Allport’s closer collaboration with Prince apparently resulted in only a small change in selection standards after he moved from Harvard to the University of North Carolina and assumed full editorial responsibility in 1922 (see also G. W. Allport, 1938; Shermer, 1985). Frequently asked questions about institutional review boards. (Ed.). Eds. Daily Tips for a Healthy Mind to Your Inbox, Frequently asked questions about institutional review boards. We can’t stress this enough! 230].). Also like Allport, Murray brought to personality psychology interests, skills, and experiences drawn from a variety of other fields—perspectives that led him to emphasize the study of individuals. A. M. (2000). York, K. L., & John, O. P. (1992). . Personality researchers promoted tests as experimental methods (Terman, 1924; Woodworth, 1929) and ignored or criticized methods that appeared subjective. . 397–603). Allport described his solicitation and publication of case studies as “the one distinctive contribution that I have made during my term of editorial service” (G. W. Allport, 1949, p. 440). Murray was born to wealth and privilege (Anderson, 1988; Murray, 1967). Elliott found the case study of Earnst too speculative. By the observation of many parts one finally arrives at a conception of the whole and, then, having grasped the latter, one can re-interpret and understand the former” (Murray, 1938, p. 604–605; emphasis in original). Terman, L. M. (1924). Psychotherapy. . Winston, A. S. (1988). What Murray left undone, especially in the conceptual domain of the study of individuals, often remained (to a great extent) undone. Since psychology offers a plethora of topics, students may have a difficult time in choosing one. (1997a). In a very real sense, therefore, personality assessment (and personality psychology generally) remains stratified, more or less along lines of social power and social class: person-centered for elites (and for criminals and others who threaten or challenge elite power; see our discussion of vivid persons, below), nomothetic for the masses. Start by selecting a … Write about a topic within personality psychology: Personality psychology focuses on the traits and dispositions that contribute to overall personality. Hence, a person might find it challenging to come up with a psychology topic for a research paper or essay. 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. In contrast, during the 1920s and 1930s, American psychologists were more concerned with meeting practical demands for personality measures than with theory (Murphy, 1932; Vernon, 1933) and were particularly skeptical of psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Danziger, 1997; Hale, 1971; Triplet, 1983). Gordon W. Allport Papers, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge. Allport, F. H., & Allport, G. W. (1921). In this section we examine the reception of Allport’s and Murray’s texts and reassess the status of case studies and life histories in personality psychology during this period. Although several of these authors expressed positive views of studies of individual lives, their recommendations that psychologists explore such methods appear to have had little impact (see, e.g., Parker, 1991). Allport was on the editorial board of the journal, which published the studies of several students from his life history seminar (Cartwright & French, 1939; Polansky, 1941). 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). Hornstein, G. A. Gordon W. Allport Papers, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA. While observers generally agree regarding personality psychologists’ ambivalence toward the study of individual lives, the historical course of this ambivalence remains somewhat unclear. 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). Several books and articles contain lists of psychobiographical studies (Cocks & Crosby, 1987, especially pp. How does temperament relate to creativity? 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. 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. How do personality assessments compare? 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. Allport’s interest in the case method and in personal documents (e.g., G. W. Allport, 1942) may have been encouraged by Stern, who advocated the use of biographical and historical methods (1911) and published a psychological analysis of his own adolescent diaries (1925; cited in G. W. Allport, 1942). The proportion of studies of individuals declined sharply between the 1930s and the 1950s (Shermer, 1985). Thomas, W. I., & Znaniecki, F. (1918–1920). The term “personality” appeared rarely in the general psychological literature before the second decade of the twentieth century, and during the first decade it “typically had a colloquial meaning that was synonymous with ‘soul’ or ‘self’” (Parker, 1991, p. 40). Office of Strategic Services Assessment Staff. In A. I. Rabin, R. A. Zucker, R. A. Emmons, & S. Frank (Eds.). Founded in 1932 by Robert Saudek, a European graphologist (Roback, 1935), it was originally international in scope and emphasized “psychodiagnostics,” or character reading based on expressive behavior (G. W. Allport, 1937b), an approach that received little attention from American researchers. After returning from Europe, Allport struggled to reconcile the empirical and quantitative American approach to personality with the more theoretical and qualitative German approach (G. W. Allport, 1962b). . 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). (G. W. Allport, 1932, p. 391). And finally, what personality dynamics led the mysterious figures of Mohamed Atta and his cohort to commit suicide and mass murder by hijacking jet airliners to fly into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and whatever target they intended for the plane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 (Yardley, 2001)? Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. There are signs of a resurgence of interest in the study of individual lives on the part of personality psychologists. The starting point of every research work is to choose a proper direction and a unique topic. Finding a research material for preparing a research paper is very time consuming. 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. Two years later, he visited Jung in Zurich, meeting and socializing daily for three weeks (F. G. Robinson, 1992). Conceptual issues in personality theory; Personality psychology of situations; Personality: traits and situations; Personality and emotion; The characterization of persons; Personality Description and Measurement. In L. B. Weiner (Gen. . You can also choose to research and write about a psychology career. Gordon W. Allport, whose idea it was in the first place that such a book should be written” (p. xvii). Woodworth, R. S. (1932). Academic and professional cultures, too, reflected a concern with personality. What historical, cultural, institutional, and personal factors have contributed to their ambivalence? (1945). (Moore himself conducted group studies using psychometric tests; see, e.g., Moore, 1925). Psychology research papers are quite often assigned to students and that leads to a lot of sleepless nights. Ed.). Thus, the proportion of empirical papers based on the study of individual cases dropped from an average of 65%, under Floyd Allport, to 30% under Moore (see Shermer, 1985): “Their place was taken by statistical studies based on group data” (Danziger, 1990, p. 165). (1990). A historical and conceptual background to psychohistory. Individuals and the differences between them. Thus, the enigma of Adolf Hitler’s personality continues to drive interpretations, psychological and otherwise, more than 55 years after his death, as testified to by the comprehensive review of Hitler biographies and psychobiographies by Rosenbaum (1998), Kershaw (1999), and L. L. Langer (1999). Gottschalk, L. R., Kluckhohn, C., & Angell, R. C. (1945). Further, it is difficult to construct any strong explanatory links between such broad and general terms as “introversion” or “neuroticism,” on the one hand, and the highly differentiated and specific actions of a Unabomber, a Hitler, or a Jenny, on the other. To make a research paper interesting, it is necessary to have a good topic in hand. 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. Allport, G. W. (1921). 15–19), it, too, remained a largely programmatic model. . American Psychological Association. Psychologists working in “applied” areas were particularly attracted to quantitative methods that could establish their scientific expertise and differentiate them from their “pseudoscientific” competitors. Paige, J. M. (1966). Lundberg, G. A. applicable at least to some, if not to all people” (p. 3). Kurt Lewin (1935) long ago articulated the principle that behavior is a joint function of the personality (P) and the environment (E); in formulaic terms: B  f(P, E). (As mentioned above, Murray actually introduced several concepts, such as need-integrate, regnancy, ordination, and gratuity, that could facilitate the study of personality-in-context in individual lives, but these concepts were never seriously developed and elaborated, either by Murray or by later generations of personality psychologists.) Importance of Social Context. Psychologist L. L. Thurstone, for example, was an important influence on such sociologists as Samuel Stouffer (1930), who became a proponent of statistical methods in sociology (Bulmer, 1984). In J. Interestingly, however, his use of this approach has been both exaggerated and minimized. In R. Hogan (Series Ed. . From House to Haig: Private life and public style in American foreign policy advisers. Common Psychology Topics According to Categories. Bulmer (1984) notes, however, that an “emphasis on the complementarity of research methods was characteristic of the Chicago school” (p. 121) and that several participants in the debate actually advocated the use of both approaches. . Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author, educational consultant, and speaker focused on helping students learn about psychology. The significance of biography. Richard M. Elliott. Even more striking in their effects, however, are macrocontexts, or enduring features of social structure and culture—gender, age, social class, culture, and history. Bernreuter, R. G. (1933). (1993). The four faces of Eve: A typological analysis of women’s personality at midlife. (1926). A motivational analysis of the Clinton first term and the 1996 presidential campaign. Personality research methods: An historical perspective. Peripheral Traits; Control Motivation; Curiosity; Defensive Pessimism; Expertise; Extraversion; Gender Differences; Genetic Influences on Behavior; Hardiness; Identity Status; Individual … Was it high, as reflected in the broad erudition in his “manifesto,” or was it perhaps low because of the rigidity of his ideas?) The Study of Individual Lives in the 1930s and 1940s . Thus, it is only natural that such trends should give impetus to a renewed focus on the individual lives approach (e.g., McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2001), particularly when they can be combined with quantitative methods (see, e.g., J. M. Healy & Stewart, 1991). Rather than simply documenting the history of case studies and life histories in personality psychology, we focus in this research paper on contextual factors shapingAmerican personality psychologists’attitudes toward these methods. For your project, you might try administering scales measuring temperament and creativity to a group of participants. In J. Brozek (Ed.). Toward this end,Allport and his students designed experimental studies of “intuitive” processes and attempted to improve the scientific respectability of case studies by addressing methodological issues related to the question, “How shall a psychological life history be written?” (G. W. Allport, 1967, p. 3). Gordon Allport played a central role in systematizing and defining the subfield of personality psychology and separating it from social psychology (Barenbaum, 2000; Nicholson, 1998, in press; Winter & Barenbaum, 1999), and Henry Murray was influential in expanding the boundaries of the study of personality to include experimental investigations of psychoanalytic concepts (Triplet, 1983; Winter & Barenbaum, 1999). (2001). In developing his list of personality variables, Murray made a deliberate analogy to organic chemistry (1938, p. 142). & Trans.). Allport, G. W. (1945, February 26). 