Compare and contrast Psychodynamic Approaches, Trait, Learning, Biological and Evolutionary, and Humanistic Approaches to personality.

Compare and contrast Psychodynamic Approaches, Trait, Learning, Biological and Evolutionary, and Humanistic Approaches to personality. Which approach to personality do you find the most compelling? Why?

The Psychodynamic Approach to personality also known as dynamic psychology is the approach to psychology of personality that helps systematically study the psychological forces that develop and direct human behaviours, feelings and the perception as well as emotions. The internal effects that are not visible develop the outcomes that are visible in humans through the human psychology. The inner forces are motivated by the early experiences and conflicts that people face related to their awareness of self and their environment.

The Trait theory approach to personality is the approach that discusses the basic and elemental traits of the personality, collectively forming the personality of the person. The personality characteristics and the behaviours in different situation re triggered through the traits that human personality has and form the outcomes for each stimuli. All humans have personality traits but these traits can be different. The degree of sociability, the ability of emotional stability and the degree to which reality is distorted often defines hoe the traits play a role in the development of outcomes for each stimuli (Feldman, 2011).

The learning approach of personality is focused of the learning perspective that all behaviours are learned from the environment. From the nature- nurture basis the learning personality approach is more focused on the nurture part where the human develops sense of the things and objects around them through learning about them and then creating a perception or degree of understanding about them. The learning approach also suggests that there are no learning develops in the human from the beginning rather the human enters the world as a clean slate and then learns from the environment through interaction. The primary desires and needs are there for the human that address the issues of desire, pleasure and pain. The learning personality approach however is against the factors defined by the biological and other personality traits suggesting that the human has already coded learned codes in them.

There are two approaches relevant to the learning approach to personality including the:

Skinner’s behaviourist approach that suggests that the personality is a collection of learned behaviour patterns that are developed through interaction with the environment. While the Social cognitive approaches suggests that the influence of a person’s cognitions, as well as observation of others’ behaviour develop the understanding of the objects and the environment. In both approaches the human learn from the environment through interaction.

The biological and environmental approaches to personality suggest that the human personality primary parts are forming the inheritance. The traits and the personality development are mainly done under the shade of the human inheritance and the effect of the inheritance. Hence the main focus in this approach in to understand the personality through the relationship between genetics and personality as well as the evidence for the origins of personality that helps understand the impact on other external factors and the genetic resemblance. The issues of neuropsychology and other biological functions and processes are also focus that helps understand the human psychology and personality.

The humanistic approach to personality in psychology focuses on the human inner desires to do well and achieve the higher level of success that they hope and dream of. In this regard the focus of the self-actualization and self-esteem are important that help determine the person whether or not they have achieved their desire level of success and how far they still have to go.

There is no single approach that completely defines the personality and the interaction with the environment. All the personality approaches help determine the complex structure of the human personality since it is effected by both inner and external factors to form a personality. The personality is affected by the inheritance, the culture and the environment as well as in the inner factors of emotions and self-perception. There is no single factor of the personality but if choice is made the personality development through interaction with environment- nurture based personality development is more compelling because there are chances that the children of the parents who are shy and reserved will be more confident and outgoing because they have developed the need to interact with the world and achieve the highest level of success that they have imagined. Again here there are two personality approaches are combined, the humanistic and the learning approaches.