control.