Personality and Religion

There are eight basic aspects of personality that are generally accepted in personality psychology. Those are understood as eight different ways or perspectives into seeing how a person’s personality comes together, which are psychoanalytic, neo-analytic/ego, biological, behaviorist, cognitive, trait, humanistic, and interactionist (Friedman, H. S. & Schustack, M. W., 2016). Each perspective is an important elemental contribution to creating a deeper understanding of the complex construct of personality. These perspectives represent an evolution of scientific thought and analysis from the simplistic categorization of personality as either nature versus nurture, or some variant thereof. 

The psychoanalytical perspective emphasizes unconscious contributions, those can come from biological, genetic or natural/environmental influences but may also be from social or situational interactions learned or evolved over time.  The biological, humanistic, and trait perspectives also appreciate the influence of unconscious contributions such that the biological perspective focuses on genetic or hereditary influences. The humanistic perspective incorporates human spirituality, and the trait perspective identifies stable traits, skills, and temperaments.

In contrast, the behaviorist, cognitive, interactionist, and neo-analytical/ego perspectives represent nature or environmental influences on personality. For example, the behaviorist perspective emphasizes learned behavioral responses to outside stimuli while the cognitive perspective explains the minds function as it tries to understand one’s environment and process responses to it. The interactionist perspective marries this interactive and responsive functioning of a person within social and environmental relationships and the potential variables that arise from the two perspectives. 

Lastly, neo-analytic/ego perspective is understood to be the interaction between internal motivations and emotions with outside or social demands. It relates to unconscious processes in relationships such as emotional and driven responses and processes to external stimuli, as such, incorporating both nature and nurture aspects.

There is no literature gap when it comes to discussing the usefulness of researching and studying the eight perspectives of personality together. In fact, there are models that propose various personality dimensions as a way to tie in the perspectives and further analyze a personality in order to predict behavior or better understand and categorize personality types. One example is the HEXACO model, which is identified as six dimensions of a personality that are founded on the basis of the eight perspectives. Those include honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience (Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K., 2008). An inclusive approach to the study of personality should always incorporate the eight perspectives indicated above as this would be the most useful approach because it serves to include all aspects without ignoring any individual dimension of a personality, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the overall construct.

References 

Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2008). The HEXACO model of personality structure and the importance of the H factor. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(5), 1952-1962.

Friedman, H. S. & Schustack, M. W. (2016). Personality: Classic theories and modern research (6th ed.). MA: Pearson.