Theories of personality

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Frank Dumont

Frank Dumont presents current personality psychology with a fresh description of its current status as well as its prospects. Play, sex, cuisine, creativity, altruism, pets, grieving rituals, and other oft-neglected topics broaden the scope of this fascinating study. This tract is imbued with historical perspectives that reveal the continuity in the evolving science and research of this discipline over the past century. The author places classic schemas and constructs, as well as current principles, in the context of their socio-political catalysts. He further relates this study of the person to life-span developmental issues and to cultural, gender-specific, trait-based, genetic/epigenetic, and evolutionary research findings. Personality psychology has recently reconciled itself to more modest paradigms for describing, explaining, and predicting human behaviour than it generated in the 19th and 20th centuries. This book documents that transformation, providing valuable information for health-service professionals as well as to teachers, researchers, and scientists. -- PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION.

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Peter J. Rentfrow

The places where people live vary considerably in terms of their social, economic, political, climatic, and physical characteristics. These conditions affect how people from different regions behave and interact with their environments and each other. This book makes the case that understanding of psychological phenomena can be greatly informed by a cross-disciplinary perspective that investigates the spatial organisation and geographical representation of such phenomena and the mechanisms that are responsible. The research described in this volume indicates that personality, political ideology, well-being, happiness, human virtues, and personal concerns are related to several important geographic social indicators.

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Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd

Reveals how your individual time perspective shapes your life and is shaped by the world around you, interacting to create national cultures, economics, and personal destinies.

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John Lofland

In the years since Doomsday Cult was first published, much has happened to the movement. This enlarged edition brings us up to the present. Doomsday Cult analyzes the first five years in America (1959-1964) of an obscure end-of-the-world religion that went on to become nationally and internationally famous in the 1970s. The movement went from identification as a small and laughable bunch of kooks to public definition as a powerful and nefarious social force that had to be countered. Such a truly dramatic change in the status of a movement (and the activities of the movement itself) demands the question: Why and how did it happen? The change provides an important opportunity, moreover, to increase our understanding of the dynamics of social movements more generally: their resource mobilization, internal organization, strategies, citizen responses to them and the like. These topics are discussed in the Epilogue to the Enlarged Edition, added since the original edition was published. - Preface to the enlarged edition.