Personality & Emotional Development

By: Aaron Schwartz
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:26:59
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The question of personality is one of the central notions in the psychological science but it also deals with a lot of other sciences. The study of personality is interesting not only to scholars and scientists but to all of us as it’s a thing each of us possesses and can’t ignore. The personality is defined as perceiving and thinking about yourself, others and surrounding environments which is usually shown in social and personal contexts. There are different theories which try to measure the influence of born characteristics and the surrounding environment to the forming and development of the personality. Such factors as heredity, learned behaviors, environment influence the personality. The question is what has a greater influence on the development of personality – hereditary factors or the environment. Hereditary factors such as intellect, motor skills, abilities and disabilities have an indubitable influence on us but such factor as environment starts influencing on us at once after our birth through the behavioral patterns presented by our parents, later friends and colleagues, mass media and social surrounding. Most people adopt the traditions, rules, manners, and biases of their culture. The first environment the children get right after the birth is a family. Children adopt the patterns of behavior presented by their parents and close relatives and use them during all further life. Most probably their own family will look like the family of their parents with the type of relationship and attitude built there. Together with the language children acquire the culture of their country or social group. They adopt not the language itself, but the language used in context of the communicative situation which is almost always influenced by the cultural context. Together with the family and close relatives school is another most important environment which influences the personality development. Together with the necessary basic knowledge on the subjects school gives the communicative social skills and unstated norms, values and beliefs that are involuntary absorbed in everyday communication. Religion is another criterion that influences greatly the person from the time he or she learns the language. Religions contains the set of believes which give answer to the basic questions of life and usually are taken for granted. Religion gives the ways to cope with stress and mistrust, ways to solve the problems and to build the family, etc. Latest researches prove that the pupils from the poor families tend to have worse marks at school and higher rate of social and emotional problems. We may conclude that the economical factors also influence the development of personality.

Personality can be expressed only in regard to other people or personalities as it can be expressed in society only. It was proved by the cases when the children lost in forest were raised by the animals and didn’t have the sense of self-identity at all when found by people. Socialization is inevitable, and unless individuals are completely isolated, socialization will occur. Erikson formulated the phases of socialization each of which is regarded as psychological crisis and only worked out can be transformed into another stage. First stage is called mistrust and when overcame enables children to ask for help of others. Another stage is called autonomy and deals with the freedom of decisions and is responsible for the sense of self-respect and self approval. Third stage is called initiative and develops the state of personal adequacy and will to act and meet challenges. Forth stage is called industry and is responsible for the interest in getting the new knowledge and producing the ideas of your own. Fifth stage called identifies or identity confusion and overcoming this crisis the person learns to exhibit stable self-concepts and to take responsibilities.

So, the degree of development of personality is seen through the marks of others in addition to our own self-perception and self-esteem. The abilities to interact and to correspond the needs of the society define the characteristics of well-socialized personality. According to Freud’s theory, “Personality differences arise from the different ways in which people deal with their fundamental drives” (Freud).

The ability to adaptation in this changeable world characterizes usually a well-developed personality. The adaptation implies the ability to handle stress and to find the way out of difficult situation with the less damage for psychical and physical state and also stands for one of the characteristics of the well-developed personality. The right perception of yourself also indicates a high-level of personality development. Sympathy and understanding the feelings of others become the characteristics of highly developed person. Empathy is a term which stands for the ability to penetrate the inner world of thought and feelings of others and is definitely one of the well-developed person’s indicators. Understanding others can grow into another quality of the well-developed person – altruism. Altruism is a sincere wish to help others without the anticipation of reward. But the characteristics of the well-developed personality can be changed in order to correspond the needs of the environment. Good personality in the family interaction and good personality for the successful business can require completely different characteristics.

Badly developed, the characteristics mentioned above define a low level of personality development or some personality disorders. These people most often have problems with social skills and adaptation in new social surrounding environment and new situations, rapid change of moods, emotional states and have big problems creating and maintaining any kind of the relationships. The problems with the emotional states, their realizations and expressions are often accompanied with the low ability to empathize. There are a lot of other characteristics of social deviant behavior but all they are differentiated the low ability to interact with the other individuals and to correspond the demands of the society. Personality disorders can be expressed as aggression, hyperactivity, depressions, criminal behavior and the inclination to suicide.

Aggression is a big problem which affects a lot of people of the society. The major problem here is that both – the person who expresses aggression and the person to whom the aggression is directed suffer. In many cases the surrounding environment which has to observe the scenes of the aggression suffers also. “Aggression in childhood and adolescents predicts aggression, violence and other anti-social behaviors, such as substance abuse and a criminal record, in adulthood” (Offord and Bennett, 1994). Aggression is defined as any physical or verbal behavior aiming to hurt others. It can take numerous forms and can be difficult to be traced sometimes but being well informed about it we can learn to recognize it in ourselves and in others and learn to manage it to escape stresses and problems. During our life we meet a lot of kinds of aggression. As an example, every day we meet a verbal aggression. “Verbal aggression is message behavior which attacks a person’s self-concept in order to deliver psychological pain.”(Infante, 1995). Another kind of personality disorder named hyperactivity is expressed usually through the difficulty in concentrating attention in one subject, difficulty in emotions controlling and low self-esteem. The root of the disorder in not being able to concentrate attention on the problem for a time required and very small attention span too quick shifts of attention and activities. Hyperactivity can be mostly found in children’s behavior but if not paid necessary attention and as a result of the wrong attitude it can progress and cause a lot of problems in the life of the raised person. Depression is another personality disorder which causes a lot of problems for the individuals and for the society. Depression is defined as an experiencing of the deep sadness, lowered interested to events and surrounding environment and reduction of activity in all spheres. In contrast to normal sadness, depression can give serious harm to mental, physical and physical state.

Personality is developed through our lives and can be influenced and changed by the surrounding environment. Adults affect children’s development in many ways. The interaction between parents and child influence the emotional development of the child’s personality. Warm, caring and supportive attitude of adult members of the family provide balanced development of the personality and positive feedback from the child. Children grown in this atmosphere posses better social skill and are more open to the society of adults. If rejected by the family, without support or understanding, children oftener show deviant and antisocial behavior in the future. In school positive and encouraging interaction between adults (teachers) and children (pupils) usually results the developments of the adequate self-perception of the children, the increase of self-esteem and communicative skills development. In the cases were interaction patters include insensitiveness, disrespect and provide no emotional feedback from the children the development of mistrust and disrespect to oneself and to others can be traced.

Public places generally give the opportunity for children to interact with the unknown adults in new unknown environment. The atmosphere created by this environment forms the image of the world in general in the minds of the children. Friendly, supportive and encouraging attitude of adults forms sincerity and openness to everything new and reliance on others in children. If vise versa, the interaction results mistrust to unknown people and the fear of public places and new environments.

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