Psychology and Temperament

Temperament, Personality, and Behavior

The topic that interested me the most was temperament, personality and behavior. Although many people have heard those words some people don’t really know the difference between them all, I myself believed that personality consisted of temperament and caused behavior. I now understand that temperament is the individual differences in emotion, reactivity, self-regulation that establishes consistency across situation and over time, and that temperament is biologically based and heredity. Whereas personality interacts between temperament and social experiences which leads to the function of human behavior.

Understanding this concept you can say that temperament is the internal motivation of a person’s behavior, because it’s the installed into the individual to be able to express themselves, whereas personally would be the external motivation because here you are acting out the behavior that you deemed to be appropriate due to society “norms”. While us as humans have no control over our biological makeup such as being reserved or social individuals. We tend to express our behavior through both temperament and personality; such as if a person has a high level of sociability trait, that particular person will be an extraversion, an outgoing/energetic person whose behaviors would be hanging out with friends, attending parties and interacting with others.

The example I provided above about the extraversion individual was done through the Five Factor Model scale, which consists of multiple personalities traits, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These tests are taken if the individual wants to know what type of personality he falls into, which describes the type of person they tend to be. I personally found this test to be quite interesting, I myself scored higher in the agreeableness (83%) and conscientiousness (62%) traits than any other, while extraversion was my lowest scoring percent (4).