However, Lewin’s simple formula and these interaction terms are really little more than programmatic methodological aspirations or statements of faith; as they stand, they are of little use in the full analysis of complex person-environment transactions in the real world. Individual Differences and Personality Research Paper Topics. . Gordon W.AllportPapers,HarvardUniversityArchives,Cambridge,MA. McAdams, D. P., & West, S. G. (1997). Personality researchers promoted tests as experimental methods (Terman, 1924; Woodworth, 1929) and ignored or criticized methods that appeared subjective. Allport’s (1937b) text reflected this change in strategy. Psychology as a profession. (This statement is based on a count of items in the historic PsycINFO database featuring the term “personality” in titles or abstracts.) Allport (1968) described social ethics professor Richard C. Cabot, who used case studies and biographies extensively in his teaching (G. W. Allport, 1937a), as a teacher who had influenced his thinking. Office of Strategic Services Assessment Staff. Block, MD, Verywell Mind uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience and for our, Possible Topics for Personality Psychology Research, What to Do Before You Begin Your Research, Clinical Psychology Research Topics to Explore in Your Next Assignment, Great Psychology Experiment Ideas to Explore, Why It's Important to Have High Self-Esteem, Picking a Topic for Your Social Psychology Research Experiment, Topic Ideas for Your Developmental Psychology Papers, What Personality Theories in Psychology May Tell You About Yours, The Link Between Depression and Creativity, Tips for Choosing a Health Psychology Topic for Research, 10 Interesting Facts Psychologists Have Found About Personality, The Guidelines You Should Follow for an Outline in APA Format, Conduct Your Own Experiment on Musical Preferences and Personality, 8 Signs That Could Mean Your Partner Is Cheating. Case study and life history methods, including the use of personal documents, drew attention in sociology following the publication of Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) landmark study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which was based on letters and autobiographical material. The assessment center and the study of lives. On the compatibility of quantitative and qualitative methods for studying individual lives. MacMurphey, R. H. (1941, January 21). Is there a correlation between personality type and the tendency to cheat on exams? [and] the aim of science is to discover laws . Each has considerable construct validity, which means that it is associated with a recognized and characteristic set of observable behaviors.Yet imagine how differently each would have been expressed on the morning of June 6, 1944, by the following two people, in the following two situations: (1) a white 20-year-old American man storming Utah Beach during the World War II invasion of Normandy in France, and (2) a middle-aged Japanese American woman in an internment camp set up in the Utah desert at the beginning of the war by the U.S. government for citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Sometimes the use of quantative data helped to resolve paradoxical behaviors (e.g., the study of Richard Nixon by Winter & Carlson, 1988) or explain surprising outcomes (e.g., the study of Bill Clinton by Winter, 1998a). . Most would maintain that they are practicing science, and many would argue for the possibility of (in Allport’s words) “a science treating individuals” (G. W. Allport, 1937b, p. 21). Psychology is a broad subject that covers various subfields. Ironically, however, it may have resulted in case studies that were one-sided. & D. K. Freedheim (Vol. Putnam, J. J. (1977). Memory; Memory and Eyewitness Testimony; Repressed and Recovered Memory; Language and Language Development; Thinking and … 7–8). How can we account for this discrepancy? Bernard, L. L. (1945). Allport, G. W. (1958). 188 Psychology Research Paper Topics List October 24, 2020 by admin Below is a list of thesis titles and topics for research paper in both a qualitative and quantitative approach to psychology thesis . The problem of alternative explanations in psychobiography. Nasby, W., & Read, N. W. (1997). Lundberg, G. A. “A coherent datum of perception”: Gordon Allport, Floyd Allport, and the politics of “personality.”