275–278, also Murray, 1943.) In 1997, Nasby and Read (1997) published a truly landmark case study of Dodge Morgan, who at the age of 54 sold his electronics business for $41 million, commissioned construction of a sailboat, and then completed a 150-day nonstop solo circumnavigation of the earth (see Morgan, 1989, for his own account of the voyage). In I. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace. Gergen, K. J. Yardley, J. The study of personality by the experimental method. In other words, recognition of the importance of social context facilitates recognition of the value of the individual lives approach. Anderson, J. W. (1988). The assessment center and the study of lives. Employing more scientific rhetoric and echoing the prevailing view that the method was “unsatisfactory,” he suggested nevertheless that “the concrete individual has eluded study by any other approach” and remarked that “in the future there will undoubtedly be attempts to standardize the case study in some way which will reduce its dependence upon the uncontrolled artistry of the author” (G. W.Allport & Vernon, 1930, p. 700; see also G. W.Allport, 1933; Nicholson, 1996). . He studied with Eduard Spranger, a disciple of the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who had promoted psychology as a “human science” (Geisteswissenschaft), emphasizing biographical studies (G. W. Allport, 1924). Runyan, W. M. (1988b). Anne Roe Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Although early measures of character and personality took various forms, the less “efficient” methods were soon replaced by tests based on the mental test model of adding scores on separate multiple-choice or true/false items to get a total (see Parker, 1991). Allport, G. W. (1940b). It is unlikely this paper can be done adequately in less than five pages. (Eds.). During the “turn-of-the-century decade,” according to Susman (1979), “interest grew in personality, individual idiosyncrasies, personal needs and interests. (Platt, 1996, p. 46). McAdams, D. P., Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. What is applied psychology? 142–242), which also included other concepts (discussed below) such as need-integrates, general traits or attributes, “miscellaneous internal factors,” and numerous other variables such as values, sentiments, interests, “gratuities,” abilities, and complexes. It must have 3 peer-reviewed sources or more, though non-peer-reviewed sources may count if relevant (e.g., to give an example of how popular a construct is) or for the broad … Sociologists’ use of case studies was derived in part from the close connection between sociology and social work: Sociology and social work took a long time to become disentangled; in the 1920s people called social workers were equally or even more likely to carry out empirical research, and university sociologists very frequently drew on their case data whether or not it had been collected for research purposes. However, there are a few important steps you need to take first. According to Platt, the debate was a “hot” issue from the 1920s until the Second World War (1996, p. 36; see also Ross, 1991). Healy, J. M., Jr., & Stewart, A. J. (1990). . Causes of Psychological Disorders 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. Psychology is proud of its laboratories, with their apparatus for careful experimentation and measurement. ), Hollingworth, H. L. (1938). Randall represented the New Thought, or Mind Cure, movement, which was important in the transition from a “culture of character,” a nineteenthcentury ideal emphasizing duty and moral qualities, to a “culture of personality” (Susman, 1979, p. 216), emphasizing self-development and self-presentation. Commenting on a pioneering book of clinical case studies (Burton & Harris, 1947), Dollard noted that it relied heavily on test material and was not “the much-needed book of illuminating case histories for the teacher of Abnormal Psychology” (1948, p. 541). Promo code: cd1a428655, Personality Psychology Research Paper Topics, Genetic Basis of Personality Structure Research Paper, Biological Bases of Personality Research Paper, Psychodynamic Models of Personality Research Paper, Psychological Behaviorism Theory of Personality Research Paper, Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory of Personality Research Paper, Self-Regulatory Perspectives on Personality Research Paper, Interpersonal Theory of Personality Research Paper, Structures of Personality Traits Research Paper, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/humbled-by-the-genome-s-mysteries.html, Biological Psychology Research Paper Topics, Developmental Psychology Research Paper Topics, Assessment Psychology Research Paper Topics, Educational Psychology Research Paper Topics, Evolutionary Psychology Research Paper Topics, The Five-Factor Model of personality traits, The development of personality across the lifespan, Attachment theory: Motivational, individual-differences and structural aspects, Attachment theory: Developmental, psychodynamic and optimal-functioning aspects, Animal models of personality and cross-species comparisons, The Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality, Semantic and linguistic aspects of personality, Self-regulation and control in personality functioning, Personality as a cognitive-affective processing system, Personality in cross-cultural perspective, Diagnosis and assessment of disorders of personality, Personality and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.