ABSTRACT
A familiarity with psychological personality theory is a requirement of the BPS Certification of Competence in Testing and the subject is therefore covered here in some detail. Although the term 'personality' is widely used in everyday conversation, defining its meaning is not a simple task. The various theoretical approaches differ fundamentally in their conceptualisation of human personality. The psychoanalytic approach views personality as biologically based, relatively unchangeable and determined by the need to control sexual and aggressive. The psychometric approach to studying personality is based on Galton's Lexical Hypothesis and began in earnest with the work of Gordon Allport and Odbert, who systematically selected all words from the dictionary that could be used to describe human characteristics. Hence following this early work, psychologists began to apply the technique of factor analysis to Allport and Odbert's word list to produce a smaller number of groups of related words.
