Contrast The Trait Approach With The Biological Aspects Of Personality

Within the past few decades there has been a large amount of research focused directly on the understanding of personality. Over the years personality psychologists have been searching for ways of mapping out personality as a whole, providing methods of measurement and a deeper insight into human behavior. The theories that have been developed help us understand and predict human behavior, whether that be within a group, society or as an individual. Trait theorist's work on the belief that a person's personality is defined by what kind of traits they possess. A personality trait can be defined as "… relatively stable cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics of people that help establish their individual identities and distinguish

There will be an evaluation of both approaches, taking a view on just how useful they are when attempting to understand personality.

In order for personality traits to be developed, psychologists focused back on language in order to find the correct basis for scientific experimentation, this meant that psychologists extracted relevant terms from the dictionary so that they would be able to classify certain traits. Researchers believed that many of the relevant terms that would be seen as valid sources for scientific taxonomy can be found in our natural language.

This 'Lexical approach' suggests that most of the socially relevant and salient personality characteristics have become encoded into out natural language. Therefore providing and broad yet fixed, set of attributes that people have found useful in their daily interactions. (Goldberg.

One other biological explanation suggested was the Reinforcement sensitivity theory developed by Jeffrey Gray. The hypothesis was developed by taking the biological level of analysis as a starting point, in contrast to Eysenck, who developed his connection with the biological aspect after the Extraversion - Stability Model was made. Gray's theory proposes that differences in personality originate from variations of sensitivity of inner biological systems of reward and punishment. This theory suggests that individual differences are developed at a young age as we are developing new skills and are encountered with reward or punishment while learning these new skills. In his theory he put forward two forms of "Super Traits" The Behavioral Approach System (BAS) suggesting that the person would be more sensitive to reward when learning new behaviors, and the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) signifying that the person would have a greater sensitivity to punishment. These two systems can be directly linked to the personality map developed by Eysenck, thus adding to the vast spectrum of personality traits.

Nonetheless the intertwining of the Trait Approach and the Biological has moved the research of personality in to more exciting and new directions, technical advances have allowed more in-depth research into twin studies. For instance Peter Borkenau et al (2006) experimented on 168 identical and 132 fraternal