. In R. Hogan (Series Ed. [Review of the book. (1983). Winter, D. G. (1998b). At a minimum, we need to know how these variables are structured. Yet in any account of Murray’s enduring impact on the field, these methods and concepts usually (and fairly) take second place to his more nomothetic concepts and procedures, such as the TAT. Throughout his career he supported case studies “behind the scenes,” using them in his teaching and increasing their visibility during his term as editor of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1938–1949). The four faces of Eve: A typological analysis of women’s personality at midlife. My life as a dissociated personality. Ed.). Using motive scores in the psychobiographical study of an individual: The case of Richard Nixon. Two years later, he visited Jung in Zurich, meeting and socializing daily for three weeks (F. G. Robinson, 1992). Taylor, E. (2000). It meant opening up a space, a “no man’s land,” between themselves and the things they studied, a place whose boundary could be patrolled so that needs or desires or feelings could never infiltrate the work itself. Letter to G. W. Allport. (Personality psychologists other than Allport and Murray shared this definition of the field. (1992). Gergen, K. J. She finds, however, that during this period sociologists’ interest in case studies, life histories, and personal documents was declining and that attention to these methods virtually disappeared following World War II (Platt, 1992, 1996). Ambivalence regarding the study of individual lives also seems incompatible with personality theorists’“dissident role in the development of psychology” (C. S. Hall & Lindzey, 1957, p. 4; see McAdams, 1997) and their concern with “the study of the whole person,” which Hall and Lindzey (p. 6) consider “a natural derivative of [the] clinical practice” of early personality theorists such as Freud, Jung, and Adler. Abrief history of modern personality theory. Hornstein, G. A. Other indicators of institutional recognition (such as publication trends in journals and textbooks, contents of professional meetings,andchangesinacademiccurricula)begantoemerge duringthemid-1920s,andpersonalityresearch“becamearelatively secure specialty area in American psychology by the mid-1930s” (Parker, 1991, p. 164; see also Burnham, 1968a). Woodworth, R. S. (1919). As he put it in the preface: “Invariably she pins me down with the unspoken challenge, ‘And what do you make of me?’” (Allport, 1965, p. x; emphasis in original). . As Parker (1991) suggests, this period has received scant attention in historical reviews of American personality psychology, largely due to the prevailing belief that “personality quite suddenly became a field in the middle of the 1930s” (Sanford, 1985, p. 492). During the 1930s, members of the Chicago sociology department demonstrated their allegiance to one method or the other at their student-faculty picnic, “where baseball sides were picked on the basis of case study versus statistics” (Platt, 1996, pp. We suggest that personality psychologists’ attitudes toward case studies and life histories were influenced by work not only in psychology but also in neighboring disciplines that adopted alternative investigative practices. Murray, H. A. They produced the landmark Explorations in Personality (Murray, 1938), a study of 51 young men by his interdisciplinary team and one of the first major systematic research studies of normal personality. (Eds.). As we have seen, Allport’s early publications promoting case methods were generally overlooked by personality psychologists; in contrast, his Ascendance-Submission (G. W. Allport, 1928) and Study of Values (G. W. Allport & Vernon, 1931) tests were very successful (see, e.g., Bernreuter, 1933; Duffy, 1940). How does Type A behavior influence success in school? Explorations in Personality is most often cited nowadays for its list of 20-plus motives or “needs.” For example, this catalog of motives formed the basis of numerous personality questionnaire measures, such as the Stern Activities Index, the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS), and the Jackson Personality Research Form (PRF). These pBibliography: persisted during the emergence of personality psychology as a separate subdiscipline in the 1930s, despite calls for more attention to case study methods. (1993). Here, we examine in more detail aspects of this formative period that contributed to the predominance of the psychometric approach and to personality psychologists’ambivalence regarding intensive studies of individual lives. In particular, we compare the reception of case studies and life histories in psychiatry, sociology, and psychology during the early decades of the twentieth century. Peripheral Traits; Control Motivation; Curiosity; Defensive Pessimism; Expertise; Extraversion; Gender Differences; Genetic Influences on Behavior; Hardiness; Identity Status; Individual … The teaching of sociology in the United States in the last fifty years. In R. W. Rieber & K. Salzinger (Eds.). In such circumstances, everyone feels compelled to explain (thus graduate students—in psychology, anyway—often feel this compulsion with respect to their mentors!). In fact, psychologists developed an interest in personality much earlier, and their methodological choices, shaped by developments within the broader field of psychology and in the larger culture, influenced the field in important ways (Danziger, 1990, 1997; Parker, 1991; Shermer, 1985). Paige, J. M. (1966). McClelland, D. C. (1951). Other critics, noting that Allport published only one case study (1965), have commented on his “ambivalence regarding the approach that he had so long championed” (Cohler, 1993, p. 