ABSTRACT
Personality is the term used to describe the sum total of those cognitive, emotional, and behavioural characteristics that a person habitually employs in relating to his or her social environment. Inevitably, an element of arbitrariness enters into the selection of which characteristics are considered to be important in establishing a person’s personality profile, but research in this area repeatedly draws attention to what are increasingly considered to be five core dimensions:
Surgency, which includes power, dominance, and extraversion (as opposed to weakness, submissiveness, and introversion);
Agreeableness, which includes co-operativeness and trustworthiness (as opposed to aggressiveness and suspiciousness);
Conscientiousness, which includes industriousness and responsibility (as opposed to laziness and irresponsibility);
Emotional stability, which includes security and stability (as opposed to insecurity and anxiousness); and
Intellect-openness, which includes intelligence, perspicacity, creativity (as opposed to stupidity, boorishness, and unimaginativeness).
David Buss (1989; 1995), who has made major contributions to personality research, suggests that these five dimensions recur with such frequency because they represent the most important features of the social landscape to which humans have to adapt. Of the five, surgency and agreeableness persistently appear as the two major axes of interpersonal taxonomies. And, comments Buss, it is not by chance that power and love emerge consistently and cross-culturally as the two most important dimensions of interpersonal behaviour. The personality disorders considered in this section all involve these crucial dimensions.