ABSTRACT
Personality is a difficult concept to explain as it could refer to any number of aspects of a person. For example, some psychologists see personality as a fixed part of a person’s makeup, such as H.J. Eysenck’s personality theory. This chapter focuses on only one approach to the study of personality, that of Eysenck. Eysenck began his research into personality by observing the behaviours of psychiatric patients that he was working with. Eysenck also devised a questionnaire that could be used to categorise a person according to where they scored on the dimensions. A person would gain a score on both dimensions in different places. One criticism of Eysenck is that he believed personality was a genetic part of a person’s makeup and so was biological. The way a person reaches the sense of identity comes from a process of socialisation that takes account of the separate roles carried out by males and females.