134; see also Capps, 1994; Holt, 1978; Peterson, 1988). President Clinton’s policy dilemmas: A cognitive analysis. Allport, F. H., & Allport, G. W. (1921). In E. G. Boring & G. Lindzey (Eds.). Richmond and other social workers (e.g., Sheffield, 1920) wrote influential works on case study methods. Case studies appeared regularly in psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals such as the American Journal of Psychiatry and the Psychoanalytic Review throughout the 1920s. Training clinical students in personality theory. If you have decided to work in this field, try to find some tips on writing a psychology research paper before you start working on it. Individual lives and the structure of personality psychology. All personality psychologists who use the individual lives approach would insist that they are rigorous scholars; they would also vigorously deny that in their interpretations “anything goes,” or that, in the derisive words of Gergen, “The case study simply allows the investigator freedom to locate the facts lending support to . Essays on personality can be very different because you can write not only about real-life personality but about a fictional character or maybe you would be required to write about yourself. This new emphasis on “personality” is evident in the previous quote from John Randall. (1973). The tendency to consider case studies unscientific was already clear just after the turn of the century in comments on the work of two respected psychologists who drew heavily on personal documents. [Review of the book. Only one such case, that of “Earnst” (written by Robert White), was actually presented in Explorations, but it was presented at considerable length: At 88 pages, it took up 11% of the book’s entire text. Do people tend to choose pets based on their personality types? Simonton, D. K. (1999). By the late 1920s, psychologists (e.g., G. W. Allport & Vernon, 1930; Murphy & Murphy, 1931) and sociologists (e.g., Bernard, 1932; Young, 1928) reviewing the personality literature were explicitly identifying the psychometric approach with psychology, and life histories and case studies with sociology and psychiatry. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Several concepts refer to the hierarchical and temporal arrangement of people’s motives; for example, regnancy, whereonemotivedominatesothers(Murray,1938,pp.45–49); relations of fusion, subsidiation, and conflict among different motives at any one time (pp. Achance encounter during an ocean voyage in 1924 led him to read Moby-Dick; thus began a lifetime’s passionate interest in the life and writings of Herman Melville (F. G. Robinson, 1992, pp. The field of psychology thrives on continuous research and every course requires students to write research papers on different subjects of psychology. The personalities of Bush and Gorbachev measured at a distance: Procedures, portraits, and policy. (Eds.). Eds. This emphasis on case studies reflected the investigative practices of medical and psychiatric researchers and psychoanalysts.Around the turn of the twentieth century, the case study, familiar to medical practitioners since the days of Hippocrates, had been introduced as a pedagogical tool by Walter B. Cannon (1900; see Forrester, 1996; Taylor, 1996) and by Richard C. Cabot (see Forrester, 1996; Lubove, 1965), borrowing from law and from social casework, respectively. The adoption in 1921 of a system for classifying abstracts of recent literature published in the American Journal of Sociology was one indication of sociologists’interest in personality. . ), Hollingworth, H. L. (1938). Gordon Allport’s (1921) review of “personality” research, generally considered the first of its kind in an American psychologicaljournal,was“anearlyindicationthatthiswordwas beginningtohaveatechnicalmeaning”(Parker,1991,p.113). Murray’s approach has survived in certain intellectual “niche” positions: for example, in the work of Robert White (a Murray protégé and a former member of Allport’s life history seminar; see G. W.Allport, 1967) on the “study of lives” (White, 1952, 1963, 1972). Good, J. M. M. (2000). Capps, D. (1994). Runyan, W. M. (1988a). In J. Strachey (Ed. In contrast, psychologists interested in personality adopted psychometric measures as efficient means of meeting practical goals. Runyan, W. M. (1988b). McClelland, D. C. (1985). 81–82, 109–110, 133–140, and passim). The predominance of the psychometric approach in psychological research on personality was reflected in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology after Prince offered to donate the journal, once oriented primarily toward practicing psychiatrists, to the American Psychological Association in 1925. Anderson, J. W. (1988). We can’t stress this enough! Thurstone, L. L. (1952). San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace. The gratuity concept has the potential to link individual personalities to the opportunities, demands, and resources of their environments, thereby making it possible to incorporate race and class privilege (or, conversely, race and class oppression) into the personality portrait. As Allport observed later, “We stop with our wobbly laws of personality and seldom confront them with the concrete person” (G. W. Allport, 1962a, p. 407). The causes of PTSD and the ways to prevent it. Recent experiences in the study and treatment of hysteria at the Massachusetts General Hospital, with remarks on Freud’s method of treatment by “psycho-analysis.”, Rank, O. