Kategoria BISAC: Psychology >> Personality

Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their...

How is something as broad and complex as a personality organized? What makes up a satisfactory theory of personality? In this ambitious book, Jaan Valsiner argues for a theoretical integration of two long-standing approaches: the individualistic tradition of personalistic psychology, typified by the work of William Stern and Gordon Allport, and the semiotic tradition of cultural-historical psychology, typified by the work of L. S. Vygotsky. The two are brought together in Valsiner's theory, which highlights the sign-constructing and sign-using nature of all distinctively human...

In The Private Self, Arnold Modell contributes an interdisciplinary perspective in formulating a theory of the private self. A leading thinker in American psychoanalysis, Modell here studies selfhood by examining variations on the theme of the self in Freud and in the work of object relations theorists, self psychologists, and neuroscientists. Modell contends that the self is fundamentally paradoxical, in that it is at once dependent upon social affirmation and autonomous in generating itself from within. We create ourselves, he suggests, by selecting values that are endowed with...

In his most probing and expansive work to date, Jerome Kagan--one of this country's leading psychologists--demonstrates that innovative research methods in the behavioral sciences and neurobiology, together with a renewed philosophical commitment to rigorous empiricism, are transforming our understanding of human behavior. Contemporary psychology, according to Kagan, has been preoccupied with three central themes: How malleable is temperament? How predictable are the milestones of cognitive development? How accurate is consciousness as a window onto the self, its motives, beliefs, and...

Drawing on work with Indian and Japanese patients, a prominent American psychoanalyst explores inner worlds that are markedly different from the Western psyche. A series of fascinating case studies illustrates Alan Roland's argument: the "familial self," rooted in the subtle emotional hierarchical relationships of the family and group, predominates in Indian and Japanese psyches and contrasts strongly with the Western "individualized self." In perceptive and sympathetic terms Roland describes the emotional problems that occur when Indians and Japanese encounter Western culture and the...

Millions of people worldwide take personality tests each year to direct their education, to decide on a career, to determine if they'll be hired, to join the armed forces, and to settle legal disputes. Yet, according to award-winning psychology writer Annie Murphy Paul, the sheer number of tests administered obscures a simple fact: they don't work. Most personality tests are seriously flawed, and sometimes unequivocally wrong. They fail the field's own standards of...