The Person: An Introduction to the Science of Personality Psychology

by Dan P. McAdams

Drawing on cutting-edge scientific research, classic personality theories, and stirring examples from biography and literature, The Person presents a lively and integrative introduction to the science of personality psychology. Author, Dan McAdams, organizes the field according to a broad conceptual perspective that has emerged in personality psychology over the past 10 years. According to this perspective, personality is made up of three levels of psychological individuality - dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations (such as motives and goals), and integrative life stories. Traits, adaptations, and stories comprise the three most recognizable variations on psychological human nature, grounded in the human evolutionary heritage and situated in cultural and historical context. The fifth edition of this beautifully written text expands and updates research on the neuroscience of personality traits and introduces new material on personality disorders, evolution and religion, attachment in adulthood, continuity and change in personality over the life course, and the development of narrative identity.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, School, Mental Health, Education, Textbooks

598 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. A leading expert in personality psychology and narrative identity, McAdams explores how people construct life stories to shape their sense of self. He is the author of several influential books, including The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (2006), which examines themes of redemption in American life narratives, and The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning (2020), a psychological analysis of Trump's personality. His research has significantly contributed to understanding personality development, identity, and life storytelling.

Reviews

[Teo · Rating 4 out of 5]

2016.01.02–2016.01.17

Contents

McAdams DP (2014) Person, The - An Introduction to the Science of Personality Psychology

Part I: The Background: Persons, Human Nature, and Culture

01. Studying the Person
• What Do We Know When We Know a Person?
• • Sketching an Outline: Dispositional Traits
• • Filling in the Details: Characteristic Adaptations
• • Constructing a Story: Integrative Life Narratives
• Science and the Person
• • Step 1: Unsystematic Observation
• • Step 2: Building Theories
• • Step 3: Evaluating Propositions
• • • Setting Up an Empirical Study
• • • The Correlational Design
• • • The Experimental Design
• Personality Psychology
• • The Past and the Present
• • • Feature 1.A: Gordon Allport and the Origins of Personality Psychology

02. Evolution and Human Nature
• On Human Nature: Our Evolutionary Heritage
• • Principles of Evolution
• • The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness
• • • Feature 2.A: The Evolution of Religion
• • The Adapted Mind
• • Mating
• • Getting Along and Getting Ahead
• • • Feature 2.B: Some Women (and Men) Are Choosier Than Others: Sociosexuality
• Hurting, Helping, and Loving: Three Faces of Human Nature
• • Aggression
• • Altruism
• • Attachment

03. Social Learning and Culture
• Behaviorism and Social-Learning Theory
• • American Environmentalism: The Behaviorist Tradition
• • Expectancies and Values
• • Bandura's Social-Learning Theory
• • • Observational Learning
• • • Self-Efficacy
• The Social Ecology of Human Behavior
• • • Feature 3.A: How Should Parents Raise Their Children?
• • Microcontexts: The Social Situation
• • Macrocontexts: Social Structure
• • Culture
• • • Individualism and Collectivism
• • • Modernity
• • • Feature 3.B: Race and Personality in the United States
• • History

Part II: Sketching the Outline: Dispositional Traits and the Prediction of Behavior

04. Personality Traits: Fundamental Concepts and Issues
• The Idea of Trait
• • What Is a Trait?
• • A Brief History of Traits
• • • Gordon Allport
• • • Raymond B. Cattell
• • • Hans Eysenck
• • The Big Five and Related Models
• • • Feature 4.A: What is Your Type? The Scientific Status of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator
• Measuring Traits
• • Constructing a Trait Measure
• • Criteria of a Good Measure
• • Trait Inventories
• • • Feature 4.B: Narcissism: The Trait of Excessive Self-Love
• • Personality Traits and Personality Disorders
• The Controversy Over Traits
• • Mischel's Critique
• • Aggregating Behaviors
• • Interactionism
• • • Persons versus Situations versus Interactions
• • • Reciprocal Interactionism
• • • Traits as Conditional Statements

05. Five Basic Traits – In the Brain and in Behavior
• E: Extraversion
• • Social Behavior and Cognitive Performance
• • Feeling Good
• N: Neuroticism
• • • Feature 5.A: Extreme Sports and the Sensation-Seeking Trait
• • The Many Ways to Feel Bad
• • Stress and Coping
• • • Feature 5.B: Are We Living in the Age of Anxiety?
• Extraversion and Neuroticism in the Brain
• • Eysenck and the Theory of Arousal
• • The Behavioral Approach System
• • The Behavioral Inhibition System
• • Left and Right
• O: Openness to Experience
• • Correlates of O
• • The Authoritarian Personality
• C and A: Conscientiousness and Agreeableness
• • Work
• • Love
• • Life
• • • Feature 5.C: Eysenck's Psychoticism: Low A, Low C, and Some Other Bad Things

06. Continuity and Change in Traits: The Roles of Genes, Environments, and Time
• The Continuity of Traits
• • Two Kinds of Continuity
• • Differential Continuity in the Adult Years
• • Childhood Precursors: From Temperament to Traits
• The Origins of Traits: Genes and Environments
• • The Logic of Twin and Adoption Studies
• • Heritability Estimates of Traits
• • Shared Environment
• • Nonshared Environment
• • • Feature 6.A: A Nonshared Environmental Effect
• • How Genes Shape Environments
• • Gene x Environment Interactions: New Findings from Neuroscience
• Change and Complexity
• • Different Meanings of Change
• • Trait Change in the Adult Years
• • Patterns of Traits Over Time
• • What Else Might Change?
• • • Feature 6.B: Happiness Over the Human Lifespan

