Paper Sample on Personality Assessment: Exploring the Big Five Factors

Introduction

This literature review explores personality assessment and discusses and explains the Big Five Factor. Researchers have noticed that Personality traits help psychologists in distinguishing characteristics that exist in individuals. A person’s personality is a combination of patterns and habits that influence motivation, emotion, behavior, and thought. It makes individuals feel, think, and behave in distinct ways consistently; in reality, it is what makes them unique. With time, these traits greatly influence personal perceptions, attitudes, values, and expectations. Without personality, humans would behave, think, act, and have identical emotions. Psychological testing is used in schools, the military, clinics, and various work settings. This literature review explores five Personality Perspectives: psychodynamic, behavioral, trait, humanistic, and learning or social factors.

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Personality Perspectives

These personalities include psychodynamic, behavioral, trait, humanistic, and learning or social factors. The psychodynamic theory explores character involving conscious, unconscious, which controls humans’ beliefs and desires. Behavioral assessments usually intend to determine individual personality traits; for instance, theorist perspectives behavior is a learned personality.

According to Diener and Lucas (2019), a personality trait incorporates vulnerability and fearlessness. In their study on personality traits, Diener and Lucas (2019) also stated that theorists have generally accepted the five-factor trait theories for personality assessment. In their research on social learning and social cognitive approaches, Nabi and Prestin (2017) reported that Bandura’s philosophy of social learning personality usually follows actions learned through observation. They also stated the characteristics of a humanistic perspective generally based on an individual’s need for self-actualization, impulse, and honesty. The humanistic perspective is crucial for optimal growth due to an individual’s demand for full filling potential creativity growth and knowledge.

The commonalities among these five personality traits explain how humans differ from each other. Another commonality between five personality perspectives consists of unique affection, actions, and ideas. They depict how people think, feel, act, and interact with others around them. In their study on psychological wisdom research, Staudinger and Glück (2011) stated that another significant commonality is that each of the five theories is tied to a specific time and space within history. The particular era (milieu, period) helps to drive the approaches and can limit their usefulness. However, these theories need to be revised since more information is gained, so each approach has only limited utility.

Research design

This study is a qualitative literature review on the concept of five personality perspectives, theoretical approaches, research methods, assessment instruments used in the five aspects of personality and their commonalities with one another. It reviews the literature and past studies from official books, journals, reports, conference proceedings, websites, and various commentaries. It incorporates research-based peer-reviewed articles published within the last ten years; I used some significant keywords, such as personality perspectives in the search. The studies and outcomes presented in this review are similar to others, not explicitly noted.

However, the findings or the data herein are compatible with and represent the body of this topic or subject. In the subsequent sections, the relevant studies get summed up following headings of the theories of personality, the idea of personality and creativity relationship, creativity and innovative behavior, character, and creative behavior relationship. It further sates significant concluding remarks about the reviewed studies in the conclusion section.

Psychodynamic

Psychodynamic concentrates on personality traits that influence individuals thinking, activities, and perception. According to Buechler’s theoretical, psychodynamic approach involves an individual’s emotions, motivating, and determining humans’ behavior (Blechner 2013). The main contributor to the sphere of psychodynamic is conscious and unconscious. Inventory of Personality Organization (IOP) is the assessment scale used while assessing psychodynamics personality estimations; it determines an individual’s internal socialization, which is the flexibility of how people perceive themselves and others.

The IOP’s reliability, validity, and cultural considerations emphasize measuring insecurity, identity, guilt, and personality organization. The current researches have helped prepare the psychodynamic therapy clients by helping change and explore the clients’ maladaptive behaviors, self-confidence, and self-esteem (Polak et al. 2018). Another measurement employed in the clinical and education field is the ECR-R; it indicates validity and reliability in determining attachment theory. However, the IOP instrument is usually due to being a self-questionnaire; therefore, its main critique is that reliability and validity may become a challenge.

Psychodynamic therapy allows counselors to explain to people and help them understand why they act, behave, and think the way they do as far as an obsessiveness, impulse, and thrill-seeking (Kornyeyeva & Boehnke, 2013). The elements of psychodynamics Authoritarianism describes the low acceptance of others and low self-esteem. Other aspects of psychodynamics are collaborators, and individual characteristics shaping communities of society (Kornyeyeva & Boehnke, 2013). These elements improve one’s ability to interact with others, hence improving people’s social interaction.

