Paper Topic:

Parental Influences on Personality: A Comparison of Trait and Psychoanalytic Theories

Personality as Influenced by Parents

A Discussion of Psychoanalytic and Trait Theories (Insert student 's name (Insert University 's name

Studies show that parents greatly influence the development of their children in every notable area (Papalia , Olds and Feldman , 2002 Naturally , how children are raised by their parents exerts a notable influence on personality development . At birth , an individual has a specific temperament or a distinguishing nature and manner of approaching and responding to different conditions . According to research , this is a fairly stable characteristic of an individual based mainly on

heredity (Papalia et al , 2002 . On the other hand , a child 's temperament could be changed or influenced to some extent based on how the parent interacts with the child

Several personality theories have taken various viewpoints in the inquiry of parental influence on personality development . This tackles two theories that present differing views . These are the trait and psychoanalytic theories of personality

Trait theory

The trait theory suggests that individual personalities are composed of broad dispositions or natural tendencies to respond in particular ways (Pervin and John , 2001 . Most trait theories try to identify a common set of traits that can be used to describe the personality of any individual . These rely on the statistical procedure of factor analysis to identify dimensions that can be used summarize individual differences in personality traits . Another trait theory called The Big Five ' was developed . This model represents 5 central traits that act together to shape the human personality , although researchers...

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