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, & S. Briggs (Eds.). For your project, you might try administering scales measuring temperament and creativity to a group of participants. From House to Haig: Private life and public style in American foreign policy advisers. Life fear and death fear. Focusing within the person, he chose to overlook “the factors shaping personality” (p. viii; emphasis in original). Rosenthal, R. (1958). Once social psychologist Henry T. Moore of Dartmouth replaced Floyd Allport as cooperating editor, the practice of publishing case studies declined dramatically, conforming with publication trends in mainstream psychological journals where the proportion of reports featuring individual data had been declining steadily since the 1910s (Shermer, 1985). Preparations for the scaffold of a comprehensive system. Bernard, L. L. (1932). In S. Koch (Ed.). . Words: 1355 Length: 4 Pages Document Type: Research Paper Paper #: 7638137. However, he referred to the course as a clinical offering, described it as highly unorthodox, and was greatly relieved to learn that his students were also taking more traditional psychology courses (Elliott, 1952). Why did Timothy McVeigh in 1995 blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people (including 15 little children in a daycare center) and injuring more than 500 others? Research suggests that genetics, abuse and other factors contribute to the development of obsessive-compulsive, narcissistic or other personality disorders. Thank you, {{form.email}}, for signing up. Consider the following example (which is hypothetical, but based on some real people we have known). Topics are extremely important. ), Paterson, D. G. (1938). In E. G. Boring, H. S. Langfeld, H. Werner, & R. M. Yerkes (Eds.). Quoted by permission of Ardys Allport. The life voyage of a solo circumnavigator: Integrating theoretical and methodological perspectives. The psychograph [i.e., a profile of trait scores] oversimplifies the problem by assuming that the investigation of personality need only consider the first of these conditions. He cited the work of several students relating to the ability to judge personality and to the most effective method of describing personality. Common Psychology Topics According to Categories. (2001, October 10). The essay flow is critical no matter which essay topics for psychology the writer has to cover. Gordon W. Allport Papers, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA. At the same time, several new personality textbooks (e.g., McAdams, 1990; Winter, 1996) gave considerable attention to individual persons, while many existing texts expanded their use of case study material in new editions. Morawski, J. G., & Hornstein, G. A. (1941). . The reality is that these papers are easier to write than we think. A. M. (2000). In the book version of her letters, Allport discussed a variety of personality interpretations of Jenny. Indispensables for the making, testing, and remaking of a personological system. What Murray left undone, especially in the conceptual domain of the study of individuals, often remained (to a great extent) undone. In P. J. This sample Personality Psychology Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Nasby and Read integrated a rich and diverse array of quantitative and qualitative data: numerous personality tests, administered before and after (and in some cases during) the voyage; Morgan’s voyage log, content-analyzed for a variety of themes and personality characteristics; and Morgan’s letters and later memoir (1989) of the voyage. Tweney, R. D., & Budzynski, C. A. . Hevern (1999) observes that although Allport’s monograph (G. W. Allport, 1942) outsold other SSRC volumes, his promotion of the case method was generally overlooked by mainstream psychologists. Probably these costs can only be justified in a few situations, where choosing the right or wrong person has important financial or social consequences—for example, the right spy, the most effective corporate senior officer. Murray, H. A. Conceptual issues in personality theory; Personality psychology of situations; Personality: traits and situations; Personality and emotion; The characterization of persons; Personality Description and Measurement. Emily is a fact checker, editor, and writer who has expertise in psychology content. Benjamin, L. T., DeLeon, P. H., & Freedheim, D. K. (2002). Allport, G. W. (1951, January 11). When we try to explain such vivid and compelling people with the usual resources of the personality psychologist’s “toolbox” of nomothetic variables, the