The term personality has several different meanings.

It is a reasonably distinct
subfield of academic psychology that encompasses a large number of different and
often conflicting theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, it is a discipline that
seeks
to establish better ways of understanding persons through the use of various
research strategies. In later chapters, we will describe many specific examples
of
how ideas, assumptions, and principles proposed by personologists to explain
human behavior have been tested in empirical research. Another distinguishing
feature of personality psychology is its emphasis on assessment methods to study
,
understand, predict, and make valid decisions about individuals. Among these
methods are interviewing, administering psychological tests, observing and
monitoring behavior, measuring physiological responses, and analyzing biographic
al
and personal documents. Virtually every perspective on personality that will
be addressed in this text uses some assessment technique or another. Accordingly
,
we have devoted a part of the next chapter and portions of the theoretical
chapters to personality assessment. Finally, as you will see in the pages to com
e,
personality is a field of inquiry that has provided the groundwork for understan
ding
and treating abnormal behavior. In fact, several personality perspectives (such
as psychodynamic, cognitive, and phenomenological) suggest ways to think about
and deal with behavioral disorders. Nonetheless, modern personality psychology
should not be confused with abnormal or clinical psychology. To oversimplify
somewhat, personologists are much more inclined to focus attention on normal
rather than abnormal functioning. Beyond this, personality psychology has tradit
ionally
distinguished itself from other disciplines within psychology by emphasizing
individual differences in persons. Even though personologists recognize that
there are similarities in the ways people behave, they are primarily concerned
with generating explanations of how and why people differ from one another.
In addition to being a field of study, personality is an abstract concept which
integrates the many aspects that characterize what the person is like. Such aspe
cts
include emotions, motivations, thoughts, experiences, perceptions, and actions.
However, we should not equate personality as a concept with whatever aspect of
the individual s functioning it is meant to describe. Instead, the conceptual mean
ing
of personality is multifaceted, encompassing a wide spectrum of internal,
mental processes that influence how the person acts across different situations.
Given such a complex meaning, no one can expect to find simple definitions of
personality as a concept. Even within the field of psychology we will find no
generally agreed-upon single definition of the term. There may be as many
different definitions of the concept of personality as there are psychologists w
ho
have tried to define it.