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Elsevier

Individual Differences and Personality

Designed for upper level undergraduate and graduate level students inquiring about the psychology of personality and individual differences, this textbook focuses on the… Read more

Description

Designed for upper level undergraduate and graduate level students inquiring about the psychology of personality and individual differences, this textbook focuses on the personality traits and related characteristics that make each person unique. Basic principles of personality measurement are explained and crucial scientific questions of personality psychology are examined via a reader-friendly style and various boxes of interesting asides to keep students’ attention.Unlike lower-level texts written from a historical perspective that concentrate solely on theory, this textbook summarizes and integrates the contemporary research available about individual differences.

Key features

  • Emphasizes current research

Readership

Undergraduate and graduate level courses in personality.

Table of contents

Preface AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Basic Concepts in Psychological MeasurementChapter 2: Personality Traits and the Inventories That Measure ThemChapter 3: Personality Structure: Classifying Traits Chapter 4: Developmental Change and Stability of Personality TraitsChapter 5: Biological Bases of PersonalityChapter 6: Genetic and Environmental Influences on PersonalityChapter 7: The Evolution of Personality VariationChapter 8: Personality DisordersChapter 9: Personality and Life OutcomesChapter 10: Mental Ability Chapter 11: Religion and PoliticsChapter 12: SexualityConclusionReferences

Review quotes

“This engaging state-of-the-art undergraduate textbook is especially recommended to readers of this journal because of its strong research orientation and its high accessibility for students, a combination rarely achieved. Consistency and integration are its strong points, due largely to a single author providing a relaxed (reader friendly) evolutionary approach for each of the 12 chapters along with an eclectic trait theory” —PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES (Sept 2007)

Product details

About the author

MA

Michael C. Ashton

Michael C. Ashton is a professor of psychology at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1998. As a grad student in the late 1990s, together with Kibeom Lee, he did some cross-cultural research to find out whether the “Big Five” personality dimensions found in North America could be recovered in other cultures. Using their own work and that of other researchers, they found that there were actually six personality dimensions. The “new” one was the H factor, or the Honesty-Humility Factor, was discovered and is now considered one of the six dimensions of human personality. In addition to the second edition of the textbook, Individual Differences and Personality, he is the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, and co-authored with Kibeom Lee The H Factor of Personality.
Affiliations and expertise
Professor of Psychology, Brock University, Ontario, Canada