PERSONALITY
Definition:
Personality is the particular combination of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral response patterns of an individual. Different personality theorists present their own definitions of the word based on their theoretical positions.
Personality should be defined from two perspectives. First, there is personality from the inside, which is called identity. This is the person you think you are and it is best defined by your hopes, dreams, aspirations, goals, and intentions — i.e., your values.
Second, there is personality from the outside, which is called reputation. This is the person that others think you are and is best defined by the Five-Factor Model — i.e., in terms of self-confidence, sociability, integrity, charm, and creativity, or their opposites. There are often important disparities between a person's identity and his/her reputation, and the size of the disparity is related to career success.

Genesis of personality:
According to Oldham and Morris, "personality style is your organizing principle. It propels you on your life path. It represents the orderly arrangement of all your attributes, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviours, and coping mechanisms. It is the distinctive pattern of your psychological functioning—the way you think, feel, and behave—that makes you definitely you."
The origin of personality style is in some combination of genetic inheritance and environmental influence.
The concept of personality style is broader than and includes the concepts of "personality traits", "personality type", and "temperament".
Personality style is usually represented dimensionally, as with the Big Five personality traits, or as a classification of type, as with the Holland Codes.
"Personality styles should be recognized as constructed approximations of human experience" and should be arrayed on a continuum rather than be reified or totalized. One should be vigilant to deconstruct the uses of personality style in favour of an ongoing reflexivity about the use and misuse of such labels.
Importance of personality:
The significance of this understanding is that you can still do something about your personality today, which means that if you think your personality needs to be changed or improved, then you can make this happen. Why is personality development important? The following points will help you understand why.
Your Personality Will Help You Build Strong Personal Relationships
In family life, how you deal with your spouse, your parents, or your children also has something to do with the kind of person you are. Although the love of a family is unconditional, there are certainly times when challenges arise, and how you deal with each one affects the relationship you will have with your family.
If you are too shy to speak when in a group, then this only means you lack self-esteem and confidence. If your relationship with your family is not too well, then it only means you lack communication and trust among each other. All these can be changed if you strive to improve and develop your personality.
Your Personality Will Dictate Success in Your Career
In the workplace, it is quite common to experience difficulties, from something as simple as beating traffic to stressful ones such as meeting project deadlines, as well as maintaining good relationships with your bosses and colleagues. Though majority of us have the mental capacity to handle the responsibilities bestowed on us, we lack a high level of emotional intelligence which is considered just as important to get the job done.

Relevance of personality:
Extroversion (E)
Sensing (S)
Thinking (T)
Judging (J)
Introversion (I)
Intuition (N)
Feeling (F)
Perceiving (P)

Theories: Trait theory. * Gordon Allport. Considered patterns of traits to be the unique attributes of individuals. * His idiographic research led him to conclude that all people have certain traits, or dispositions, that are the building blocks of personality.

Current Status:
Research on the nature and development of personality disorders has grown immensely over the past thirty years. A selective summary overview is given of the current status of the scientific study of the personality disorders from several perspectives, including the epidemiological, longitudinal, experimental psychopathology, and neurobehavioral perspectives. From this research, we now know that approximately 10 percent of the general population suffer from a diagnosable personality disorder. Moreover, contrary to nearly a century of theory and clinical pedagogy, modern longitudinal studies clearly suggest that personality disorders decrease in severity over time. The mechanisms by which this change occurs are not understood at present, though it is not likely that change in underlying normal personality systems drives the change in personality disorder. The methods of the experimental psychopathology laboratory, including neuroimaging approaches, are being brought to bear on the nature of personality disorders in efforts to relate neurobiological and neurocognitive functions to personality disorder symptomatology. A model that links personality disorder feature development to underlying, interacting brain-based neurobehavioral systems is reviewed in brief. Current issues and findings illustrative of these developments are given using borderline personality disorder as an exemplar. Finally, areas of intersection between psychoanalytic treatment approaches and the growing science of personality disorder are highlighted.

Conclusion:
In general, information about human personality has come from three different sources of study. The first is biological, conceived to have genetic as well as environmental origins. The second is that of the social realm, including the impact of social forces on the growing child that shape such personal responses as motives, traits, behaviours, and attitudes. The third is the examination of clinical contacts with people who have suffered adaptive and adjustive failures. Some authorities have suggested that a greater degree of integration of all three sources of information and the methods derived from them would accelerate the growth of valid information about personality.