Personality Psychology

Personality is usually consistent throughout one’s life span. However, some people do exhibit major personality changes. To start with, biological factors have many ways of keeping consistency and changing your personality. Biological factors such as our body structure can affect our personality. And example is how fat men usually are easy going and social, while the thin persons are self- controlled and irritated. Physical structure also makes a difference in behavior towards a particular person. It is said that our behavior towards different individuals changes according to their physical structure. The amount of chemical elements in the body can also change one’s personality. An example is drugs. Drugs can have a major affect one someone’s personality; leaving someone happy, sad, anger, depressed, and even obsessed. A second factor that changes or keeps personality steady is the learning factor. A good definition of personality is the way you have learned to deal with the everyday challenges of life. How you learn to deal with things and the lessons you learn, create the general trend or style of your behavior. Whether you learn to favor logical or associative thinking, or whether you prefer to spend more time in reflection or action, our life experiences for good or bad also have an impact on our personalities. For example you’re an innocent, happy girl that imagines fairytales. You end up falling for a boy people would consider a ‘bad boy’ and he ends up breaking your heart. From that day on you turn into a more conserved, distanced girl to make sure you don’t get hurt again. You learned not to let people into your life so easily. Another factor that keeps your personality the same or changes it is the situational factor. The effect of the environment on personality is very strong.
Many times the actions of the person are determined by the situation. The situation may have a very big impact on the actions and expressions of someone. For instance, being brought up in an unstable environment as a child could lead you to grow up to be insecure or ambitionless. Besides a person’s home environment and family members, there are other influences from the social placement of the person when they are exposed to people outside the home. Examples are whom they hang out with at school, their friends they see on a daily basis, and even co-workers.
Being with different people frequently, you can fall into similar habits as them. If the environment changes, the behavior changes, and so does the personality. One of the final factors that can affect someone’s personality is the cognitive factor in their life. We learn many of our behaviors either through conditioning or by observing and modeling others. The cognitive factor pretty much deals with out mental processes, it involves how we interact with our environment to interpret things around us. An example is how a young child’s personality can be shaped through reinforcement or strengthened by a reward. Say as a child you want something, so you start crying a your parents give it to you to keep you happy. You learn that every time you want something, you just have to cry and scream about it. When you grow up, you’ll most likely be a loud, controlling, and demanding person. All of the cognitive factors such as the environment, our control, our behavior, how we interact with things and much more, all keep one’s personality consistent or can even change it. The cognitive factors in one’s life and the situational factors in someone’s life can end up producing change in the shyness of a person. The situation your in and the environment around you can influence your actions, behavior and lead to change in your personality. If you grew up in a household where you were neglected as a child, you could end up being a shy person. But maybe one day you’ll find a person who you feel comfortable around, and they could bring you’re out of your shyness. You could adapt to being around people and be livelier. The same goes with involving the cognitive factors. The cognitive factors include everything from your environment, your knowledge on things, how you behave to things, and much more. Say you’re usually a really outgoing person, but then when your put on the spot you become shy. Another example is you’re usually a loud person and you meet someone you find really cute, but then you get all nervous and shy and you can’t think straight around him. All of these factors, in some way, can affect one’s personality.