Personality and individual differences

Five broad personality traits, the narrower characteristics within each one, and how a model differs from a test.

How this informal label relates to vulnerable narcissism, including sensitivity to criticism, and why a few behaviors do not establish a diagnosis.

Knowledge gained through learning and experience, and how using it differs from reasoning through a new problem.

Ways of managing distress, such as denying an uncomfortable reality, and how psychoanalytic theories explain them.

The Parent, Adult and Child patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving described in transactional analysis.

Difficulty separating your own perspective from what another person sees or knows.

Manipulation that undermines trust in memory, perception or judgment, distinguished from ordinary disagreement.

A model that groups personality into six broad traits, and the questionnaires designed to measure them.

Freud’s proposed distinction between instinctive drives, dealing with reality, and learned moral standards.

Variation between people in characteristics such as personality and ability.

A framework for distinguishing information known to yourself, to others, to both, or to neither.

Four stances toward yourself and other people, described in the psychological framework called transactional analysis.

Cooley’s explanation of how the judgments we imagine others making can shape our view of ourselves.

The capacity, described in psychoanalytic theory, to maintain a stable emotional sense of another person when apart or in conflict.

Psychoanalytic theories about how relationships, and the mental images we form of other people, shape emotional life.

An informal label for shifts between outgoing and withdrawn behavior, distinguished from an established personality type.

The stereotype about growing up without siblings and the research used to test parts of it.

Enduring tendencies in thought, feeling and behavior, alongside variation across situations.

How assigning people to categories differs from describing their traits by degree, and why systems give different numbers of types.

Approaches to recurring emotional and relationship patterns, with distinctions between historical theories and treatment evidence.

A historical description of striving for achievement, competitiveness and a strong sense of time pressure.

The less competitive, less hurried behavior pattern originally contrasted with Type A.

A proposed pattern of suppressing emotions and accommodating others, and the limits of claims linking it to illness.