Behavioral perspectives

The behavioral personality approach focuses on the five-factor measurement: conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, neuroticism, and extraversion. Neuroticism defines a person as calm, stress moody, or worrying while extraversion describes one’s personality as talkative, outgoing, likable, or friendly. Openness defines an individual character as creative, intelligent, curious, or adventurous. Agreeableness describes a particular character as helpful, caring, or empathetic; conscientiousness establishes an individual as hardworking, organized, or careless. The importance of the five-factor reliability and validity is associated with the NEO-R factor helping these factors (Bridbord & DeLucia-Waack, 2011). These five-factor measures personalities as one alter their behavior for better or worse; For instance, an extrovert individual could promptly evolve into an introvert. A parsimonious test of mediation is another contributor to the study behavioral perspective; it defines how psychological factors like personality relate to individual health and longevity.

The NEO-R is widely used in cross-cultures for psychological assessments to establish specific treatment plans (Bridbord & DeLucia-Waack, 2011). In their study on the NEO personality inventory revised (NEO-PI-R), Vassend and Skrondal (2011), stated that the NEO-PI-R is the standardization of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) instrument. However, the NEO-PI-R variables usually base on six factors because of the revision.

Also, the NEO-P-3 factor is another useful assessment factor; it is used for post-employment. Although personality assessments allow employers to place the people in a position where employees strive, these assessments cannot be solely employed while hiring since some cultural behaviors may lead to incorrect results.

Personality Traits

According to Hintz et al. (2019) and Costantini et al. (2019), personality trait theory comprises of two types of variables which consists of Latent State-Traits (LST) and state methods. Psychologists often used the state theory in preceding assessments; it tests and estimates mood and hormone levels. However, future evaluations comprised in the Latent State-Traits approach shows that variables are consistent with personal interaction and situation effects (Hintz et al. 2019). Additionally, the Latent State-Traits scores based on questionnaires determine the occasion-specific and variances person interactions.

In recent studies, the LST measurement improvement to LST-R theory drove the researchers to analyze specific methods of psychologists’ interest due to the lack of validity (Steyer et al., 2015). Hence, the lack of efficacy drives researchers to develop the LST theory, which can determine academic emotions, consisting of pride, enjoyment, and boredom. In their study, Erol and Orth (2014) stated that the increase of personality traits related to the analysis of emotions in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies presented fill a vital gap in the dyadic data modeling study by establishing an LST modeling method for dyadic data. This approach explores the stability and variability of various state and latency; the characteristics of the Latent State-Traits measurement are individual differences.

LST-R explains that an individual can be either anxious or happy simultaneously; this is considered its strength (Geiser et al., 2017). Its weakness is that personality traits are usually based on the complexity of an individual’s characteristics hence might not give a standard, reliable or valuable observations. However, the variables of a person’s personality are essential in maintaining physical and mental health.

Learning or Social Perspectives

The social analytics approach is the study of intrapersonal psychology; it explores the social perspective on personality and evaluates one’s career success. It also observes an individual’s strategy to acquire the status of one’s identity, and its characteristics are a view of an individual’s reputation (Turner, 2017). According to Ruppel et al. (2016), Hogan Personality inventory (HPI) is used in the social perspective assessment. HPI is a seven-factor assessment approach that includes interpersonal sensitivity, inquisitive, prudence, ambition, adjustment, learning approach, and sociability. The internal consistency defines the validity, reliability, and analysis used to support predictor measures; the HPI measures include personality components and test performance.

The HPI strength usually provides Organizations with information regarding employees with their potential for management positions. Its weakness, based on false or actual questions, inhibits the possibility and can be distorting information (Ruppel et al., 2016). Again, it constricts workers from being able to expose their true feelings. Ethical considerations and cultural considerations are personality tests used in companies to determine potential employment rather than skills and experience. Personality assessments applied in the military are beneficial in ascertaining if counseling is essential in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Pugh et al., 2015).

Also, the HPI assessment and the five-factor are parallel to each other. In a study on justifying social inequalities, Rudman and Saud (2020) stated that Darwinian justified the essence of personality assessments, which are useful in assessing psychological disorders with the help of using the measurements as an instrument for determining a career path.