Personality: A Systems Approach

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0205389147 ISBN 13: 9780205389148

Publisher: Pearson, 2006

The discipline of Personality Psychology is undergoing a renaissance. The new textbook, Personality: A Systems Approach, has been designed to help students keep up. The book is constructed according to an exciting new roadmap that draws on the field’s best and most longstanding intellectual traditions. By examining personality according to its defining qualities, parts, organization, and development, students understand human personality, including their own personalities, and the influence of personality on an individual’s life.

From the Back Cover:

Today, the discipline of Personality Psychology is undergoing a renaissance: Fresh new thinking and innovative research are creating a newly integrated field. Such rapid change, however, makes it hard for students to keep up with the latest thinking.

A new textbook that fully reflects today’s new view of human personality– in a lively, contemporary fashion, PERSONALITY: A SYSTEMS APPROACH, is constructed according to an exciting new roadmap of the field, one that draws together the best of the field’s intellectual traditions. The book helps students to understand personality, including their own personalities, as well as how personality influences a given individual’s life over time.

In this textbook, human personality is described in a sequence of four richly explanatory sections, each one written in a careful, even-handed, and engaging fashion.

The first section describes the field of personality and defines personality itself. The second dissects personality into its major parts. The third examines how the parts are organized, including the dynamics among them. The fourth section considers personality as it develops over time. Students will finish the book with an understanding of how human personality systems work together and how personality develops from birth to life’s conclusion.

Selected Features:

• Introductory graphics at the outset of each chapter make it easy for students to follow the book’s outline and the progress of their own study of personality.
• Real life case examples illustrate central points. These cases appear both in chapter openings and in Case Study boxes.
• Disciplinary Crossroads boxes connect Personality Psychology to adjoining fields such as Literature, Artificial Intelligence, Political Science and Biology.
• Inside the Field boxes take the student behind the scenes to experience the discipline of Personality Psychology from the inside.
• Connecting Windows link related topics across the book. For example, Freud's theory of motives is introduced in Chapter 3’s coverage of theoretical perspectives; a connecting window there links it to current thinking on motives in Chapter 4.
• The book’s organization follows a peer-reviewed new plan for the discipline– and has been classroom tested by multiple instructors.
• Over 1,400 original sources of theory and research, many published in the last decade, are covered in the text.

For more information including an online instructor’s manual and information on requesting an examination copy, please visit www.ablongman.com/mayer1e or the author’s companion website at www.personalitysystem.com.

About the Author:

John D. Mayer received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the doctoral program in psychology at Case Western Reserve University. After obtaining his doctorate, he taught his first course in personality psychology at Case Western using Hall and Lindzey’s classic text, Theories of Personality. Although he loved the book, the problems of teaching personality psychology by studying various theories led him to a career-long search for a better way to teach–and more generally, think about–personality psychology.

 

Dr. Mayer examined the contributions of mental abilities to personality in his postdoctoral work at Case Western Reserve, and the interactions of emotion and thought within personality, as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Mayer returned to teaching personality psychology with his first faculty position at the State University of New York at Purchase. There he resumed his search for a better way to teach the course. In 1989, Mayer moved to the University of New Hampshire and began to publish a series of articles on the “systems framework for personality,” a new approach to integrating the study of the discipline. The framework elaborated in those articles provides the basis for this new textbook. While developing the systems framework and this textbook,

 

Dr. Mayer published over ninety articles, chapters, books, and psychological tests. His 1990 articles on emotional intelligence, with Professor Peter Salovey of Yale University, are often credited with beginning scientific research on the topic. Dr. Mayer is coauthor of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), and coeditor, with J. Ciarrochi and J. P. Forgas of Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life: A Scientific Inquiry. Dr. Mayer has served on the editorial boards of Psychological Bulletin, the Journal of Personality, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Review of General Psychology. He has been the recipient of an Individual National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, and has been a senior research fellow of the United States Army Research Institute. In addition to many years of teaching university classes, Professor Mayer also has lectured to diverse audiences throughout the United States and abroad on topics related to personality psychology.