Personality: the developmental perspective, traits, and theories

 

A thing or two about personality
Our personality starts to mould right from our childhood. It can be described as an organised pattern of behaviours and attitudes that make a person unique. As infants grow up, they go through rigorous personality development at various stages of their total developmental period. Personality development is an acquired process that keeps varying constantly, in which, features can be learned and unlearned throughout an individual’s lifespan. More often, one tends to misinterpret a child’s temperament with their personality. Temperament is genetically predetermined traits that influence how a child will learn and interact which the external environment. Personality development is a result of the interaction between temperament, character and environment. Nine temperamental traits in humans influence personality development in childhood crucially - the child’s activity levels, distractibility, intensity in terms of loudness, regularity of biological functions, sensory threshold, approach and withdrawal, adaptability, persistence and mood.

 
Freud on personality development
Sigmund Freud proposed that the first five years of an individual’s life are crucial in forming their adult personality and have a heavy influence throughout. He described human personality development in terms of psychosexual stages. The term ‘sexual’ signifies all pleasurable actions and thoughts a person has, not its literal meaning. According to him, personality development takes place as the id, the instinctive drive present in humans, accumulates and discharges on maturation. The ego and the superego development takes place to channelise the id's gratifications into socially acceptable ways. interaction between the id, the ego and the superego creates conflict at every psychosexual stage of development. These conflicts are meant to be resolved as one progresses through every stage. This process is vital for healthy personality development. As per Freud’s classification of psychosexual stages, the development starts with the oral stage, right from the birth of an individual, and goes on to the genital stage, starting from adolescence till adulthood of an individual. Unresolved conflicts have effects on humans, usually seen in the forms of frustrations, fixations and overindulgence. 

Erikson and the stages of personality development
In 1956, Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst told us about an individual’s socialisation process which gave major insights into personality development and functions. The process is comprised of eight stages each with a “psychosocial” crisis. These stages significantly impact personality development in individuals. Five of these eight stages take place in infancy, childhood and adolescence. According to Erikson’s theory, during the first two years of life, an infant learns about basic trust and mistrust, which affects their perception of optimism and security. The second stage comes in at toddlerhood, which deals with learning about autonomy and shame, characterised by self-confidence, tantrums and stubbornness, however, these highly depend on the temperament of the child. The third stage is the preschool stage, which is about learning initiative and guilt. Imagination, learning tools, and fantasy building are all parts of this stage. The school-age forms the fourth stage where a child's learning competence develops, they start relating with other peers and acquire basic intellectual skills. The fifth stage is the learning identity or diffusion stage which takes place during adolescence. Here, self-certainty, leadership skills and other positive development take place. In extreme cases, negative identity and delinquency can also be developed. 

The Big Five Traits
The Big Five model of personality, consist of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion. It is made with thecontribution of many independent researchers in the field of psychology and personality. Starting out with the list of 4,500 terminologies related to personality by Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert in 1936, it was reduced to 16 trait through factor analysis by Raymon Catell In the end, these sixteen were reduced to five traits. The Big Five trait theory is one of the most widely accepted models of personality worldwide because each of these big five contains many subcategories that explain many personality-related terms. 
Let us look at each of these big five traits individually and see how they can be interpreted. Conscientiousness is a person's ability to regulate, control and inhibit their impulses and channelise them into goal-directed behaviour. If an individual is high on this trait, they shall be described as competent, organised, self-disciplined and dutiful individuals. On the other side, if they are low on this, they showcase a lack of discipline, more impulsiveness and display careless behaviours. Agreeableness is about how an individual treats interpersonal relationships. Individuals high on this trait, are said to be trustful, forgiving, altruistic and modest. Low levels of this trait indicate scepticism and a lack of sympathy and empathy.  Extraversion is the tendency of an individual to be social and the intensity to which they socialise. Extraversion also refers to the source from which an individual seeks or drains their energy. People high on extraversion are energised by social interactions and are outgoing by nature whereas people low on this are called introverts who drain their energy if they socialise. They are reserved and try to avoid being the centre of attention. Openness to experience is an individual’s capacity and willingness to try new things and think through imagination. A high openness to experience will make an individual curious, creative and unconventional. Such people are often called “out-of-the-box thinkers”. If people are not open to experiences, they will dislike trying new things and will prefer sticking to their routines. The last in the big five, Neuroticism, which is an individual’s emotional stability and the prediction of an individual’s perception of events. High neuroticism makes a person more prone to anxiety, irritability and mood swings. A low range of neuroticism scores will reflect calmness, confidence and resilience in an individual. The big five traits are mostly stable throughout the lifespan. However, minor changes are seen from childhood to adulthood. 

Conclusion
Our personality influences nearly every aspect of our life, from choosing our partners to our pets which has made it one of the most heavily researched and explored domains in psychology. Our personality is what makes us unique and distinct from the rest of the world and the goal should be to channelise for the optimal development of the self and maximum good of others.

About the Author

Anaika Desai

Subhead, PsyCreative column

Psychology committee, SDSOS, NMIMS.

Anaika is currently 18 years old and studying applied psychology. She believes a little kindness does the right magic. She is very inquisitive, picks up new hobbies occasionally, loves petting cats, and puts all her love in a batter and bakes it into beautiful cakes. She organises her thoughts on a piece of paper and calls it spending quality time with herself. She hopes one day the world will win through love and kindness, till then she will keep doing her part. She has a warrior spirit and will rise above the hurdles life puts her through, at her own pace though. She aspires to see herself as a psychologist one day and for that she works on herself every day a little bit.