Constituents of Personality

Describe the various constituents of personality.

  There are different approaches of studying personalities, like psychoanalysis approach, behavioral approach etc. These key structures which serve to provide the basis of personality are actually the constituents of personality. The various constituents of personality are given in the following sections: 

 1. The Unconscious, is a place where our worst fears bubble and boil. It is a centre which accounts for the many things that influence us without our full awareness. There are three aspects to our unconscious. i) The first is biological in which our instincts, temperament and pre-dispositions behaves like our ancestors.  Ii) The second is the social unconscious or superego. It might include our language, social taboos, cultural habits, all the dos and don'ts which we are expected to follow and so on.  iii) The third is the personal unconscious. It is composed of our idiosyncratic habits and all those things we have learned so adeptly, that we no longer need to be conscious of them in order to enact them.

 2. Learning is granted by most personality theorists. There are at least three kinds of learning: basic, social, and verbal. Basic learning includes conditioning, getting feed back from our environment and is determined by the pattern of rewards which we have received. It also includes latent learning which is learning to differentiate one thing from another on the basis of the consequences, without actually being aware of it. Social learning includes vicarious learning (noticing and recalling the kinds of environmental feedback and social conditioning other people get) and imitation.

 3. Towards Understanding either conscious, as when we are watching an artist to learn his/her technique, or the unconscious, as when we grow up to be disconcertingly like our parents or elders.

 4. Emotions are typically our feelings towards certain objects, persons or events in our environment. We are often described by the emotions which we embody. At the lowest level, we have pain and pleasure feelings, which are like sensations. 

 5. Motivation refers to the force or drive which gives strength and direction to our behaviour. Our personality can often be understood in terms of our motivational structures reflected by our needs, drive, goals and presses. Motives tend to vary in terms of how they mediate behaviour and in their level of importance for specific human beings.

 6. Self-concept may be defined as a conscious, cognitive and experiential perception and evaluation by individuals of themselves. It consists of their thoughts and opinions about themselves. It has been referred to as the individual's self perceived consistent individuality. It also implies a developing awareness of who and what one is. 

 7. Some recent studies have highlighted the importance of what significant others say to children as a shaping factor in self concept. Significant others include a child's parents, teachers, siblings and peers. Their positive and negative statements have a high predictive effect on whether the child's self concept will be positive or negative.