results can be quite unsatisfying—a hollow portrait. Crider, B. Quantifying psychological phenomena: Debates, dilemmas, and implications. As a result, the concepts of “personality variables” and even “personality” are most appropriately understood not as autonomous, freefloating entities located “within” people but rather as “bundles” of potentialities, expressed in many and varied (but still recognizable) ways in combination with features of the social micro- and macrocontexts. Exemplifying this usage, sociologist John Dollard applied his Criteria for the Life History (1935) to several different types of “life history,” defined as “an autobiography, biography or clinical history” or “even a social service case history or a psychiatric document” (p. 265). . Inspired by a case study—the autobiography of a former patient (Beers, 1908)—the mental hygiene movement was organized in 1909 to reform the treatment of patients in mental institutions. A debate concerning the relative merits of case study and statistical methods during this period reflected sociologists’ growing interest in quantitative methods, partly a result of their collaboration with researchers in neighboring disciplines, such as economics and psychology. Duffy, E. (1940). Expanding their goals to include the identification of potential cases of maladjustment, mental hygiene workers made “personality” the focus of their preventive and therapeutic efforts, which frequently involved interdisciplinary teams of experts undertaking intensive case studies of “troublesome” children in settings such as child guidance clinics (W. Healy, 1915; Jones, 1999). The influence of a personality type on choosing a pet. (As Winter, 1993, suggests, perhaps this was because she resembled in some ways his own mother and cast him in the role of “good son,” in comparison to her own son. Person-Centered Concepts. There was fascination with the very peculiarities of the self, especially the sick self” (pp. . 100+ Psychology Research Paper Topics. If psychologists wish to understand developments that have already occurred, however, they are left with a substitute: We find a genius, or an insane person, a criminal, or a “problem child” before us, and we desire to know how he came to be what he is. Allport argued that personal documents provided knowledge of “concrete individuals. One important factor was undoubtedly Murray’s lifelong tendency— present in his biographical work on Melville as well as his psychology—to revise, rework, and “fuss” with his most important works—ultimately leaving them fragmentary and incomplete (see F. G. Robinson, 1992, passim). (Woodworth, 1929, p. 8). Psychology Before 1900; Psychology in the 20th Century; Psychology Into the 21st Century Homburger, E. [Erikson, E. H.] (1937). Another response to the criticism that case studies do not permit generalization is to take seriously Allport’s suggestion that personality psychology has more than one goal. Check other research paper topics for more inspiration. Clinical Psychology. At what point did psychometric methods become predominant in personality research? Look into what other researchers have discovered. Freud, S. (1957b). His correspondence reveals that he hoped to follow his text with a volume on the methodology of case studies and life histories, including case materials for use in courses in psychology and social work (e.g., G. W. Allport, 1937a). In contrast, nomothetic questionnaire-based assessment predominates in the selection and guidance of lowerlevel workers, and at all levels of education. Similarly, Richard M. Elliott (1939) approved of Murray’s (1938) efforts to combine psychoanalytic and experimental approaches, his procedures (especially the Thematic Apperception Test), and his catalog of variables, but he criticized Murray’s neglect of psychometric research and of statistics. Woodworth, R. S. (1932). In 1921, the journal was expanded to include a focus on social psychology and was renamed The Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology; the editorial announcing this change pointed to “personality” as a central topic in both fields (Editors, 1921). In addition to the case of Jenny Masterson (G. W.Allport, 1965; Anonymous, 1946), he collected extensive materials on a second case that remained unpublished (Barenbaum, 1997a). Gordon W. Allport. Runyan, W. M. (1983). The case(s) of Gordon Allport. Yardley, J. obtained in a reliable, objective manner” using “scientifically valid methods” (p. 555). What historical, cultural, institutional, and personal factors have contributed to their ambivalence? Ed.) 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(1999). Allport, G. W. (1937a, September 29). Continuing an earlier trend, the number of studies of individuals published both in general psychology journals and in “personality” journals (the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and Character and Personality) declined during the 1930s and 1940s (G. W. Allport, 1940b; Shermer, 1985).

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