The personality of a person is multifaceted, deep andis unique. For centuries, being the subject of comprehensive research for various scientific fields, it still remains not fully understood. Thanks to the accumulated and systematized knowledge, the main personality traits are highlighted. Acquaintance with them helps a person to better understand himself, which, in turn, allows to make adjustments to beliefs, self-motivation system, change the usual ways of action to improve the quality of their lives and increase the level of happiness.
Personality structure
There are many different theories of personality traits. In Russian psychology, the personality structures of such authors as Platonov K.K., Leontyev A.N., Kovalev A.G. are well known.
In the table below, the structure of personality according to A. Kovalev
| Psychological processes of personality | Psychological states of personality | Psychological personality traits |
| Most dynamic | More resilient | Most stable |
| Cognitive Emotional Willful | Cognitive Emotional Willful | Directivity Abilities Temperament Character |
In the works of the famous Russian psychologist A. Kovalev, a personality is defined as an integrative formation of mental processes, states and formed personality traits of a person.
Psychological processes
Psychological processes determine the foundationmental life of a person, because they provide him with interaction with the environment and are responsible for the formation of his life experience. There are a lot of such processes both in the consciousness and in the subconscious. They are the most dynamic and short-lived. Among them stand out emotional, volitional and cognitive mental processes. The latter group includes perception, sensation, representation, thinking, memory, attention, imagination.
Psychological states
Psychological states are already more thansustainable education, which are formed from psychological processes. They represent the internal characteristics of the individual psyche relatively unchanged in time. Each such state can be characterized by one or several parameters that distinguish it from many others. Depending on what kind of activity or behavioral act this state provides, dominance of certain cognitive, emotional or volitional mental processes is manifested.
Psychological properties
Mental properties or personality traitsThese are the individual psychological characteristics that underlie the constant means of its interaction with the world. They characterize a person as a system of certain subjective attitudes towards oneself, towards people around, various groups and the world as a whole, which manifests itself in communication and interaction with them.
While the formation of common stable personality traitsonly begins, the child is characterized as a whole by his prevailing psychological states. For example, they talk about him as calm, balanced, shy, capricious, affective, excitable, depressive. When changing mental states, the shape of a child’s personality also changes. Under certain conditions, one of these states can be fixed and in the future manifest itself in some peculiarities of its character.
Формирование черт личности осуществляется из mental processes that occur on the background of mental states. They represent the most stable and stable, little changeable and at the same time slowly accumulated mental formations. As such, Kovalev A. G. identified four main categories. The list of human personality traits is as follows:
- temperament;
- orientation;
- character;
- abilities.
При этом он обращал внимание на определенную меру the conventions of the allocation of these structures, since the same properties can characterize the direction and character, and influence the manifestation of abilities. However, considering these structures as relatively autonomous is very important. After all, in the presence of the same properties, for example, temperament, people can differ greatly from each other in orientation, character and abilities.
Temperament
Human temperament refers to the biologicaldue to the properties of the person and is the foundation on which it is formed. It reflects the differences between people in such criteria as emotional impressionability, intensity and stability of emotions, pace and energy of actions, and other dynamic characteristics. The properties of the person, due to them, are the most stable and long-term.
Согласно определению Теплова Б. М.one can speak of temperament as the totality of mental characteristics characteristic of this particular person, which are associated with the speed at which feelings arise and their intensity.
Thus, to determine the type of temperamentexplore two main dynamic characteristics - activity and emotionality. The behavior activity indicator characterizes the degree of speed, swiftness, vigor or inertness and sluggishness. The indicator of emotionality characterizes emotional processes, reflecting their sign, positive or negative, and modality - fear, anger, joy, and others. The most common today is the classification proposed by Hippocrates in the V century BC. e., distinguishing four types of temperament:
- sanguine;
- phlegmatic;
- melancholic;
- choleric.
Representatives of the sanguine type are markedquickly emerging but weak feelings, phlegmatic - slowly arising and weak feelings, melancholic - slowly arising, but strong feelings, choleric - quickly arising and strong feelings. It can also be noted that for the representatives of the sanguine and choleric types of temperament, rapid movements, general mobility and a predisposition to bright external expression of feelings through facial expressions, movements and speech are characteristic. For representatives of phlegmatic and melancholic, on the contrary, slow movements and a tendency to a weak expression of feelings are characteristic. In practice, it is very rare to meet people with a pronounced pure type of temperament; mixed types are more common when the features of two types of temperament are combined.
