Perspectives on Personality

by Charles S. Carver, Michael F. Scheier

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book.

 

Informative, yet engaging – viewpoints of personality psychologists today

 

Written in an informal, conversational style, Carver and Scheier engage students by helping them understand how various perspectives of the field of personality can apply to their own lives.

 

This book describes a range of viewpoints that are used by personality psychologists today. Each perspective on personality is presented in a pair of chapters, introduced by a prologue that provides an overview of that perspective’s orienting assumptions and core themes. By starting with these orienting assumptions, you’ll be placed right inside the thought processes of the theorists, as you go on to read the chapters themselves. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of current problems within that theoretical viewpoint and the authors’ analysis about its future prospects.  The result is a book that is engaging and enjoyable as well as informative.

 

Learning Goals

Upon completing this digital book, readers should be able

 

•Identify the ideas that form each theoretical viewpoint

•Understand the importance of research and why the role of research stresses the fact that personality psychology is a living, dynamic process of ongoing scientific exploration

•See how each perspective reflects fundamental assumptions about human nature and how behavior problems can arise and be treated from each perspective

•Understand how the different viewpoints relate to each other and the usefulness of blending theoretical viewpoints, treating theories as complementary, rather than competing

Genres: Psychology, School, Textbooks, Nonfiction

318 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Lauren McDonald · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great read for a great class, rating is only for my recommended books algorithm :)

[Mik]

gee those sure were a lot of perspectives on personality

this was probably the least dry textbook i've read in my 4 years of university lmao

[Brad Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book a little strange. I read of for my Personality Psychology class and couldn't help but notice how much overlap there was in other units (and other textbooks). Kind of made me wonder why they have a whole dedicated unit to Personality and yet ignore other domains (like evolutionary psychology) which might warrant an entire textbook.

To be fair, it does cover personality perspectives across a bunch of domains, but I found much of the content just had so much overlap with other units, despite it trying to 'personality it up' a lot.
Easy to read and digest though, so no complaints really other than feeling it was a bit redundant.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having done barely any non academic reading this year so including this out of spite 😁. Provides a range of psychological perspectives on personality and some interesting studies, overall a good read:)

[Brynn Land · Rating 3 out of 5]

Standard textbook, educational

[Aaron Wong]

Interesting insights on personality, and how it is related to growing-up experiences.

[Tayler K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chapters 1-5, 8-15, 6, 7, 16, 17

[Kyara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simply insightful