Part III: Filling in the Details: Characteristic Adaptations to Life Tasks

07. Motives and Goals: What Do We Want in Life?
• The Psychoanalytic View
• • The Unconscious
• • • Feature 7.A: Sigmund Freud and the Birth of Psychoanalysis
• • • Repression and Repressors
• • • The Ego's Defenses
• The Humanistic View
• • Carl Rogers's Theory
• • Abraham Maslow's Psychology of Being
• • Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination Theory
• The Diversity View
• • Henry Murray's Theory of Needs
• • The TAT and the PSE
• • Achievement Motivation
• • Power Motivation
• • Intimacy Motivation
• • Implicit and Self-Attributed Motives
• • Personalized Goals

08. Self and Other: Social-Cognitive Aspects of Personality
• The Psychology of Personal Contructs
• • George Kelly's Theory
• • Exploring Personal Constructs: The Rep Test
• Cognitive Styles and Personality
• • Field Independence–Dependence
• • Integrative Complexity
• Social-Cognitive Theory and the Person
• • • Feature 8.A: Religious Values and Personality
• • Social Intelligence
• • Self-Schemas
• • Possible Selves: What I Might Be; What I Might Have Been
• • Discrepancies Among Selves
• • Schemas, Attributions, and Explanatory Style: The Case of Depression
• • • Feature 8.B: The Positive Psychology of Virtue: Gratitude as an Example
• • Mental Representations of Others: Attachment in Adulthood

09. Developmental Stages and Tasks
• Martin Luther's Identity Crisis
• Erik Erikson's Theory of Psychosocial Development
• • Developmental Stages in Childhood
• • • Feature 9.A: Early Object Relations
• • The Problem of Identity
• • • Adolescence and Young Adulthood
• • • Identity Statuses
• • • Identity and Intimacy
• • Generativity and Adult Development
• • • A Model of Generativity
• • • Individual Differences in Generativity
• • • Integrity
• Jane Loevinger's Theory of Ego Development
• • Stages of the Ego
• • • The Infant
• • • The Child
• • • The Adolescent
• • • The Adult
• • Measuring Ego Development

Part IV: Making a Life: The Stories We Live By

10. Life Scripts, Life Stories
• The Meaning of Stories
• • The Narrating Mind
• • Healing and Integration
• Feeling and Story: Tomkin's Script Theory
• • Affects
• • Scenes and Scripts
• • • Basic Concepts
• • • Types of Scripts
• Narrative Identity
• • Development of the Life Story
• • • Feature 10.A: Time and Story in Bali
• • Culture and Narrative
• • Story Themes and Episodes
• • Types of Stories
• • What Is a Good Story?
• • • Feature 10.B: When Did Identity Become a Problem?

11. The Interpretation of Stories: From Freud to Today
• Freudian Interpretation
• • The Story of Oedipus
• • A Case of Oedipal Dynamics: The Death of Yukio Mishima
• • The Case of Dora
• • • Feature 11.A: An Alternative Take on Oedipus: Chodorow's Gender Theory
• • • Two Traumatic Events
• • • The Dream of the Jewel-Case
• • • Dora Revisited
• • Principles of Interpretation
• • • Text and Treaty
• • • Manifest and Latent
• • • Symptoms and Everyday Life
• The Jungian Approach: Myth and Symbol
• • A Collective Unconscious
• • Individuation and the Heroic Quest
• • Interpreting a Dream Series
• Adler: Beginnings and Endings
• • Individual Psychology
• • The Earliest Memory
• • Fictional Finalism
• Lives as Texts
• • Hermans's Dialogical Self
• • Music and Story: Gregg's Approach
• • The Postmodern Self
• • Feminist Perspectives

12. Writing Stories of Lives: Biography and Life Course
• Icarus: An Ancient Story
• Personology and the Study of Lives
• • Murray and the Harvard Psychological Clinic
• • The Personological Tradition
• • Science and the Single Case
• Biography, Narrative, and Lives
• • Psychobiography
• • • Feature 12.A: Studying Famous People in History
• • • Feature 12.B: Why Did van Gogh Cut Off His Ear?
• • The Seasons of Adult Life
• • The Life Course

Glossary
References
Credits
Name Index
Subject Index

[Zachary Ransom · Rating 4 out of 5]

USM, B.S. in Psychology, Personality class

[Vic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure, I did not read all of this, because it was a textbook. However, I do plan on reading it in chunks as needed. I like how clear the writing is and how well the examples fit.

[Johanna Michlig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the newest edition for class. I learned things; it counts.

[Jaeyde · Rating 3 out of 5]

A textbook. An interesting one.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoy Personality Psychology, but this text? Ugh. It has its moments, but for the most part it reads like stero instructions. Glad to be done with it and almost done with the class!

[locrian · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh. your standard psychology textbook, nothing special about it, nothing particularly good or bad. I found I could get by in my class without reading it.

[Lisa Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than I originally expected. I learned to appreciate the science as I continued to read.

[Cam Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this textbook was almost therapeutic experience for me.

[Amanda]

Professor Marc Fournier's class. Very good prof, good book.