THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF PERSONALITY STUCTURES

Addressing Personality Structure

One of the most critical decisions in

studying personality psychology, is how best to divide the system. A complex system such as personality can be validly divided in more than one way. The Systems Framework for Personality Psychology (SFPP) suggests several innovations in regard to understanding personality structure.

 First, complex systems can be divided in

more than one valid way. Second, not all divisions are equally valid. Third, criteria can be divised (and met) for good divisions (Mayer, 2001).

Personality can be divided in more than one valid way

There are a number of ways that have been employed

to divide personality. Moses Mendelsohn had divided personality into motives, emotion, and cognition (Hilgard, 1981). Freud divided personality into the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, and later, into the id, ego, and superego (Freud, 1923/1960). More recently, a number of trait psychologists have suggested that personality can be divided into 5 Big Traits (Goldberg, 1993; Costa & McCrae, 1985).

 The Systems Framework for Personality

Psychology allows the field to reconcile these different divisions of personality by understanding that the different divsions serve different purposes. For example, Freud's division of the mind help distinguish between areas of personality that differ in their level-of-processing. Whereas the id represents evolutionarily early-developing processes, the ego represents later-evolved processes.

 Mendelssohn's division, on the other hand,

focuses on basic functionality of personality -- the basic tasks that carries out personality. That is, the motivational system helps direct the organism, emotions help it navigate the social world, and cognition helps it understand and reason abstractly about the world more generally. The Big Five trait divisions, on the other hand, divide personality according to its most commonly perceived styles of social expression (Mayer, 2001).

 At the same time as the Systems Framework

allows for seeing the relation and purposes of these divisions, it also indicates that the divisions are not all equivalent. Rather, there are better and worse division of mind. Any fundamental division of mind such as the above must meet specific criteria for what will form a good division of personality.

Personality Structures: 1. Partial Structures Somewhere between the consideration of individual personality parts (e.g., n achievement, extroversion, intelligence), covered in the preceding survey page(s), and global personality structure (e.g., broad areas of personality function such as conation, affect, motivation), it makes sense to talk about the structure of groups of personality parts as a transitional topic. This topic concerns how groups of individual parts -especially traits, for example -- build into larger structures.

 Example 1: Supertraits An example of a partial personality structure

is a supertrait. Super traits are structures made up of distinct but intercorrelated traits. An example of such a super trait is Extraversion. Extraversion is a so-called super trait because it has a structure to it that includes several additional traits. That is, it is composed of a number of distinct, smaller traits.

 For example, from some perspectives,

extraversion is composed of lively affect (also called surgency), sociability, and impulsiveness. Example 2: Personality Types (or Personality Forms) A second example of a partial personality structure is a "personality type."

 A second kind of structure that multiple

traits can form could be called a "functional trait group" (or maybe , "functional forms" of traits). These traits are grouped together because the have a tendency to work out well when they co-occur together, rather than because they correlate.

 For example, the brilliant 20th-century

diagnostician Paul Meehl pointed out that certain distinct MMPI patterns occur much more frequently than others. Those patterns (he would argue, if I understand him correctly) occur together, again, because they function together to create a meaningful mental (or behavioral) pattern.

 Many people are more familiar with the

typology of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Certain MBTI profiles are likely to occur more often than others, and others are much rarer. For example, the INTJ type (an Introverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Judging type) is a fairly common type among personality psychologists, so I'm told, and would also potentially represent a functional form suited for such work, perhaps. (For example, introversion would promote studiousness).