Temperament in no way affects the presence ofabilities and talents of man. Outstanding talents in various fields of activity can occur with the same frequency for any type of temperament. For example, such famous Russian writers as I.A. Goncharov and I.A. Krylov showed features of the phlegmatic type of temperament, I.Gogol, I.V. and Zhukovsky V.A. - melancholic, Herzen A.I. - sanguine. , Pushkin A.S. had prominent choleric features. And in the two great Russian commanders, the types of temperaments were the opposite: A. Suvorov, V., choleric, and M. Kutuzov, phlegmatic.
Asking what type of temperamentbetter is incorrect. Each of them has both its own positive and its negative sides. Valuable properties of the personality of a sanguine person - liveliness, mobility, responsiveness, phlegmatic - calm, lack of fussiness and haste, melancholic - depth and stability of feelings, choleric - energy, passion, activity.
There is a tendency to develop undesirable personality traits:
- in a sanguine person, such as levity and infantilism, a tendency to spray, the superficiality of feelings;
- in phlegmatic - inertia, lethargy, indifference;
- melancholic - excessive closeness, excessive shyness, a tendency to immerse your head in your own experiences;
- choleric - sharpness, lack of restraint, a tendency to emotional "explosions".
Personality orientation
Personality orientation serves asleading person characteristics. It is understood as a set of stable motives, orienting the activities of the individual and having relative independence from the actual situation. In other words, this is the main motivational core of a person. The orientation of the person is always socially determined and is formed in the process of education. Orientation - these are attitudes that have become personality traits and found their manifestation in certain forms, each of which is based on the motives of human activity. These forms include:
- attraction;
- a wish;
- interest;
- addiction;
- ideal;
- worldview;
- conviction.
Characteristic forms of orientation
In this context, attraction is understood asa mental state that expresses an indistinguishable, unconscious, or insufficiently conscious need. As a rule, attraction is a temporary phenomenon, since the human need manifested in it either dies away or is realized and thus transformed into desire.
Желание - это уже осознанная человеком need and attraction to something concrete. Desire due to sufficient awareness has a driving force. It contributes to the vision of the goal of future actions and the construction of a detailed plan. This form of manifestation of orientation is characterized by the awareness, firstly, of their needs and, secondly, of potential ways to satisfy them.
Aspiration is usually viewed as a perceived motivation for action. It appears when desire is combined with a volitional component.
Наиболее яркой и объемной характеристикой orientation of the individual advocate its interests, being the most important driving force to the knowledge of the surrounding reality. At the subjective level, interest reveals itself in a special emotional background that accompanies the process of cognition or attention to certain objects. A surprising feature of interest is that, in satisfying it instead of extinction, it, on the contrary, causes a number of new ones that correspond to higher levels of cognitive activity.
Aptitude reflects a person’s focus ona certain type of activity. In its essence, it is a steady interest in the dynamics of its development, developing into a deep and stable human need for performing a particular activity. This happens when a volitional component is connected to the interest.
The ideal is a certain concrete image or representation of the objective goal, towards which a person is oriented, toward whom he aspires through the realization of his inclinations.
Worldview is understood as a system of subjectiveman’s views on the world around him, his place in him, his attitude to himself and to other people. Here the ideals, value orientations, principles and beliefs of the individual are reflected.
Убеждение считают высшей формой направленности и considered as a system of motives of a person’s personality, encouraging him to act according to his views, principles, worldview. The concepts of motive and motivation are different from each other. The latter is broader and more capacious. The motive is a stable personality trait, from within encouraging a person to certain actions. In the formation of the orientation of the individual, the main role belongs to conscious motives, since they ensure the activation and direction of behavior. Their formation originates from human needs.
Character
В психологии под характером принято понимать a set of individual mental properties that manifest themselves in typical forms of behavior for the individual and methods of action. The process of formation of common stable personality traits is carried out in the course of life.
Traits are not all herfeatures, but only the most significant and stable. For example, even very cheerful and optimistic people may experience feelings such as sadness or sadness, but this does not make them pessimists or whiners.
