Offers a broad perspective of the field and unifying theoretical framework. Emphases recent work linking personality to brain, biological-genetic, and evolutionary processes.
This is a textbook I first read in 1976 while majoring in psychology at the University of Washington. This time I was reading it while doing jury duty for the King County Superior Court in downtown Seattle. It was strange being surrounded by a variety of people while reading it, and it also served as a conversation starter with a couple of people. For the most part it was pretty dry reading, and I kept wondering what has been learned since the book was written 35 years ago!
This psychology textbook is not written in the most engaging manner, but it does have a lot of interesting information and, for the most part, presents it in an organized, easily understandable fashion. It covers a lot of aspects about personality and the various levels of analyses. My Intro to Personality university course used this textbook.
Interesting read too, for my Personality Theory course...man, a lot better than the cognition crap I had to read last term....I mean I am grateful I know the cognition material, but is was BORING! I need to come back to this.
If it is at all possible to like a textbook, that is how I feel about this one. It was a great introduction to a field I cannot wait to work in. The authors present plenty of concepts, and it is a great textbook to keep for future reference.