Personality: A Systems Approach

Today, the discipline of Personality Psychology is undergoing a renaissance: Fresh new thinking and innovative research are creating a newly integrated field. Such rapid change, however, makes it hard for students to keep up with the latest thinking. A new textbook that fully reflects today's new view of human personality in a lively, contemporary fashion,PERSONALITY: A SYSTEMS APPROACH, is constructed according to an exciting new roadmap of the field, one that draws together the best of the field's intellectual traditions. The book helps students to understand personality, including their own personalities, as well as how personality influences a given individual's life over time. In this textbook, human personality is described in a sequence of four richly explanatory sections, each one written in a careful, even-handed, and engaging fashion. The first section describes the field of personality and defines personality itself. The second dissects personality into its major parts. The third examines how the parts are organized, including the dynamics among them. The fourth section considers personality as it develops over time. Students will finish the book with an understanding of how human personality systems work together and how personality develops from birth to life's conclusion. Selected Features: Introductory graphics at the outset of each chapter make it easy for students to follow the book's outline and the progress of their own study of personality. Real life case examples illustrate central points. These cases appear both in chapter openings and inCase Studyboxes. Disciplinary Crossroadsboxes connect Personality Psychology to adjoining fields such as Literature, Artificial Intelligence, Political Science and Biology. Inside the Fieldboxes take the student behind the scenes to experience the discipline of Personality Psychology from the inside. Connecting Windowslink related topics across the book. For example, Freud's theory of motives is introduced in Chapter 3's coverage of theoretical perspectives; a connecting window there links it to current thinking on motives in Chapter 4. The book's organization follows a peer-reviewed new plan for the discipline and has been classroom tested by multiple instructors. Over 1,400 original sources of theory and research, many published in the last decade, are covered in the text. For more information including an online instructor's manual and information on requesting an examination copy, please visit www.ablongman.com/mayer1e or the author's companion website at www.personalitysystem.com .John D. Mayer is the author of 'Personality: A Systems Approach', published 2006 under ISBN 9780205389148 and ISBN 0205389147.