Personality

Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: One is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. Personality can be determined through a variety of tests. However, dimensions of personality and scales of personality tests vary and often are poorly defined. Personality is usually broken into components called the Big Five, which are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (or emotionality). These components are generally stable over time, and about half of the variance appears to be attributable to a person’s genetics rather than the effects of one’s environment.