Classifications of the main psychological traitsthere is a lot of personality. Most often in the domestic psychological literature there are two approaches. According to the first, all character traits are attached to mental processes and therefore are divided into three groups. The list of personality traits in this case is as follows:
- Volitional - independence, organization, activity, perseverance, determination and others.
- Emotional - impressionability, impetuosity, fervor, responsiveness, indifference, inertness and others.
- Intellectual - curiosity, thoughtfulness, resourcefulness, ingenuity and others.
According to the second approach, traitspersonalities are described based on the orientation of the individual. In the formed character, the leading component is the belief system, which sets the long-term strategic orientation of the person’s actions and behavior, provides confidence in the importance and fairness of the work performed by him, and causes perseverance in achieving his goals.
Character traits that define attitudes towardsactivities are expressed in the sustainable interests of the person. In a characterless person there are no goals at all or very scattered. The superficiality and instability of their interests are often associated with a large imitativeness, with a lack of autonomy and integrity of a person’s personality. And, on the contrary, pithiness and depth of interests of a person testify to his purposefulness and perseverance.
The specific character of the personality is manifested insituations of choice of actions or types of behavior. In this context, we can speak of such a character trait as the degree of severity of motivation to achieve success. A person’s choice will depend on it either in favor of actions leading to success — initiative, competitive activity, willingness to take risks, or in favor of simply trying to avoid failure — avoiding risks, evading responsibility, inactivity, and lack of initiative.
All personality traits can be conditionallyattributed to two types - motivational and instrumental. The first, respectively, encourage and direct activity, and the latter give it a certain style. For example, when choosing a goal of action, a motivational personality trait appears. However, after the goal is defined, the instrumental traits of character that determine the choice of those or other ways of achieving this goal appear more.
The character is formed gradually and canundergo transformations throughout human life. And this process can be made conscious. In the words of the famous English writer William Makepeace Thackeray, sow an act - reap a habit, sow a habit - reap a character, sow a character - and you reap destiny.
Human abilities
According to the approach of the domestic scientist Teplova B.M., by abilities are understood such individual psychological characteristics that, on the one hand, distinguish one person from another, on the other, are related to the success of performing one single activity or numerous activities, and on the third one are not reduced to those already existing human knowledge, skills and abilities.
Human ability to determine the degree of lightnessand the speed of acquisition and assimilation of knowledge and skills. In turn, the acquired knowledge, skills and abilities render essential assistance to the further development of abilities, and their absence, on the contrary, serves as a brake on the development of abilities. In psychology, the levels of development of abilities are most often classified as follows:
- ability;
- giftedness;
- talent;
- genius.
Successful implementation of any activity isdepending not on any one, but on a combination of several abilities at once. In this case, a combination leading to the same result can be provided in various ways. In the absence of the necessary background for the successful development of some abilities, their deficit can be filled by deeper development and study of others. According to BM Teplov, abilities cannot exist in the absence of a constant development process. An ability that is not practiced is lost over time. Only through diligence, constant exercise, systematic pursuit of such complex activities as math, music, artistic or technical creativity, and sport, is it possible to maintain and develop appropriate abilities in oneself.
As a great artist did not accept the academy
Identification in daily practiceabilities and skills often lead to erroneous judgments and conclusions, especially in teaching practice. The story of how the famous artist Surikov V.I. was not accepted to the Academy of Arts at the initial stage of his development, was honored to be included in psychological literature as an example for a better understanding of the category of "ability".
Passion Surikov V.I.to drawing was obvious from early childhood. For a while he took lessons in the Krasnoyarsk district school. After the death of his father, due to constrained financial circumstances, a good education was not affordable for his family. The young man came to the service as a scribe in the governor's office. Somehow, his drawings caught Zamyatin P.N. - to the Yenisei governor, and he spotted an enormous artistic potential of the author in them. He found Surikov V.I. patron of the arts, ready to pay to study at the Academy of Arts. But despite this, the first attempt to enroll in an educational institution did not end in success.
Teachers made a mistake because they could notdistinguish between the lack of skills and abilities. Despite the fact that the outstanding abilities of the young artist showed up quite early, his drawing skills were still not enough at that time.
Within three months, Surikov V.I.mastered the necessary skills and abilities and as a result was enrolled in the Academy of Arts. During his studies, he received four silver medals for his work and was awarded several cash prizes.
His example shows that you need to believe in yourself, in your dream and persevere to achieve your goal.
