WHAT IS PERSONALITY MEANS

Personality: Personality is defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person. It uniquely influences his/her knowledge, motivations and behavior in various situations.

Cattell’s Personality Factor Model: Raymond Cattell(1905-1998) was one of the renowned psychologists who developed an interest in science to solve human problems. He mainly focused on doing his research in personality and motivation, and his contribution to personality factor is in short known as 16PF. According to him, there is a continuum of personality traits. Each person contains all of these 16 traits to a certain degree, and it may be high in some traits and low in others. Cattell reduced the traits to 16 primary factors. Cattell had given each a name, and all those 16 are described as follows:

i.        Warmth: Warm, outgoing, attentive to others, kind, easy going, participating, cool, reserved, impersonal, detached, formal.

ii.      Reasoning: Abstract-thinking, more intelligent, bright, higher general mental capacity, fast learner.

iii.    Emotional stability: It is emotionally stable, adaptive, mature, faces reality, calm.

iv.    Dominance: Dominant, forceful, assertive, aggressive, competitive, stubborn, bossy.

v.      Liveliness: It is lively, animated; spontaneous, enthusiastic, happy go lucky, cheerful, expressive, and impulsive.

vi.    Rule consciousness: Rule-consciousness, dutiful, conscientious, conforming, moralistic, staid, rule bound.

vii.  Social boldness: It is nothing but socially bold, venturesome, thick skinned, uninhibited.

viii.Sensitivity: Sensitive, aesthetic, sentimental, tender minded, intuitive, refined.

ix.    Vigilance: Being vigilant, suspicious, skeptical, distrustful, and oppositional.

x.       Abstractedness: Abstract, imaginative, absent minded, impractical, absorbed in ideas.

xi.    Privateness: Being private, discreet, shrewd, polished, worldly, and diplomatic.

xii.  Apprehension: It is apprehensive, self doubting, worried, guilt prone, self blaming.

xiii.Openness to change: Open to change, experimental, liberal, analytical, critical, free thinking, and flexibility.

xiv.Self-reliance: The state of being self-reliant, solitary, resourceful, individualistic.

xv.  Perfectionism: Perfectionist, organized, compulsive, self-disciplined, socially precise, exacting will power, control, self-sentimental.

xvi.Tension: It is tense, high energy, impatient, driven, frustrated, over wrought, time driven.   

Cattell also developed an assessment based on these 16 personality factors, and the test is known as the 16 PF Personality Questionnaires. It is still commonly used in business for employee testing and selection and also in career counseling. It can be summed up that personality, being a set of psychological traits and mechanisms within an individual is determined by some other factors as well for its development, such as heredity, environment, culture, family, situation, social factors, friend circle etc.