2016年3月6日日曜日

Q81. What is personality?

Personality is the strategies for dealing with conflict added to temperament.

  A person's innate temperament does not change much but the ability to adjust it varies greatly. When several emotions are opposed to each other and a conflict occurs in the mind, the way different people deal with this conflict varies. A method of dealing with conflict is an important element of personality, the same as the four temperaments. This is connected to neuroticism, which is one of big five elements in personality psychology.
  Methods of dealing with conflict don't have genetic factors, they develop according to experience. There are many methods that can be used to deal with conflict, which is dealing with emotions that occur simultaneously. This is also an important topic in psychoanalysis.
  Psychoanalysis tells us that there are many methods for dealing with conflict such as repression, identification, or rationalization. We use one or more of these methods in effort to get through life's troubles. This is shown as the different personalities that people have.   
  The best way to end inner conflict is to solve the problem, but in many cases this is not possible.
  This page lists the main ways to deal with conflict. Many of these methods to deal with conflict are undesirable, so you can make your life more beneficial by checking whether you use these methods or not. Those who want to learn more about this may do so by checking out books about psychoanalysis.
  Repression: ignoring and forgetting conflicts. The person pretends as much as they can that the conflict did not happen, ignoring it and not thinking about it.
  Identification: to imagine that one is an admirable person in order to forget conflicts. For example, people support an athlete and imagine the athlete's feelings as their own to drive off their own feelings at the time. Another option is they read historical novels and imagine themselves as the hero.
  Rationalization: to justify the conflict using chop logic. This is the same logic as "Sour Grapes". People think about bad or trivial parts of what they did not do, they then think that they could not do it so it's not regrettable.
  Projection: to impose your emotions on another person. People see their evil thoughts in another person's actions and think that it is not them but the other person who harbors ill will. This makes their emotions into the other person's emotions.
  Substitution: to change a goal to one that is easier to attain, and then achieve it. For example, if your dream is very big, and you are troubled because it is too difficult to attain, so you change the goal to something easier.
  Sublimation: to turn the energy from a conflict in another direction.
  Escape: to daydream the conflict away.
  Reaction Formation: to do the opposite of your desire in order to prevent an explosion of emotion.
  Compensation: to enhance the good features in order to hide the weak points.
  Regression: to directly express their emotion, like a child. If someone is brought up in a very blessed home environment, he or she may have only this one way of dealing with conflict even after they have become an adult.
  Passive-aggressive behavior: to choose to do nothing despite having a conflict. This is considered aggressive because it is used when doing nothing will trouble everyone else. The person is satisfied with the situation in which he or she does nothing so he or she is not at fault even though other people are troubled.
  Disassociation: to make a substitute personality to deal with conflict. Abused children may end up creating a new personality to try to erase the horrible memories. This is commonly known as multiple personality disorder.