ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a range of approaches to the psychological study and measurement of personality that have been and still are important in personality psychology. One of the problems of producing a useful definition of psychology is that different psychologists adopt quite different approaches in their attempts to understand and research human personality. There are four main approaches: the psychoanalytic approach, the dispositional approach; the behavioural and cognitive approach; the humanistic approach. Environmental experiences have been shown to influence strongly complex and general aspects of personality described under the general heading of 'temperament'. Focusing on the individual in an attempt to understand and explain personality rests on the assumption that personality characteristics or dispositions will result in a person behaving in a consistent way across a range of institutions. The chapter also provides an outline of this book.
